CHAPTER 2

HEY, BUZZ OFF!…

I Am Not Defensive!

Remaining nondefensive is the single most important thing you can do to increase your effectiveness when working to turn conflict into collaboration. Defensiveness fans the flames of conflict and divisiveness. We’re consistently reminded how important an authentic nondefensive presence can be.

The main reason people get into relationship trouble is because they get defensive. As a judge, Jim rarely had to deal with pure legal issues. Parties usually ended up in litigation because one or both sides became fearful and defensive. When people get defensive, their thinking becomes rigid, and they are lousy problem solvers. Defensiveness not only impacts their own problem-solving skills, it also invites everyone else to get defensive, rigid, and ineffectual as well. When the room is filled with defensive, rigid-thinking, ineffective problem solvers, the result is disaster!

Defensiveness, ultimately, is not about protecting ourselves from other people. People get defensive because they don’t want to experience uncomfortable feelings within themselves. Getting defensive will temporarily block the feelings that they don’t want to experience. Psychologist Gary Chapin calls defensiveness “secrets we unknowingly keep from ourselves.”¹ For example, if we (Ron or Jim) are leading a workshop or giving a speech and we fear we are not doing a competent job, that fear can create considerable discomfort. Instead of letting ourselves feel and explore this discomfort, we may unconsciously behave in ways that allow us to avoid, dismiss, or diminish it. This usually involves blaming someone else.

During a workshop, for example, we may start making excuses about how the participants didn’t really want to be in the workshop or tell ourselves that they were all required to attend, which explains why the workshop isn’t going well. Or we may imagine that the audience just wanted to get away from work for a while to dine out in some wonderful San Francisco restaurant at the company’s expense. By behaving this way we may unconsciously create the illusion that the problems are the fault of others. We thus avoid feeling our own fear that we are not doing a competent job.

To summarize: We fear that we may not be doing a good job. The fear causes discomfort that we don’t want to feel. So, we behave in a way that lets us avoid feeling that discomfort. We get defensive and blame others in order to protect ourselves from experiencing our own uncomfortable feelings and thoughts.

Defensiveness is always based on a fear. Always, always, always! If someone is acting like a defensive jerk, it can be helpful to know that he or she undoubtedly feels threatened or afraid. When people feel insignificant, incompetent, or unlikable, they may act in ways to avoid those uncomfortable feelings. They may act out toward others, become sleepy, intellectualize issues, overeat, flood others with information, talk too fast, trivialize issues with humor, abuse alcohol or drugs, or act in dozens of other ways to avoid or suppress their own discomfort. By exploring skillfully enough and deeply enough, it is possible to learn more about the underlying unresolved feelings and fears and take action to reduce them. Being able to create an atmosphere that reduces other people’s overreactions as well as your own is a great asset in building collaboration.

The prescription for dealing with your own defensive fears, then, is to let yourself experience them. Do not avoid or deny them by moving away from them, but rather move toward them, bringing them fully into your consciousness and acknowledging them. While this is counterintuitive, it is the most effective way known to cope with fears and to reduce defensiveness.

Remember that defenses are biologically based and usually charged with physical energy in the body, so defensiveness can sometimes be detected from physiological cues. These may include more rapid breathing, an increase in pulse rate, feeling too hot, too cold, or restless. Other individuals might experience the opposite effect, feeling fatigue or drowsiness, inattention, and poor concentration. There are diverse ways to avoid experiencing uncomfortable feelings.

Defensiveness is so difficult to deal with because defenses operate independently of our conscious thinking processes. They are by nature autonomous and unconscious. People are not consciously aware that their behavior is a strategy to defend themselves from feeling some of their own unwanted feelings. If they had that awareness, they would act differently because unconscious defensive attitudes and behavior are never in their best interest.

We are not saying, however, that people should never defend themselves. The world has seen all too clearly that at times defense from attack is appropriate. This is true at both an international level and an interpersonal level. Not everyone can be trusted to take each other’s interests into account. When people legitimately defend themselves from attack, however, they should do so from a place of centered self-awareness, rather than from a reality distorted by unconscious defensive fears.

Another problem with getting defensive is that it provides only temporary relief. Because defensive behavior occurs as a way to avoid uncomfortable feelings, it only works as long as the individual is engaging in distorted thinking. The defense is not dealing with the deeper problem, that fearful, vulnerable place inside you that may reduce your effectiveness in dealing with any substantive issue. Rather, your defensive strategy is trying to hide that vulnerability from your consciousness in order to avoid discomfort. It will never resolve the underlying anxiety. The real issues are obscured and the process becomes an exercise in self-deception, an internal trick people play on themselves. Anyone doubting the power of self-deception should view a few of the early rounds of the American Idol television talent search.

WHERE DEFENSES COME FROM

Defense systems, however, are not evil. Human defenses arose from evolutionary development. Individual defenses emerged from each person’s history. They helped people cope with the stress of growing up in a world where they had little control over their lives. Individuals created certain behaviors to defend themselves from fears such as feeling insignificant, incompetent, unlikable, or helpless. These defenses became the shelters that protected them from unwelcome feelings. Without defenses, coping with childhood and adolescence would have been exceedingly difficult if not impossible.

The problem is that defense mechanisms can assume a life of their own and unduly control adult lives. People exhibit their defenses with the same lack of awareness that they show when they open a door, ride a bicycle, go swimming, or climb a flight of stairs. They don’t think to themselves, “Let’s see, this next step is higher than the last one, so I need to raise my foot about ten inches higher, so that it will be high enough to land on the top of the next step.” Instead the behavior has become part of them, something automatic, and most of the time they aren’t even conscious of what they are doing.

Acting out their defenses, people may continue to behave in ways that might have been useful in their childhood but are no longer helpful as adults. They commonly fail to recognize that their defensive attitudes and behaviors stem from outmoded fears. They can instill hair-trigger responses rather than fostering an open and sincere attitude of inquiry toward any situation.

At one time or another, most people have had less than optimal childhood experiences that have led to defensive behaviors and automatic thinking patterns. These early childhood experiences leave their imprints on developing nervous systems. People tend to create new stories to justify old behaviors. In one experiment, researchers told hypnotized subjects that when they saw a certain phrase in a questionnaire they would later be asked to fill out, they would go to an umbrella stand in the room and open an umbrella. They were also told that they would not recall being told to do that. Then the hypnotic state was terminated and one at a time they were given the questionnaire to fill out. Sure enough, when they saw the magic phrase, each subject got up from the desk, walked across the room to the umbrella stand, removed an umbrella, opened it, then closed it and placed it back in the umbrella stand. Then they each returned to their table and completed the questionnaire as though nothing unusual had just occurred.

The most interesting part of this experiment comes from their responses when the subjects were asked why they opened an umbrella during the middle of answering the questionnaire. Each person offered a reason. Not one person said they didn’t know why they engaged in the odd behavior. Having no conscious recollection of the hypnotic suggestion, each subject produced a “sensible” reason. Some said they were worried it was going to rain; some expressed an urge to just get up and stretch; others said they were simply curious to see if the umbrellas would work. Everyone made up a reason that offered some logical explanation for the irrational behavior. We are all meaning-seeking creatures. We want our behaviors to make sense to us, and to others, so we attribute meaning to our actions even when we don’t understand them.

Take a moment to reflect back on your childhood, thinking of it as an eighteen-year-long hypnotic induction. Think of the behaviors that you adopted and the messages that you learned and have since forgotten. You might realize how defenses that were helpful to you in childhood may have taken on a life of their own and may no longer be helpful to you as an adult. Situations make people fearful and they don’t want to experience those fears, so they adopt attitudes and behaviors that help them not feel the fears. But their avoidant behavior can become a familiar and comfortable pattern that is inappropriate, although they may not even realize they are acting defensively.

When you were a child, for example, if your parents were always fighting, their arguments could cause you great pain. You couldn’t stop them from fighting and you couldn’t move out on your own. Perhaps one way that you could defend yourself from that pain, however, was to stop listening well, for if you didn’t hear it, the fighting wouldn’t be as painful. So, maybe you just tuned out and learned not to listen. This is an effective survival strategy for a child in those circumstances. It is not an effective strategy for an adult. If you learned this defensive strategy of not listening well during conflicts and use it as an adult, you’ve simply grown up to be a lousy listener. What helped you as a child makes you ineffective as an adult.

Maybe you couldn’t block out the noise of your parents fighting, so perhaps you learned a different defense system. Instead of not hearing the words, you may have numbed your emotions, so you wouldn’t feel so much pain. You shut down your emotions and chose not to feel anything intense. If you carry that strategy into adulthood, you will experience a limited range of emotions. You may feel less pain, anger, and sadness, but you will also experience less joy, love, and excitement because you are not as alive as you might be. Because you learned to defend yourself this way as a child, you now experience a very narrow range of emotions as an adult.

Or perhaps you learned to get sick as a defense, so you would get attention and not feel ignored. Maybe you learned to become sarcastic or withdrawn or to be passive-aggressive. The personal favorite of one of our colleagues is to become confused. If that colleague is getting feedback from a group of friends that he really trusts, and he is the only one in the group who doesn’t understand that feedback, that’s a sure sign that he’s getting defensive. The feedback causes him discomfort that he doesn’t want to feel, so he behaves in a way that allows him to avoid the uncomfortable feelings. He gets confused and doesn’t understand the feedback. If he doesn’t understand the feedback, he doesn’t have to deal with the uncomfortable feelings it brings up.

Another colleague’s personal favorite pattern is to withdraw into silence. When faced with criticism that creates uncomfortable feelings, she may simply tune out as a way of breaking contact rather than staying conscious of the uncomfortable feelings and dealing with them more directly. Her pattern is not an effective strategy for problem solving; however, it provides some comfort through the illusion that being out of contact equals being out of danger. While the strategy doesn’t make sense intellectually, it is operating at an unconscious level.

It’s easy to see how and why these defenses are created by difficult childhoods that include alcoholic or abusive parents, multiple divorces, or early deaths of a parent. But defenses are also learned in perfectly normal, everyday, average, nontraumatic childhoods.

HOW DEFENSES CAUSE PROBLEMS

Defensiveness gets people into trouble by distorting reality, primarily through projection. Projection is when someone tends to see their own fears and feelings in other people rather than within themselves. If an individual has unconscious feelings, he or she might project them onto another person. They attribute their own feelings to the other person, not based upon objective reality, but from their own distortions. It could look like this: I have unresolved fears about my own competence, so I project them onto you, and I begin to believe that you think I’m not competent. I then start reacting to you as though my projection were true. I may feel judged by you and may start trying to convince you that I am competent. Although it appears that I’m trying to convince you of my competence, I’m really attempting to convince myself, because I’m the one who is unconvinced. However, because I am unaware of this, I will tend to feel victimized by you and blame you.

Frances was a competent engineer. She grew up, however, with a mother who constantly told her that she wasn’t good enough, that nobody in the family was smart. Frances carried that message with her into adulthood. It was always on her mind that she wasn’t good enough. She projected that belief onto her supervisor and was constantly worried that she was disappointing her supervisor. Contrary to Frances’s belief, her supervisor saw Frances as one of her most talented engineers. The supervisor’s only disappointment was that Frances would not take a stronger leadership role in the office. The combination of old messages from her mother and her projection of her own fears onto her supervisor had taken over Frances’s life and was undermining her career.

We often see projection at work in our mediation of conflicts. In one case a supervisor had a dispute with an employee. The supervisor was deceitful and manipulative, but of course he didn’t see that in himself. Instead he saw those qualities in the employee, even though there was absolutely no evidence of that in the behavior of the employee. The supervisor projected his own unconscious deceitful motives onto the employee.

Regardless of whether the distorted lens is rose-colored or a dark and smoky one that creates a sinister outlook in every situation, it becomes a burden on any good relationship.

LOOKING AT YOUR OWN DEFENSES

The first step toward not acting defensively is to become aware of when you are getting defensive. Increasing your self-awareness about your defense systems also increases the accuracy of your perceptions of others. Events are less likely to be seen through a distorted lens. As people increase their self-awareness, they are also better able to see how others perceive them.

Defenses are created during events in your history. So we now invite you to engage in some emotional archaeology, i.e., uncovering your emotional history, to help you discover the roots of your own defensiveness. Spend ten to fifteen minutes drawing what we call a Conflict Lifeline. This provides a visual history of the conflicts and difficult relationships in your life, from birth to the present. The Conflict Lifeline is a tool for gaining more awareness about where your defenses may have come from. Specific instructions for the Conflict Lifeline begin on page 38.

As you draw your Conflict Lifeline, focus on instances when you felt the most distressed. Use words, pictures, symbols, or any other ways to depict those events in your life. As you draw, reexperience the emotions connected with the events. Don’t worry about what the Conflict Lifeline looks like, for the purpose is to generate insight, not great art. You don’t have to show it to anyone else if you don’t want to. Visualizing the significant conflicts in your life will help you spot defensive patterns that you may have learned over a lifetime to defend yourself from uncomfortable feelings and situations.

Here are a few examples of Conflict Lifelines.²

Conflict Lifeline example #1

Lifeline example #1 was drawn by a psychology student. In the upper left corner a father is yelling “Shut up and quit bugging your sister or I won’t ever bring you again.” Then, “You better be good or I’ll really give you something to cry about.” At school there was a threat to tell the father. Next is a broken heart leading to a broken marriage. That leads to a crossroads involving too much work and time running out, reflected by the hourglass and the ticking clock.

Conflict Lifeline example #2

Lifeline example #2 is our no-frills favorite from an engineer. Born, parents divorce, fights in school, car issue, roommate issue, father-in-law, and then now.

Conflict Lifeline example #3

Lifeline example #3 is from an MBA student. The chart depicts “Age” from young to old and “Conflict” from low to high. The issues range from low conflict in high school, when driving a truck and in a second marriage, to high conflict with parents fighting, Vietnam, and a divorce.

When you are done drawing your Conflict Lifeline, try another exercise to get a better felt sense of the impact these experiences may have had on you. Take one of the earlier childhood scenes in your Conflict Lifeline and do the visualization exercise listed below. Read the visualization and the follow-up questions through first to get a sense of what you will be doing, then do the visualization and answer the questions.

When you feel complete in experiencing the visualization, breathe, stretch, and take as much time as you need before answering the questions. When you are ready, answer the questions in detail. Your answers will be important to your understanding of how you have learned to process stressful situations, both consciously and unconsciously.

Everybody has been subjected to traumatic situations. What’s important is for you to begin to learn and recognize what happens to you mentally and physically during moments of stress. During these times most people report an increase in heartbeat and breathing, and a feeling of panic or anxiety as feelings of being overwhelmed increase. Some people respond with an agitated “fight” type of response. Others mobilize with a “flight” response of wanting to run away. Still others constrict with a numbing “freeze” response. The body’s nervous system is being activated in an attempt to instinctively protect itself.³

Now look at the symptoms you reported in the scene you reexperienced in your visualization. Were your reactions more fight, flight, or freeze? When children are laughed at, humiliated, shamed, frightened, or bullied, and there is no way out, you can imagine how their nervous system would be activated.

Imagine one hypothetical example, a young boy named Billy, frightened by a scary situation—perhaps an overbearing, punishing parent, or a group of bullies. Billy is being yelled at and shamed. The child’s heartbeat accelerates; his intake of breath is swift before he holds his breath. His shoulders shoot up, eyes wide with fear as the threat approaches menacingly. The physical energy in Billy’s body has no place to go. There is no adequate discharge of this energy. The energy can get stuffed over a lifetime when there are many episodes of a person not being allowed to adequately speak up or stand up for himself. When Billy is not allowed adequate expression or emotional development, damage is done.

When people have been traumatized or have received distorted messages in childhood (e.g., “you aren’t very important,” “you can’t do anything right,” or “you’re unlovable”), people carry these messages into their adult lives like their skin. Without awareness people can continue to live out the scripts written for them early in their upbringing.

For example, if your mother was a rigid, stern disciplinarian and you have a boss who is a demanding female, you might easily act out the undischarged, pent-up emotional charge from your childhood. You may project your mother’s traits onto your boss with little provocation or understanding. In stressful situations people’s nervous systems shift into high gear, into a highly energized state to meet the demands of the situation. When they can meet the challenge head-on and carry the energy all the way through from start to finish, they can be fine. It’s when they are helpless, like Billy, or in other charged situations when they fear they are helpless again (i.e., the old memories come up unconsciously and without their awareness), that they get flooded and stuck in the old patterns all over again. They can become the masters of their own fate only by bringing more awareness into their lives.

Now that you have a better sense of what was happening inside your body, and what you were thinking and feeling, look back to your Conflict Lifeline to see if you can determine what defenses you may have used to help you cope with those situations. How did you behave so that you would not have to feel helpless, ignored, humiliated, rejected, or other uncomfortable feelings that you did not want to feel?

For example, the woman who drew Conflict Lifeline example #1 noticed that she had a pattern of going numb emotionally, becoming silent, and withdrawing physically whenever she was threatened. That was her way of avoiding her own uncomfortable feelings. In reviewing her Conflict Lifeline, she recalled first avoiding her feelings when her father yelled at her, and she carried that defensive behavior into school when teachers frightened her, and later into her marriage and at work. Instead of dealing with conflicts directly, she would go numb, refuse to talk about it, and withdraw from her husband or colleagues, which was one of the factors leading to a divorce and career difficulties.

The Conflict Lifeline doesn’t have to be great art to be a helpful exploration of the origins of defensiveness. Reflecting on Conflict Lifeline example #2, the engineer realized he had a habit of feeling victimized by his circumstances and playing “poor me.”

The man drawing Conflict Lifeline example #3 behaved almost the opposite of the first two people. His pattern was to act out and become very aggressive and sarcastic whenever he became fearful. He noticed that during times of low stress—for example, during high school, while driving a truck, and during his second marriage—he didn’t feel overly aggressive and was rarely sarcastic. However, when he was feeling stress, his aggression and sarcasm helped him to avoid feeling his fear.

Looking back on your own Conflict Lifeline, did you run away or tend to attack? Did you become passive-aggressive, get sick or confused, go shopping, get drunk, get sarcastic, or withdraw into silence? Did you become overly nice and refuse to even admit that you were in a difficult situation? Pay particular attention to any patterns you can see. Try to give your defensive behaviors a descriptive name.

CREATING AN EARLY WARNING SYSTEM

When you finish your review, take a few minutes to reflect how helpful it could be to be able recognize when you are becoming defensive and reverting to these earlier learned reactions. If you have your own Personal Early Warning System, something to alert you as soon as you start getting defensive, you can act to reduce your defensiveness before it causes you any damage. This requires two things. First, you need to be aware of when you are starting to get defensive. Second, you need to have an action plan to reduce the impact of your defensive reactions. This action plan should be devised ahead of time so that you can implement it automatically and don’t have to be thinking something through at a time when your thinking is impaired.

Most people don’t realize that they are getting defensive until it’s too late to do much about it. Once they are firmly hooked by their defensive behavior, it is difficult for them to remain effective in a relationship. They don’t have enough awareness of what their defensiveness looks like to be able to tell when they are starting to become defensive. The Signs of Defensiveness exercises below will help you increase your awareness about your own special defensive patterns. You will put a name to them and know what they look like. By naming your favorite defense mechanisms you can better recognize when you are getting defensive. This will create your own Personal Early Warning System to tip you off that you are becoming defensive. At that point you will be able to take action to reduce the impact of your defensiveness. You’ll have an opportunity to create your own action plan a little later in the chapter.

Looking at the top three signs of defensiveness that you circled, you now have names for your top three defensive behaviors. We urge you to become familiar with these behaviors. Become articulate about them. Make them your friends. They are no longer your enemies; they are now your allies. They are your Personal Early Warning System that you are becoming fearful about something and beginning to get defensive.

It is much easier for most of us to spot our defensive behavioral responses than it is to identify the underlying feelings that we don’t want to feel. Because the whole point of defensive behavior is to help us avoid feeling something we don’t want to feel, we can often recognize our defensive behavior before we are aware of the underlying feelings we are trying to avoid.

A person may not understand that he is starting to feel unlikable when he is in the middle of a conversation with his older brother, or that he doesn’t want to feel that he is unlikable. He may, however, realize that he has once again started to react to his brother in a sarcastic manner. If he knows that one of his personal early warning signs of becoming defensive is to react with sarcasm, he can work backward to better understand his underlying feelings. The thought process might go like this:

People may not recognize their feelings as clearly or as quickly as they can see their behavior, so they can use their behavior to tip them off that they’re having feelings that would be helpful for them to explore.

CREATING A DEFENSIVENESS ACTION PLAN

So far you’ve looked at your history and you’ve identified a Personal Early Warning System that you may be getting defensive. Now you have a choice about how to react. You can try to ignore the information you are faced with or blame yourself for getting defensive, or instead you can experience compassion for yourself and start exploring the feelings. Successfully reducing your defensiveness involves increasing your self-awareness and having compassion for yourself. Beating yourself up because you find yourself getting defensive is not an effective strategy for reducing your defensiveness. It’s a little like beating on a turtle’s shell to get it to stick its neck out. Exploring your fear requires greater safety, not self-aggression. You cannot intimidate yourself or others into a feeling of safety.

So now what do you do when your early warning system tells you that you’re getting defensive? Here are some general ideas that are helpful. Review them all and then take some time to develop your own Defensiveness Action Plan.

1. Take Responsibility for Yourself

Acknowledging that you are becoming defensive is a good first step. By doing so you increase your awareness that you are unconsciously fearful and you can start exploring what that is about. You may want to go a step further and acknowledge your defensiveness to those you are dealing with, for this can create greater depth in the relationship. Do you remember our colleague whose IQ suddenly drops and who gets confused when confronted with information that is discomforting for him? For example, one time he was getting feedback from colleagues that he could have improved his last customer presentation by better clarifying the company’s pricing structure. He didn’t want to hear this feedback because it reflected upon his competency and he would have felt bad about that. So his defense mechanism kicked in to help him not feel those uncomfortable feelings. He got confused and didn’t understand the feedback from his colleagues. Because the feedback didn’t make sense to him, he could easily have dismissed what they were telling him. Instead, he paid attention to his early warning system and realized that he was becoming defensive. He stopped the conversation to announce, “I seem to be getting a little defensive here, and I don’t understand the feedback you’re giving me. I’m not sure what that’s about yet, but I want to understand what you’re telling me. Can you go back over what you said a little slower because I want to understand it.”

By doing this he acknowledged his defensiveness both to himself and to his colleagues, and he asked for their help in dealing with it. It may not always be appropriate to ask for that help, but if you are dealing with people that you trust, it not only offsets the damage caused by the defensiveness, it can actually create greater intimacy and a stronger relationship.

2. Slow Down

Remember that defensiveness has physiological aspects. People are usually flooded with adrenaline and charged with energy, so slowing down physically and relaxing can be helpful. Going for a short walk, going to the restroom and splashing some water on your face, or taking a time-out and rescheduling the rest of the meeting are all possible ways to slow down and help become more centered. Others don’t even need to be aware of this centering strategy if it doesn’t seem appropriate to tell them. Simply take a couple of deep breaths without making a big deal about it to anyone else, and it will be a calming and centering experience.

3. Confront Your Negative Self-Talk

Negative self-talk is the internal dialogue that goes on in your head as you are watching actual events. If someone is giving a speech and sees an audience member get up and walk out, the speaker can have a dialogue going on in his head about what’s happening. It can make him much more defensive if the negative self-talk sounds like “Darn, I’ll bet she’s unhappy. I hope she’s not the conference organizer. I’ll bet she hates what I’m saying. She’ll probably give me a bad evaluation. I’ll bet I never get invited back to this group again.”

If the speaker is conscious that he is engaging in such negative self-talk, he can confront it and actively change it into a more supportive frame of mind. Perhaps it would sound like this: “I wonder why she’s leaving. Maybe I can check with her later. Everyone else seems to be fully engaged and enjoying the material. Things are going very well right now.” With this more positive self-talk the speaker can stay centered and present with the rest of the audience and let her go for now. The speaker’s defensiveness will not turn into a vicious downward spiral.

4. CYA

People often make incorrect assumptions about the meaning of CYA. It stands for Check Your Assumptions, not cover your ass. In most mediations, someone (often both parties) has made incorrect assumptions. A common one is “the other side is behaving that way because they don’t like me.” Often, however, it is simply that the interests of the conflicting parties are different.

Everyone has to make many assumptions daily to get by. There is nothing wrong with making assumptions, and it would be impossible to live a normal life without making them. The problem is the rigidity with which they are held. If people are conscious that they are making assumptions, they can then check them out to see if they are correct or incorrect. People then tend to get less defensive than when they automatically believe the assumptions are true.

5. Detach

There are two good reasons to adopt an attitude of detachment. First, it can be helpful to prevent acting out inappropriately. For example, if you recognize that you tend to flood others with information or become too aggressive when you are getting defensive, you can acknowledge these tendencies to yourself and choose not to act out with that behavior. You can instead go deeper with conscious awareness, trying to understand the root causes, and ask yourself, “What am I trying to override?” You can choose to experience the discomfort you are trying to avoid, asking yourself not to act in a defensive way, even though the behavior may offer you some temporary relief. That is detaching from a desire to act out.

A second way is to detach from overidentification with the outcome of the situation. How often have you seen someone submit a report or offer a solution to a problem during a meeting, then feel personally rejected when the report or solution is rejected? One of the great advantages that humans have is our ability to identify with other individuals and objects. That can also be a great disadvantage when people overidentify with those same objects or individuals. It is possible to remain passionate about an idea and yet remain detached enough from it to not take a rejection personally. The key is to not get your ego involved with it. This engaged yet detached mind-set is the ability and willingness to step back and see things more objectively by disconnecting our deepest sense of identity and self-worth from the specific situation and outcome, while still remaining caring and concerned.

For example, Beth, one of the managers Ron was coaching, had one of her projects canceled. Beth’s immediate reaction was outrage. She felt rejected and thought that she was being told her contribution had no value, and that she personally had no value. It took time and much discussion for her to see that she was not “the project.” She was able to see that from time to time projects get canceled regardless of the effort put into them. While it was useful for her to advocate and do all in her power to persuade people to support the project, if at the end of the day the project was still canceled, it was then in her interest both personally and professionally to let go of her identification with the project. Admittedly, it is difficult to both care deeply but also not overly connect our self-worth and self-identity to the outcome or results. She did not have to “forfeit” her positive feelings and evaluation of herself just because something did not turn out the way she hoped.

In this case, Beth learned to change her self-talk. When she was overidentified with the project, her self-talk sounded like “I can’t stand this; they don’t appreciate me. They are saying I have no worth. They don’t want the project and that means they don’t want me.” After gaining some perspective, her self-talk sounded like “I don’t like this and I don’t agree with the decision. However, I did my best to have it go the way I wanted, and now I am curious how this happened so I can be more effective next time. I am not the project and this is not a vote on my worth as a human being.”⁴

After a few weeks Beth had another great insight. She reported that she realized her interpersonal energy produced by her overattachment to the project was not seen as passion by others, but was perceived as arrogance and self-righteousness. She was able to see how this perception might actually have contributed to the demise of her project.

Spanish matadors have a phrase describing the detachment necessary for dealing with the onslaught of the beast: ver llegar. Hemingway spoke of the phrase in Death in the Afternoon, stating, “To calmly watch the bull come is the most necessary and primarily difficult thing in bullfighting.” It is to calmly detach from the situation enough to see what is happening and maneuver appropriately. So it is when one faces a charging “other” (such as a boss, teammate, employee, colleague, or spouse). By focusing on your intentions, it is possible to watch and listen and allow the charging energy to flow around you like a wave but not define who you are in the moment.

6. Start Over

The approach we suggest is not a model of perfection. It is a recovery model. So, when your Personal Early Warning System tells you that you might be getting defensive, acknowledge that to yourself, take some action to reduce your defensiveness, and then start over. Everyone gets defensive occasionally. It’s not the end of the world. You will usually be better served by letting it go and focusing on the future than by blaming yourself for your defensiveness in the past.

Now you create your own Defensiveness Action Plan. List your top three signs of defensiveness in part A. Then in part B, create two specific action steps tailored to deal with your particular defenses.

CHAPTER SUMMARY

Maintaining a nondefensive presence is one of the most effective things people can do when trying to build collaboration. Defensiveness does not protect us from others. It arises to defend us from experiencing uncomfortable feelings that we don’t want to feel. Something happens to trigger feelings or fears within us that we don’t want to feel, so we behave in ways that let us not feel those disturbing feelings. Most of the time we are unaware of the reasons we are behaving that way. We don’t realize that we are protecting ourselves or avoiding uncomfortable feelings. Defensiveness distorts reality and reduces our effectiveness when trying to resolve conflicts or to build collaborative relationships. It causes us to put more energy into self-preservation than we put into problem solving. We all have favorite ways of defending ourselves, usually a combination of behaviors affecting both our mind and our body.

By exploring our top three defensive behaviors, we each can create a Personal Early Warning System to tip us off when we are getting defensive. By developing a Defensiveness Action Plan tailored to our top three defenses, we can increase our personal effectiveness when our warning system tells us we are becoming defensive.