You know when your conversation with your colleague is going down hill. Your voice pitch goes up and your focus on facts goes down. Your heart starts beating faster. If you have a stress ball nearby you start squeezing it such that your fingers leave permanent indents in the ball itself.
Generally the conversation starts well enough only to slowly climb the “Ladder of Conversational Intensity” as depicted in this hand graphic:
So what to do?
One suggestion is slip back to IM - yep, that’d be Instant Messaging.
The thought goes something like this. When your conversation is so intense, and escalates to such a degree that you can’t get past the emotions to have a very important conversation then you need to have some way to remove the friction points of emotion. You also want the conversation to occur in real time, not via email. Enter in IM. You could use Skype (my personal fav), Yahoo IM, GoogleTalk, MSN IM, whatever, but going to that medium can accomplish a few things:
- It removes the emotions. You can’t hear the frustration in real time so while you might still “hear” the other person’s voice, you don’t actually hear it so that may reduce the intensity.
- Typing makes you think. you have to slow down and think as you type. That makes you think twice about what your going to say.
- Typing via IM makes forces your tongue and brain to come back into synch. Ever had a situation whereby your tongue started to let flow communication seemingly on it’s own? That’s what we are trying to avoid here.
So give it a try next time your relational interaction is getting too hot, a little IM may cool you both off and allow you to talk about the issue once again.
(Angry smiley face and source material for graphic courtesy of WP Clipart, thoughts to get me thinking on this from Phil Wolff over at Skype Journal)
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