Avoiding Trainer Defensiveness
The play was a great success, but the audience was a disaster.
——Oscar Wilde, playwright
Like resistance in participants, defensiveness in trainers is a protective strategy to ward off anticipated, perceived, or real attacks. It’s an effort to guard yourself against actual or imagined criticism, injury to your ego, or exposure of your shortcomings. People don’t plan to be defensive—it just seems to pop out of them. Even so, as you’ll see in this chapter, there’s much you can do to manage your defensiveness effectively.
Being human, we all have our defensive moments; to some degree we resemble the New Testament lawyer who, “desiring to justify himself, said . . .”1
Each of us has been somewhat defensive all our lives, beginning in the preschool years. When a parent tells a young child, “Stop hitting your brother,” the probable response— regardless of the facts of the situation—will be, “I didn’t do anything” or “He started it.” When you stop to think about it, most of us have had decades of practice at being self-protective. So defensiveness is in each of us waiting to be aroused.
At times, defensiveness does us a real service. That’s why it remains part of our evolutionary heritage. When people are mercilessly critical or uncaringly judgmental, defensiveness typically comes to our aid and blunts the withering attacks. It’s a great ally when needed. As therapist Howard Clinebell points out, “All of us have and need defenses to cope with the pressures and crises of our lives.... It is important to remember that people have defenses because they still need them, or believe they do.”2
However, we’re all inappropriately defensive at times. And some people have developed more than average self-protectiveness. Until you’ve learned to handle excessive defensiveness, it’s like a time bomb waiting to explode. Sooner or later, the trainer who hasn’t mastered his defensiveness will surely fail in the training room.
Consequences of Excessive Trainer Defensiveness
When a trainer experiences disproportionate self-protectiveness, and instead devotes her energy to shielding herself or defending the content she is presenting, she’s in trouble. It is important to realize that when we’re triggered, as the saying has it, “We don’t have our defenses, they have us.”
Typically, when the trainer is defensive everybody loses—participants suffer through an unsatisfactory workshop and the trainer has a failed leadership experience.
Managing your defensiveness can be one of the biggest challenges you’ll face in your work as a trainer. Sooner or later, the trainer who hasn’t learned to handle her defensiveness will surely fail in the training room. The good news is that trainer defensiveness can be diminished and much of the remaining defensiveness can be managed by using the methods described in this chapter.
As your awareness of the dynamics of defensiveness increases, your ability to function in less defensive ways should increase, with the result that your workshop leadership becomes more productive and your participants’ learning is greatly enhanced.
Two Types of Defensiveness—Chronic and Triggered
It’s useful to distinguish between
• chronic defensiveness and
• triggered defensiveness.
Chronic Defensiveness
A person with chronic defensiveness is considerably more susceptible than the average person to being wary about the intentions and behaviors of others and behaves accordingly. Chronic defensiveness tends to generate self-protective behavior before the trainer even meets the participants; he’s armored as he waits for them arrive. When participants begin filtering into the room, he reacts to a number of them based on past experiences with people they remind him of. He behaves more warmly to some, more distantly toward others—often irrespective of their attitude toward the workshop or the trainer. In other words, chronic defensiveness can be preemptive as well as reactive.
Subtly the defensive vicious cycle described by Jack Gibb is initiated. Participants aren’t drawn to the trainer. The trainer becomes a bit more defensive, doesn’t connect with the trainees, gets busy arranging materials, and finally begins to go through the motions of training. It’s hard to relate well to others when you’re focused on yourself. The defensive trainer’s self-protectiveness inches toward scuttling the effectiveness of the workshop. Consequently, a chronically defensive trainer will tend to have one mediocre to poor training experience after another.
Triggered Defensiveness
A trainer with triggered defensiveness tends to be reasonably non-defensive most of the time. Sometimes, however, situational factors—certain persons or certain situations—are apt to trigger his defensiveness. However, as you’ll soon see, our defensive incidents aren’t caused by something outside of us. What’s “out there” is merely a stimulus—a trigger—rather than what caused the defensive reaction. For instance, an incident that hooks us at one time might not bother us at all at another time. And although certain people and situations may have a greater likelihood of inciting defensiveness in you or us, other people may not be ruffled by them at all.
When a trainer experiences disproportionate self-protectiveness, he tends to shift from trying to understand what participants are experiencing and instead devotes his energy to shielding himself or defending the content he is presenting. It’s important to realize that when we’re triggered, “we don’t have our defenses, they have us.”3
When Defensiveness Encounters Resistance—The Push-Pushback Phenomenon
Self-protective behavior in one person tends to increase self-protectiveness in other people. And, sure enough, in our field, trainer defensiveness is often triggered by participant resistance. Here’s an example: A participant has had a negative reaction to a new process that the trainer was presenting to use in his work. The participant looked uninterested and vigorously shook his head from side to side, indicating his strong disagreement. A few minutes later he butted into the presentation saying in a sarcastic tone, “Have you ever been down to see how our department works?”
That pushed the trainer’s button and he said, “What’s that got to do with what I’m presenting?”
The trainer’s response stiffened the participant’s resistance, which in turn boosted the trainer’s defensiveness. The pattern continued as the participant’s intensified resistance generated more defensiveness in the trainer. A vicious cycle had been set in motion; real communication stopped, and the interaction became a kind of “king of the hill” scuffle.
To demonstrate this type of dynamic, course leaders in the Craft of Training workshops sometimes do a demonstration of what’s been referred to as the push-pushback phenomenon. The demo goes like this:
Introduction: “I need a volunteer to do a brief nonverbal demonstration with me. It will take only forty seconds, you won’t have to say a word, and you are guaranteed success.”
[Wait for the volunteer.]
Directions: “Put palms of both hands out in front of you at shoulder height, making a stop signal. I am going to do something and I want you to respond by doing whatever comes naturally.” Activity: Place your hands against the volunteer’s hands and push. If the volunteer backs up, move with him and keep pushing. The volunteer will eventually push back—if only because he is up against the wall.
As soon as the volunteer visibly pushes back against you, stop the activity and give the volunteer a round of applause. Debriefing: Ask the volunteer, “What just happened? Did you stop to think, ‘Hey this person is pushing me. I’ll stop this. I’ll push back’?”
The answer is always, “No.” So, without thinking, the volunteer pushed back.
The trainer then says to the group, “When resistance occurs, it’s generally an automatic reaction rather than a conscious decision. So don’t take it personally. And don’t hold it against the person.”
The push-pushback phenomenon can also occur between a group and the trainer. Group members may be unresponsive to the trainer’s questions, may drag their feet when asked to do an activity, or demonstrate by other actions or words that they don’t want to take part in the workshop. When the trainer notes that, but pretends nothing unusual is happening, he has begun his defensive response. He pretends to ignore what’s going on but begins to justify or overexplain the main points of his presentation. Or, he may withdraw into himself and rush through material just to get it over with. In a defensive mode the trainer will do everything but deal with what is actually happening, gain cooperation in identifying the real problem, and work effectively to address it.
One of the biggest mistakes a trainer can make is to pretend that nothing is wrong in the workshop when everybody knows things are going badly. The trainer knows, the participants know, and anybody just dropping by would know. So, why would a trainer ignore the obvious and persevere even under these terrible conditions? Because his defensiveness kicked in due to fear and ignorance:
Fear of the unknown—what bad things would happen if he really faced the problem? Ignorance—not knowing how to handle the tough situation even if he acknowledged it. Fear and ignorance create a powerful force that leads many trainers to become anxious and deny the problem. Reactive trainer defensiveness is the beginning of the death of a workshop.
Forewarned Is Forearmed
Here’s another type of preparation that leaders of the Craft of Training workshops sometimes use to help trainer-participants avoid being hooked by their defensiveness. They ask the trainer-participants to think of a person who triggered them in a workshop or in daily life. Then each person briefly describes what it was about that person that “got” to them. That activity generates lots of insights—and much hilarity. Among other lessons, it quickly becomes apparent that what triggers one trainer might not faze another trainer at all.
Once a trainer is aware of the kind of person or persons he’s apt to be hooked by, he can act preventively. For example, he can be proactive in establishing a relationship with that sort of person as early in the workshop as possible.
Methods of Managing Triggered Defensiveness
There are two general approaches to managing one’s defensiveness:
1. Prevention: take steps to avoid being triggered.
2. Learn the six ways of managing your defensiveness once your self-protectiveness begins to interfere with your training—or other aspects of your life.
Prevention: Take Steps to Avoid Being Triggered
The saying an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure applies in spades to keeping your defensiveness from interfering with your training. Although these commonsense guidelines have been mentioned earlier, it’s worth briefly repeating the following three ways of enhancing your management of defensiveness before entering the training room:
1. Be well rested.
2. Be in good physical condition.
3. Have your tension level under control.
If you open a workshop feeling fatigued, with low stamina, and a fair amount of tension in your body, you’re more vulnerable to becoming defensive. You just don’t have what it takes to stand on your feet for eight hours a day, presenting and relating to twenty to twenty-five people. Instead, enter the workshop well-rested, with high energy, and good spirits. That will take you a long way in keeping your defensiveness low and managing it if you feel it beginning to creep up on you.
Know Your Material
The first few times of teaching a new workshop, you’re more vulnerable to defensiveness than if you’re an old hand at it. You might skip a key point, your presentations don’t hang together the way you want them to, or you get a question that you don’t know how to answer. Your confidence may go out the window and your defensiveness is likely to surge.
To prevent this from happening when you teach a new course, you want to be at ease in all aspects of leading the course: presentations, demonstrations, activities, and skill practices. You want to know the big picture of the course and have command of the details. This investment up front in your course preparation will pay big dividends—especially if difficult people challenge you or other negative events materialize.
Excel at Creating and Maintaining a Positive Learning Climate
Trainers who are able to develop a supportive, friendly, and open classroom seldom have to manage their defensiveness. That’s because the learning climate they’ve created decreases the participants’ resistance and helps things run smoothly. Chapter 22 contains most of what you need to know about this subject.
Be Okay with Not Being Perfect
As Rosalynn Carter said, “Once you accept the fact that you’re not perfect, then you develop some confidence.”
What to Do When You Sense You’re Getting Hooked
When it comes to defensiveness, prevention is the strategy of choice. But since we’re human, there’ll undoubtedly be times when you get hooked by a participant. Here are six ways of managing these situations. Four are internal—ways of thinking and managing your self-talk. When using the other two methods the trainer deals with the whole group. It’s sometimes useful to combine two or more methods.
Work on Yourself
The first four methods are done internally: nothing is mentioned to the participants about the triggering incident or your reaction to it.
1. Maintain Your Professionalism
As a trainer, when you stand up in front of a class, you have left behind the luxury of allowing yourself to be triggered by a cantankerous individual, a vocally hostile subgroup, or even a whole class of uncooperative people. When the going is difficult, remind yourself that you are a professional—and that a professional is a person who “rules his spirit.”4
Japan’s Sadaharu Oh was one of the greatest baseball players of his time. In his autobiography he described his thoughts and feelings as he stood alone in the locker room in the moments immediately before his last game. He was crying and gripping his cap so tightly in both hands that he was in danger of tearing it. He was clearly in no condition to go out on the field.
He tells us what happened next:
I am a professional baseball player, I told myself. A professional. The word has meaning for me as few others in my vocabulary do. There is a standard performance you must maintain. It is the best you are able to give and then more—and to maintain that level of consistency. No excuses for the demands of your ego or the extremes of your emotions. It’s an inner thing. I held myself to that standard for twenty-two years. It is my proudest achievement.
Impressive, right? Yet no less is expected of a professional trainer. As a professional, when leading a workshop you have given up the option of reacting in a defensive mode against a person who triggers you. Your role is to strive to protect every participant’s well-being, including the well-being of the person or persons who may be disrupting the workshop. A key to doing that is to try to treat everyone in the workshop in an approximately equal but not identical way.
It’s important to note that if you defensively push-back against a triggering participant the group may turn against you. They’ll see that you are using your power as group leader against a person in a weaker position. Hold yourself to the high professional standard of not getting triggered into using behavior that you’ll be sorry for.
2. Manage Your Self-Talk
Understanding how self-talk works can be very helpful in managing the kinds of feelings that often activate trainer defensiveness. Basic to the self-talk concept is the assumption that the feelings you experience in consequence of what another person says or does may be less about the incident itself than it is about how you interpret the meaning of the incident. This interpretation of the event is called self-talk since it is what you say to yourself about the incident.
A stands for Activating event that occurred.
B stands for trainer’s Belief about the the meaning of the event.
C stands for the Consequence which is the trainer’s feelings of defensiveness triggered by the Belief.
D stands for the trainer’s resulting Defensive reaction.
The radical aspect of this concept for trainers is that our feelings of defensiveness that we often think are triggered by a participant’s disruptive behavior are really triggered by what we say to ourselves about the disruptive behavior. Contrary to common opinion, psychologists have found that our feelings and the behaviors they tend to generate are not caused by the other person’s behaviors but by our inner thoughts about the situation.
Making your self-talk more accurate and constructive generally leads to more productive feelings which lowers your defensiveness and enables you to cope better with difficult people and challenging situations. For example, in a Train the Trainer workshop, a class member described a time when her defensiveness was hooked:
A, the event:
“One participant in a People Skills for Managers workshop spoke more often, longer, and with stronger opinions than other participants. He dominated group discussions and interrupted my presentations with long comments—like how to redesign the agreement practice which I had just led!”
B, the self-talk:
“Oh my God; here we go again. This guy is out to get me. Talk about rude. . . .”
C, the resulting feelings:
“In a defensive, self-protective mode I felt impatient and non-accepting of him.”
D, the trainer’s consequent defensive reaction:
“When he spoke I tensed up. I tended to avoid eye contact with him and was more abrupt in dealing with him than I was with others in the class.”
Here’s how the trainer could have used self-talk to alter her frame of mind about the situation and come up with a more effective way to manage the interaction regarding the same event:
B, the self-talk:
This participant has not yet learned how to be an effective member of a group—that it’s not okay to dominate, interrupt, and sidetrack what we’re focusing on. It would be good if I could help him eliminate or decrease that kind of behavior. For now, I’ll just deal with his sidetracking (redesigning workshop exercises). I’ll have to think more about how to show him an option to use instead of dominating and interrupting.
C, the resulting feelings:
Relieved to have a plan of action—just deal with his sidetracking for now.
D, the trainer’s non-defensive response:
“Sounds like you have some interesting ideas. Could we talk about them on break so we can finish our work on getting agreements?”
Reframing involves looking at a situation from a different point of view. Barlow and Moller’s book, A Complaint Is a Gift, provides a useful way of reframing participant’s criticisms. As they put it, “The criticism we receive probably has some truth in it, even if it feels unfair or like an attack.”5
It’s often been said that you can learn more from your enemies than from your friends. So when a disgruntled trainee criticizes you, listen up.
4. Suppress Your Defensiveness
Suppression involves consciously but temporarily pushing certain thoughts and feelings to the back of your mind until you have the time and energy to deal with them.
A therapist described how he uses suppression when he’s counseling people. When he finds himself beginning to get distracted, he says:
I temporarily put those thoughts and feelings on hold. . . . I conjure up an image of an empty chair and seat whatever I want to put on hold in that chair. In my mind I say to my anger, frustration, anxiety. . . , “I hear you. Now sit here and be quiet. I’ll get back to you later.”
Suppression involves consciously ignoring an incident, thought, or feeling for the time being—until you are free to think about or deal with it. Suppression is a great tool for trainers for dealing with trainer defensiveness.
Although the trainer is cognizant of the problem, he makes a decision to set the problem aside and not deal with it. Your defensiveness is lowered when you decide that you are not going to enter into an argument, or give a person a dirty look, or in some other way show your displeasure with what was said. Suppression too helps you maintain your professionalism.
When You Choose to Reply
The remaining two methods are ways of handling situations that come up in the whole group and generally are best dealt with in and to the whole group.
5. Neutrally Acknowledge a Participant’s Hostile Comments
When someone makes a remark that you perceive as attacking and you feel your defensiveness rising, the simplest thing to do is to acknowledge the comment and move on. Here are a few examples of neutrally acknowledging a participant’s antagonistic remarks:
“I hear you.”
“I see.”
“Thanks for telling me. I know that’s not easy.”
This type of courteous response enables the participant to feel that he was heard without your having agreed or disagreed with him. And, although you take the information in as feedback, you don’t consume valuable class time with your comments and the possibility of an unnecessary dialogue that likely will only be of interest to one of your twenty or more participants.
It’s not wise to reflect his comments at this point because the participant might take that as an opportunity to continue her attack.
6. Reply Non-Defensively to Criticism
A participant’s body language had made it clear that he was dissatisfied with the workshop. After a while he spoke up:
Participant:
I don’t know how much homework you’ve done on our company, but it doesn’t seem like you know what we’re all about. If you are going to teach people, it would help for you to get smart about the history of the company, what made us successful, and what’s happening today.
Defensive Response:
As it happens, I have done my homework. I’m very aware that XYZ Company is sixteen years old and was started by an engineer who never envisioned this kind of rapid success. Etc. Etc.
Non-Defensive Response:
I guess I haven’t demonstrated the type of background you are looking for. It sounds like that is important to you. Let’s see if I can do better on that from now on. And if you think I’m missing some important context feel free to jump right in and add it.
A final word: Defensiveness in a trainer severely undercuts group process and triggers and intensifies resistance in participants. And, who wants that.