From the course: Conflict Resolution For Beginners

Listening for feelings

From the course: Conflict Resolution For Beginners

Start my 1-month free trial

Listening for feelings

“

- When I first entered the world of work, I was explicitly told that you don't bring your feelings to work with you. Feelings I was told our personal and business is not a place for personal things. I have worked with hundreds of clients who were given pretty similar advice, especially men. Contrary to this common advice, in this lesson, I want to teach you why feelings are important when resolving conflict and how you can listen for them when people are speaking. The quote, "I am a simple person "who hides a thousand feelings behind the happiest smile," shares the experience of many people in the workplace. Most people have been taught not to share their feelings at work. And most men have been taught not to show their feelings as a rule. But this often gets in the way of resolving conflicts because feelings fuel conflict. If a colleague says or does something that you don't like, it causes you to feel certain things. Talking about what they did or said is important, but telling them how it made you feel helps them have a greater understanding about why this created a conflict for you. Because feelings are individual, when you share them, the other person can know how their actions affected you specifically. This can inform their future interactions with you and lessen the amount of conflict between you. A helpful activity is to develop a feelings vocabulary. Set a timer for 60 seconds. In that time, write down all of the feeling words that you can think of. Now look at the words you came up with. Check and see how many words are what I call the safer feelings to express. Words like happy, mad, sad, glad, angry, or upset are feeling words that are more acceptable to express because they don't reveal anything too deep. The harder words to express, like betrayed and even disappointed, don't often make it to the list on the first try. If they made your list, then you've probably done some work in this area. If they did not, no worries, you have a second chance. Set the timer again for 60 seconds, and this time go for the deeper feelings. Add them to your list. Once you have a rich feelings vocabulary, it's easier to recognize a range of feelings when you hear them. The key to listening for feelings lies in knowing that most people don't speak their feelings. They speak around them. So you need to hear what's not being said. Think about yourself in a conflict conversation. Do you lead with, "I feel disappointed in the fact "that you didn't complete the assignment." Most likely not. But if someone were to say to you, "Your work is always impeccable. "This assignment was so important, but you didn't deliver." Could you hear that they are disappointed? They didn't say the word, but I bet you are pretty sure that's the feeling. All right, here's the fun part. I am giving you permission to eavesdrop. I want you to listen in on a few conversations, or you can have one of your own. Listen for feelings that are being named, or that you can hear, even though they're not being said. Try it out.

Contents