Communication Courage | Today’s Psychology

When encountering difficult interpersonal situations, it often feels like you are lacking in the skills needed to be effective. We imagine that with the right strategy we will be confident, secure and successful. This is sometimes the case, but focusing on communication skills and strategies can often be distracting from larger challenges: anxiety. This anxiety can take many forms, including fear Fear of being criticized, rejected, or hurting someone else. Recognizing that these concerns are natural and inevitable, we can work together with anxiety, overcome avoidance, and approach more skillfully challenging interactions.

Consider the following example from work and personal life.

• You will be asked to give feedback on your work project at the meeting, but you are reluctant to share your critical thoughts, despite your ideas being important to the success of the project.
• I plan to ask for a salary increase at a scheduled meeting with my boss.
• You are romantically interested in someone and want to ask them on a date.
• I want to discuss my partner’s spending habits and I know I have responded defensively to these conversations in the past.

These are common situations where you may feel like you are lacking in the skills to succeed. But they are also an objectively challenging interaction that it is natural to worry. These situations have potentially hurtful consequences for yourself or someone else, so they are seeking special care. While some people really lack certain communication skills, anxiety is often a greater barrier to such challenging interactions.

Real problem: Avoiding it, not insufficient

Anxiety is unpleasant Feelingsbut it is not pathological in itself. There may be good reasons for bad feelings, as psychiatrist Randolph Ness puts it.¹ Anxiety is a response to a potentially dangerous or harmful situation, thus causing the need to retreat or proceed with caution. During human evolution, we had good reasons to pay attention to our attention and make mistakes. As Ness says, anxiety is like a smoke alarm programmed to be overly sensitive to threats. It’s better to have smoke alarms plague us by going out for burning toast rather than miss the real threat of a fire.

Our anxiety doesn’t respond solely to physical threats. We have social and relational smoke alarms that are highly adapted to the risks of our social connections. It’s rejection, loss of social status, or the pain of those close to us. Therefore, it makes sense to be somewhat anxious when faced with challenging interactions like the above situations, as we recognize the true social or relational risks. However, there is an incorporation bias Towards seeing dangers take more seriously than they actually are. This anxiety can lead to avoiding interactions. Interactions feel good in the short term, but ultimately increase our pain and prevent us from solving relationship problems.

Anxiety in response to challenging interactions is not pathological in itself. It can help us to be more vigilant about bad outcomes and to move on more cautiously. However, the real problem is avoidance. This is why focusing on skills and strategies can be a distraction. Considering a lack of skills and knowledge to handle interactions may simply avoid difficult situations naturally.

Aristotle’s Courage: Find the Center

Aristotle’s explanation of courage is useful here. Aristotle describes virtues including courage as the average between the extremes.² The virtue of courage avoids the extremes of fear and coronavirus on one end, and recklessness on the other end. A courageous man finds a middle ground between fear and stupid impulsivity. Communication courage is not a lack of anxiety in difficult situations, but the ability to properly assess risks and make good judgments. We don’t want to be someone who is free from anxiety about our social situations, speak impulsively, and doesn’t know the possibility of hurting others.

Of course, the best response to anxiety-stimulating interactions is to stay silent or leave the interaction. Plowing forward while ignoring your anxiety is usually wise It’s exactly as in the course. It is best to think of it as a meaningful signal to assess anxiety. It should give us a pause, but it should not justify avoiding important communication.

When we realize that some degree of discomfort in social interaction is inevitable, we can begin to collaborate with our anxiety rather than oppose it. Anxiety is usually a signal to carefully move forward, not a reason to avoid interaction or spend time developing new skills. Importantly, Aristotle emphasizes that virtue arises not only through rational analysis but through practice and habituation.

Four Ways to Reconstruct Anxiety

Given the need to accept some degree of discomfort, here are some ways to overcome anxiety about difficult interactions and find courage to communicate.

1. Accept that difficult interactions are likely to be difficult. Some anxiety, discomfort, or awkwardness is natural and inevitable. Interactions like the example above may include conflict, defense, or wounds.
2. Practice or rehearse rewarding interactions to help prepare. This serves two purposes. It helps to bleach related anxiety while predicting challenges. Interaction practice or roleplay serves as “exposure” in the language of Cognitive behavior Treatment. However, if we assume that practice is perfected to avoid difficulties and discomfort, practice can be just another avoidance strategy.
3. Remember that relationship ruptures can almost always be repaired. Difficult interactions and conflicts rarely end at the end of a relationship. Defensive partners may be more calm and more open to communication later. If you feel you’ve made the wrong move, you can always apologize And try to engage in a different way. It helps to think of interactions as one moment of an ongoing process within a relationship, rather than the performance needed to get “just right”.
4. Recognise that you can’t control others’ reactions. No matter how clever you are, others may be defensive, distracted, or responded in ways you don’t expect. You can only control your actions.

When expert help makes sense

I emphasize that anxiety is natural, but this does not mean that people feel overwhelming anxiety and hard-working and paralyzed on their own. As a psychotherapist, I see people making dramatic progress in overcoming Social anxiety And then change the difficult patterns in their relationship. Professional resources are useful in these cases, but meaningful change arises from working through anxiety rather than ultimately eliminating it.

Four practical communication strategies

Overcoming anxiety that may lead you to avoid interactions will reveal you already have the skills necessary to read the situation and communicate effectively. Here are some practical strategies to guide your approach:

1. Make your goals clear: Be specific about your purpose in interaction. Are you trying to solve problems, defend yourself, or help others in some way? Many interactions have multiple interactions the goalbut it helps to clarify your main intentions.
2. Show understanding: Consider the perspective of others and explicitly show your understanding of their needs and interest in your communication. You can help them feel understood even if you don’t agree with them.
3. Direct communication: Make sure you state your needs and perspective clearly and assertively and be specific. Anxiety can guide us to be indirect or tentative in ways that can confuse others and undermine the message.
4. Plan emotional strength and have an exit plan. If you or someone else is emotionally overwhelmed by the interaction, plan to take a timeout and return to the topic at another time. Many difficult interactions need to be carried out in stages. Don’t forget that most communication is a process, not performance, and you can usually go back and repair it later.

From avoidance to courageous communication

It helps you to be interested in why when you find yourself avoiding interactions or feeling anxious. Usually, this anxiety has a good reason to carry risk to yourself and others. We should take special care to be clever in these situations. However, our social smoke alarms are often overly sensitive to threats, leading us to withdraw or avoid important social interactions. Searching for appropriate skills or strategies to eliminate discomfort in these situations is usually a trap that leads to more self-doubt and avoidance.

Direct, clear, and clever communication involves wise actions in its presence, not lacking fear. If we accept anxiety as the price of genuine connections, we find that the conversations we have avoided are often the most important ones.