Tag: emotional science

5 Remote Friendly Teaching Strategies to Deepen Empathy

During Universal Human Rights Month this December and every month, optimizing classroom activities to foster learning and caring about global human rights is a crucial task of modern educators. For all of the vital information that is available about histories of struggles for human rights and coverage of ongoing struggles, teaching this material demands parallel attention to deepening our capacities for empathy and perspective taking. Based on a bedrock of social-emotional learning (SEL) methodology, Facing History offers these 5 remote-friendly teaching strategies to aid thoughtful teaching in remote and mixed learning environments:

Contracting for Remote Learning
Contracting is the process of openly discussing with students how classroom members will engage with each other and with the learning experience, and it is an important strategy for making the classroom a reflective and respectful community. Since remote learning deeply affects the progression of classroom communication, it is important to update your class contract so it accounts for any new logistical circumstances so students can feel engaged, valued, respected, and heard.

Bio-poem: Connecting Identity and Poetry
“Who am I?” is a question on the minds of many adolescents. This activity helps students clarify important elements of their identities by writing a poem about themselves or about a historical or literary figure. By providing a structure for students to think more critically about an individual’s traits, experiences, and character, bio-poems allow students to build peer relationships and foster a cohesive classroom community.

Reflection upon the complexity of one’s own identity is also crucial for building an empathic bridge to the inner worlds and social lives of others.
[NOTE: We invite you to make logistical tweaks to ensure alignment with your current teaching situation.]

Text-to-Text, Text-to-Self, Text-to-World
Reading comes alive when we recognize how the ideas in a text connect to our experiences and beliefs, events happening in the larger world, our understanding of history, and our knowledge of other texts. This strategy helps students develop the habit of making these connections as they read. When students are given a purpose for their reading, they are able to better comprehend and make meaning of the ideas in the text.

Promoting processing on these multiple levels also trains students to carry this mode of analysis beyond the classroom and apply it in situations where they have the potential to make a difference.
[NOTE: We invite you to make logistical tweaks to ensure alignment with your current teaching situation.]

Graffiti Boards
Virtual Graffiti Boards are a shared writing space (such as Google Docs, Google Jamboard, Padlet, Flipgrid, or VoiceThread) where students can write comments or questions during a synchronous session or during a defined asynchronous time. The purpose of this strategy is to help students “hear” each other’s ideas. Virtual Graffiti Boards create a record of students’ ideas and questions that can be referred to at a later point, and give students space and time to process emotional material.

Students’ responses can give you insight into what they are thinking and feeling about a topic and provide a springboard for both synchronous and asynchronous discussions. Further, this strategy allows students to practice taking in the perspectives of others and trying on others’ experiences in a manner that also provides them with space to process material that may be challenging.

Journals in Remote Learning
Journals play a key role in a Facing History classroom, whether the learning is in person or remote. Many students find that writing or drawing in a journal helps them process ideas, formulate questions, retain information, and synthesize their perspectives and experiences with those of classmates.

Journals make learning visible by providing a safe, accessible space for students to share thoughts, feelings, and uncertainties.

Invest 300$ to get $1200 in a week completely real and legit

They also help nurture classroom community and offer a way for you to build relationships with your students through reading and commenting on their journals. And frequent journal writing helps students become more fluent in expressing their ideas in writing or speaking.

—

Facing History and Ourselves invites educators to use our resource collection for remote and hybrid learning, Taking School Online with a Student-Centered Approach.

Topics: Online Learning, Empathy

By Kaitlin Smith
Kaitlin Smith is a Marketing and Communications Writer for Facing History and Ourselves. At Facing History and Ourselves, we value conversation—in classrooms, in our professional development for educators, and online. When you comment on Facing Today, you’re engaging with our worldwide community of learners, so please take care that your contributions are constructive, civil, and advance the conversation.

.

.

Kafoople Land

WATCH NEXT ▶ https://youtu.be/-mzXW_uBU1w *Hey Hey!* Do you need some remote, distance, online learning hacks to incorporate into your teaching? These tips and strategies for remote teaching will enhance your work-life balance as a teacher and (hopefully) keep you sane during this time. Let me know in the comments if you have any other distance learning/teaching tips that may help other teachers; especially if you are further along in the remote teaching journey than I am! #distancelearning#remotelearning#remoteteaching *SIGN UP* for regular updates HERE https://mailchi.mp/4b53faf5e751/kafoo… *SUBSCRIBE HERE* https://goo.gl/njMj9G Please consider subscribing as I am keen to hit 2000 subscribers this year. 🙂 I’m currently at 1789 at the time of this upload…) *GET* your 2020 Digital Teacher Planner HERE https://gum.co/KHetUa *WATCH* SIMILAR VIDEOS HERE Remote Teaching playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list… Teach From Home Teacher Tag https://youtu.be/sW9TF7v8l1E Classroom Management Tips https://youtu.be/X3TJjNXVcWI 5 Mistakes New Teachers Make https://youtu.be/qygFew2gjZ0 Google Classroom for Beginners https://youtu.be/fRlmgO4FVa0 Remote Teaching in Australia https://youtu.be/-mzXW_uBU1w *CURRENT FAVES* These are the YouTube channels that I am currently watching (and LOVING!) … Janice Wan Vlogs https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvEp… Chronicles of Teacher Tay https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0He… The Michelaks https://www.youtube.com/user/alittleb… Sarah’s Day https://www.youtube.com/user/sarahsda… *GET* your 2020 Digital Teacher Planner HERE https://gum.co/KHetUa Here at Kafoople Land my passion is for you to be able to: 🌸TEACH WELL 🌸LIVE WELL and 🌸BE WELL

How Far Is It To The Edge Of The Universe?

Artist's logarithmic scale conception of the observable universe. Galaxies give way to large-scale... [+] structure and the hot, dense plasma of the Big Bang at the outskirts. This 'edge' is a boundary only in time.

If you were to go as far out into space as you can imagine, what would you encounter? Would there be a limit to how far you could go, or could you travel a limitless distance? Would you eventually return to your starting point, or would you continue to traverse space that you had never encountered before? In other words, does the Universe have an edge, and if so, where is it?

Believe it or not, there are actually three different ways to think about this question, and each one has a different answer. If you consider how far you could go if you:

    • left today in an arbitrarily powerful rocket,
    • considered everything that could ever contact us or be contacted by us from the start of the hot Big Bang,
    • or used your imagination alone to access the entire Universe, including beyond what will ever be observable,

You can figure out how far it is to the edge. In each case, the answer is fascinating.

We often visualize space as a 3D grid, even though this is a frame-dependent oversimplification when... [+] we consider the concept of spacetime. In reality, spacetime is curved by the presence of matter-and-energy, and distances are not fixed but rather can evolve as the Universe expands or contracts.

ReunMedia / Storyblocks

The key concept to keep in mind is that space isn’t how we normally conceive of it. Conventionally, we think about space as being like a coordinate system — a three-dimensional grid — where the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, and where distances don’t change over time.

But both of those assumptions, so thoroughly good in our everyday lives, fail spectacularly when we begin looking at the larger-scale Universe beyond our own planet. For starters, the idea that the shortest distance between two points is a straight line falls apart as soon as you start introducing masses and energetic quanta into your Universe. Because spacetime is subject to curvature, which the presence of matter and energy is the cause of, the shortest distance between two points is inherently dependent on the shape of the Universe between those points.

Instead of an empty, blank, three-dimensional grid, putting a mass down causes what would have been... [+] 'straight' lines to instead become curved by a specific amount. In General Relativity, we treat space and time as continuous, but all forms of energy, including but not limited to mass, contribute to spacetime curvature. If we were to replace Earth with a denser version, up to and including a singularity, the spacetime deformation shown here would be identical; only inside the Earth itself would a difference be notable.

Christopher Vitale of Networkologies and the Pratt Institute

In addition to that, the fabric of spacetime itself does not remain static over time. In a Universe filled with matter and energy, a static, unchanging Universe (where distances between points remain the same over time) is inherently unstable; the Universe must evolve by either expanding or contracting. If Einstein’s General theory of Relativity is correct, this is mandatory.

Observationally, the evidence that our Universe is expanding is overwhelming: a spectacular validation for Einstein’s predictions. But this carries with it a series of consequences for objects separated by cosmic distances, including that the distance between them expands over time. Today, the most distant objects we can see are more than 30 billion light-years away, despite the fact that only 13.8 billion years have passed since the Big Bang.

The farther a galaxy is, the faster it expands away from us and the more its light appears... [+] redshifted. A galaxy moving with the expanding Universe will be even a greater number of light years away, today, than the number of years (multiplied by the speed of light) that it took the light emitted from it to reach us. But we can only understand redshifts and blueshifts if we attribute them to a combination of motion (special relativistic) and the expanding fabric of space (general relativistic) contributions both.

Larry McNish of RASC Calgary Center

When we measure how distant a variety of objects are from their physical and luminous properties — along with the amount that their light has been shifted by the Universe’s expansion — we can come to understand what the Universe is made of. Our cosmic cocktail, at present, consists of:

  • 0.01% radiation in the form of photons,
  • 0.1% neutrinos, an elusive, low-mass particle almost as numerous as photons,
  • 4.9% normal matter, made mostly of the same stuff we are: protons, neutrons, and electrons,
  • 27% dark matter, an unknown substance that gravitates but neither emits nor absorbs light,
  • and 68% dark energy, which is the energy inherent to space that causes distant objects to accelerate in their recession from us.

When you combine these effects together, you get a unique and unambiguous prediction for how far it is, at all times past and present, to the edge of the observable Universe.

A graph of the size/scale of the observable Universe vs. the passage of cosmic time. This is... [+] displayed on a log-log scale, with a few major size/time milestones identified. Note the early radiation-dominated era, the recent matter-dominated era, and the current-and-future exponentially-expanding era.

E. Siegel

This is a big deal! Most people assume that if the Universe has been around for 13.8 billion years since the Big Bang, then the limit to how far we can see will be 13.8 billion light-years, but that’s not quite right.

Only if the Universe were static and not expanding would this be true, but the fact is this: the farther away we look, the faster distant objects appear to speed away from us. The rate of that expansion changes in a way that is predictable based on what’s in the Universe, and in turn, knowing what’s in the Universe and observing how fast objects expand tells us how far away they are. When we take all of the available data together, we arrive at a unique value for everything together, including the distance to the observable cosmic horizon: 46.1 billion light-years.

The observable Universe might be 46 billion light years in all directions from our point of view,... [+] but there's certainly more, unobservable Universe, perhaps even an infinite amount, just like ours beyond that. Over time, we'll be able to see more of it, eventually revealing approximately 2.3 times as many galaxies as we can presently view.

Frédéric MICHEL and Andrew Z. Colvin, annotated by E. Siegel

This boundary, however, is not an “edge” to the Universe in any conventional sense of the word. It is not a boundary in space at all; if we happened to be located at any other point in space, we would still be able to detect and observe everything around us within that 46.1 billion light-year sphere centered on us.

This is because that “edge” is a boundary in time, rather than in space. This edge represents the limit of what we can see because the speed of light — even in an expanding Universe governed by General Relativity — only allows signals to travel so far over the Universe’s 13.8 billion year history. This distance is farther than 13.8 billion light-years because of the Universe’s expansion, but it’s still finite. However, we cannot reach all of it.

The size of our visible Universe (yellow), along with the amount we can reach (magenta). If we... [+] accelerated at 9.8 m/s^2 for approximately 22.5 years and then turned around and decelerated for another 22.5 years, we could reach any galaxy within the magenta circle, even in a Universe with dark energy, but nothing outside of it.

E. Siegel, based on work by Wikimedia Commons users Azcolvin 429 and Frédéric MICHEL

Beyond a certain distance, we can see some of the light that was already emitted long ago, but will never see the light that is being emitted right now: 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang. Beyond a certain specific distance — calculated (by me) to be approximately 18 billion light-years away at present — even a signal moving at the speed of light will never reach us.

Similarly, that means that if we were in an arbitrarily high-powered rocket ship, all of the objects presently contained within this 18 billion light-year radius would be eventually reachable by us, even as the Universe continued to expand and these distances continued to increase. However, the objects beyond that would never be reachable. Even as we achieved greater and greater distances, they would recede faster than we could ever travel, preventing us from visiting them for all eternity. Already, 94% of all the galaxies in the observable Universe are beyond our eternal reach.

As vast as our observable Universe is and as much as we can see, it’s far more than we can ever... [+] reach, as only 6% of the volume that we can observe is presently reachable. Beyond what we can observe, however, there is certainly more Universe; what we can see represents only a tiny fraction of what must be out there.

NASA, ESA, R. Windhorst, S. Cohen, and M. Mechtley (ASU), R. O’Connell (UVa), P. McCarthy (Carnegie Obs), N. Hathi (UC Riverside), R. Ryan (UC Davis), & H. Yan (tOSU)

And yet, there is a different “edge” that we might want to consider: beyond the limits of what we can observe today, or even what we can potentially observe arbitrarily far into the future, if we run our theoretical clock towards infinity. We can consider how large the entire Universe is — the unobservable Universe — and whether it folds in on itself or not.

The way we can answer this is based on an extrapolation of what we observe when we try to measure the spatial curvature of the Universe: the amount that space is curved on the largest scale we can possibly observe. If the Universe is positively curved, parallel lines will converge and the three angles of a triangle will sum to more than 180 degrees. If the Universe is negatively curved, parallel lines will diverge and the three angles of a triangle will sum to less than 180 degrees. And if the Universe is flat, parallel lines will remain parallel, and all triangles will contain 180 degrees exactly.

The angles of a triangle add up to different amounts depending on the spatial curvature present. A... [+] positively curved (top), negatively curved (middle), or flat (bottom) Universe will have the internal angles of a triangle sum up to more, less, or exactly equal to 180 degrees, respectively.

NASA / WMAP science team

The way we do this is to take the most distant signals of all, such as the light that’s left over from the Big Bang, and examine in detail how the fluctuations are patterned. If the Universe is curved in either a positive or a negative direction, the fluctuation patterns that we observe will wind up distorted to appear on either larger or smaller angular scales, as opposed to a flat Universe.

When we take the best data available, which comes from both the cosmic microwave background’s fluctuations and the details of how galaxies cluster together on large scales at a variety of distances, we arrive at an inescapable conclusion: the Universe is indistinguishable from perfect spatial flatness. If it is curved, it’s at a level that’s no more than 0.4%, meaning that if the Universe is curved like a hypersphere, its radius is at least ~250 times larger than the part that’s observable to us.

The magnitudes of the hot and cold spots, as well as their scales, indicate the curvature of the... [+] Universe. To the best of our capabilities, we measure it to be perfectly flat. Baryon acoustic oscillations and the CMB, together, provide the best methods of constraining this, down to a combined precision of 0.4%.

Smoot Cosmology Group / LBL

If you define the edge of the Universe as the farthest object we could ever reach if we began our journey immediately, then our present limit is a mere distance of 18 billion light-years, encompassing just 6% of the volume of our observable Universe. If you define it as the limit of what we can observe a signal from — who we can see and who can see us — then the edge goes out to 46.1 billion light-years. But if you define it as the limits of the unobservable Universe, the only limit we have is that it’s at least 11,500 billion light-years in size, and it could be even larger.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that the Universe is infinite, though. It could be flat and still curve back on itself, with a donut-like shape known mathematically as a torus. As large and expansive as the observable Universe is, it’s still finite, with a finite amount of information to teach us. Beyond that, the ultimate cosmic truths still remain unknown to us.

In a hypertorus model of the Universe, motion in a straight line will return you to your original... [+] location, even in an uncurved (flat) spacetime. The Universe could also be closed and positively curved: like a hypersphere.

ESO and deviantART user InTheStarlightGarden

Follow me on Twitter. Check out my website or some of my other work here.

Ethan Siegel Ethan Siegel

I am a Ph.D. astrophysicist, author, and science communicator, who professes physics and astronomy at various colleges. I have won numerous awards for science writing since 2008 for my blog, Starts With A Bang, including the award for best science blog by the Institute of Physics. My two books, Treknology: The Science of Star Trek from Tricorders to Warp Drive, Beyond the Galaxy: How humanity looked beyond our Milky Way and discovered the entire Universe, are available for purchase at Amazon. Follow me on Twitter @startswithabang.

Source: How Far Is It To The Edge Of The Universe?

https://i0.wp.com/imgaz1.chiccdn.com/os/nc_brand/201912/20191217023703_122.jpg?resize=787%2C428&ssl=1https://i0.wp.com/onlinemarketingscoops.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/6a0026f8c5e5a018cbe4d80b92517d6c.jpg?resize=840%2C336&ssl=1https://i0.wp.com/onlinemarketingscoops.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/3702e2465799999d50a87f9baa706ba5.jpg?resize=840%2C336&ssl=1https://i0.wp.com/onlinemarketingscoops.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/02/13ea310c35c951ec3e53f614234b9bf6.jpg?resize=840%2C336&ssl=1

Share this:

Like this:

Like Loading...

Empathetic Listening Can Improve Health Care & Treatment Recommendations – Maggie Leung

1.jpg

It is critical for physicians to respond appropriately with empathy to support families during a difficult time. Care conferences are discussions held between physicians and families to discuss medical treatment plans and decisions, and often involve high-stake decision-making, which can be emotionally stressing for the family. Past studies have found that physicians in the adult ICU setting do not commonly show empathy, and are often missing the opportunities to connect with families of the patient. However, this has not been well studied in the paediatric ICU setting……

Read more: https://www.medicalnewsbulletin.com/empathetic-listening-health-care-treatment/?_scpsug=crawled,5589,a595796b0106017107cbe36f9e8b6be20b1145e02188c642bf3d56958fa54748#_scpsug=crawled,5589,a595796b0106017107cbe36f9e8b6be20b1145e02188c642bf3d56958fa54748

 

 

Your kindly Donations would be so effective in order to fulfill our future research and endeavors – Thank you

How Managers Develop Emotional Intelligence & Apply It: New Study – David Wilkinson

1.jpg

How managers develop emotional intelligence is a critical question for organizations and anyone involved in management development.  A new (this research briefing was sent to members in July 2017)  meta-analysis of over 25 years of research on the emotional intelligence of managers answers some important questions about emotional intelligence and its development in managers.

Intelligence and emotional intelligence

The first thing to note is that there is no relationship between cognitive intelligence and emotional intelligence. “Therefore it is important not to assume that a person with high cognitive capabilities also has high emotional capabilities and vice versa.”

Emotional intelligence and performance

Research does support the assertion that emotional intelligence predicts improved performance at work. In particular, there is a strong correlation with jobs that require a significant level of communication and connection with others and especially in complex social situations where emotions are at play.

Further, managers who have to deal with issues of diversity, including diversity of views, tend to perform better with higher levels of emotional intelligence, than those with lower levels.

Additionally, it has been found that managers with higher levels of emotional intelligence perform better in situations where people are in emotionally demanding jobs and where people need to regulate their emotions frequently to perform well.

Emotional intelligence has been found to be less important in terms of performance in situations with few managerial or emotional labour demands.

emotional intelligence and performance

Intelligence (on its own) has been found to be a good predictor of performance in jobs that are cognitively complex, but not emotionally complex or requiring relationship building. However, intelligence is a better predictor of performance than emotional intelligence in many situations. Together, higher levels of intelligence and emotional intelligence are the best predictors of performance. It is therefore important when considering how managers develop emotional intelligence to also understand what emotional intelligence predicts in terms of performance in the workplace.

Emotional intelligence and personality

Emotional intelligence has been found to be a better predictor of performance in management and jobs that require greater levels of relationship building and emotional labour than any facets of personality (agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, extraversion and openness to experience for example).

The core emotional intelligence capabilities

The meta-analysis found that there are four core emotional intelligence capabilities that underpin how managers develop emotional intelligence:

1.    Self-awareness
2.   Social perception
3.   Emotional literacy or emotion understanding
4.   Emotion regulation.

Understanding these four capabilities is essential for getting to grips with how managers develop emotional intelligence

Self-awareness

Self-awareness refers to the ability or level to which an individual is able to identify their own emotions, particularly whilst they are experiencing that emotion. For example, being able to identify that they are angry or sad or happy, at the time they are feeling the emotion, rather than afterwards when things have calmed down. This ability to recognize the emotion at the time is the precursor to emotion regulation, or the ability to change our emotions at will and whilst we are feeling angry, for example. It is the self-awareness that allows for control. Therefore when thinking about how managers develop emotional intelligence starting with developing self-awareness is key.

Social perception

Social perception is the ability to be able to accurately read and identify other people’s emotions as they are feeling them. Social perception also includes identifying the distribution of emotions and sense of the emotional direction of a group. Interestingly, this includes being able to distinguish between genuine emotions and expressions that are put on for show in group, and particularly work, situations. This ability to be able to extract the underlying emotions in a group situation is a complex capability.

Social perception is critical in the work environment as it gives us vital information about people’s attitudes, goals and intentions. Managers who have low social perception often misread their team’s sense of things. Developing social perception and awareness is the next factor in how managers develop emotional intelligence.

developing emotional literacy

Emotional literacy or emotion understanding

Emotional literacy, or emotion understanding, is the ability to be able to identify and understand what has led to the feelings we are experiencing and why others might be feeling how they are. This ability to correctly identify the specific events that have given rise to a set of emotions is particularly important in management and for being able to predict how future events are likely to affect the people around them, as well as themselves.

This ability to be able to predict how future events are likely to influence people’s emotions (known as affective forecasting) helps to manage performance. Most people, the research shows, are not that good at affective forecasting and are continually surprised by their own and others’ reactions to events and even their own actions.

Effective forecasting or accurately identifying how events will influence our and others’ current and future emotions is an important facet of decision making, particularly for leaders and managers.

Errors of prediction in effective forecasting are often difficult to rectify later. Once an emotion has been associated with a decision, changing that initial reaction can be extremely time consuming. Emotional literacy is a critical skill when thinking about how managers develop emotional intelligence.

Emotion regulation

This is the ability of an individual to increase, decrease or maintain both the duration of an emotion and the intensity of it. Emotion regulation also includes the ability to change or influence other people’s emotions.

There are three core facets of emotion regulation:

1.    Setting appropriate emotion regulation goals
2.    Selecting the most effective and appropriate emotion regulation strategy
3.    Implementing the most appropriate and effect emotion regulation strategy

Learning to be more emotionally intelligent – how managers develop emotional intelligence

A number of studies have shown that emotional intelligence is not fixed at birth and can be changed. Further, the parents or significant caregivers have a significant impact both on our level of emotional intelligence but also on the flexibility we show in developing greater levels of emotional intelligence.

Exposure to different cultures and a range of emotions is also important in predicting the level of emotional intelligence an individual has and their ability to develop greater levels of emotional intelligence.

Defensiveness has been shown to be a considerable barrier to developing higher levels of emotional intelligence.

There are really four broad steps to developing better emotional intelligence capability:

1. Develop greater self-awareness of and learn to accurately identify others and your own emotions
2. Become more aware of your own and others’ general emotional intelligence capabilities
3. Learn to recognize where emotional intelligence is important
4. Learn and practice emotion regulation strategies and techniques
5. Find out which are more effective in which situation.

The first step to developing better levels of emotional intelligence is self-awareness. Getting direct feedback about how good you are at identifying emotions, both your own and others has been found to be the most effective way to start the process.

This is then best followed by becoming increasingly aware and focused on your general emotional capabilities. Learning to read the signs of your own emotions and your abilities and identifying those of others extends the self-awareness abilities.

Next, recognizing the importance of emotional intelligence is important. A number of studies have shown that managers who are defensive about their emotional intelligence capabilities tend to be trying to protect their ego and as a result tend to down-play the importance of emotional intelligence in the workplace. Other studies have found that employees who reduce the importance of emotional intelligence are also the ones who make the least effort in terms of emotional intelligence.

Practice and feedback (both of emotional awareness – “can I just check what you feel about this…” to calibrate your perceptions for example, tend to be the last stage of developing greater emotional intelligence.

Your kindly Donations would be so effective in order to fulfill our future research and endeavors – Thank you
https://www.paypal.me/ahamidian

The Emotionally Intelligent Way To Resolve Disagreements Faster – Josh Davis and Hitendra Wadhwa

1.jpeg

Imagine you run a tech startup. Cash is tight, but you can’t afford to enter the market with a product that doesn’t live up to its promises. And right now, it’s clear that your engineers aren’t focusing enough on the user-experience issues. Your senior engineer just won’t play along, though. You and she can’t seem to agree on what matters. She wants to do an early launch so the engineers can test features and improve them before fine-tuning the UX, arguing that other software companies, including major tech giants like Apple and Google, launch beta versions all the time. She suggests that you’re just burning cash and wasting time, that you don’t understand how tech companies work and need to trust her on this.

But you don’t. You’re worried about the brand; what if first-time users give you just one chance, hate the UX, and never return? If your launch product isn’t user-friendly, your whole business could be destroyed. Weeks go by and your disagreement with the senior engineer is going nowhere. You’ve tried bringing evidence and examples to prove to her that she’s wrong, and she’s done the same to you. The arguments have started to get heated, she’s getting concerned about your leadership, and you’re getting concerned about her commitment.

What should you do? What you should’ve done much earlier: Find something–anything–to agree on, as long as it’s meaningful.

Agree on something (other than the solution)

It’s natural during conflicts to feel you have to prove that you’re right, but this only escalates things. One party may give in, but it will be at the expense of wasted time, energy, and morale. However, a surprising thing happens when you take the opposite approach. By finding some common ground as soon as you detect the first signs of tension or conflict, you can start working quickly toward a mutually agreeable solution.

There’s always something true in the other party’s thinking. It may be their intention, premises, logic, concerns, or the factors they’re weighing. For example, you might agree with your senior engineer’s concerns and say to her, “I agree. It would make a lot of sense to get real user testing at this stage on our basic features before we put a lot more energy into other things. Let’s find a way to do that without a public launch. I need to also make sure we protect the brand experience.”

Alternatively, you might agree with her premises and say, “You make a great point that the tech giants do a lot of this kind of testing, and it’s hugely beneficial to getting the product features right. We should follow their lead. I think we won’t get the chance to learn about those features unless users have a simple and positive experience. That’s something else great companies do. What will it take for us to get to that point before we put our product out there?”

Or you may even seek a deeper truth and say, “I appreciate how much you want this product and this company to be amazing. I share that optimism and enthusiasm. That’s why I think we have so much potential here. Let’s think about where we’re both trying to get to.”

 

When you find a way to agree with something other than the solution to the problem you’re debating, you can shift the frame of the conversation to include a factor you both see as true and relevant. That makes it easier for the other person to lay down their arms and stop fighting. Instead, they start listening.

The psychology of agreeing

This approach creates what psychologists call “shared reality” and “procedural justice.” Shared reality is what happens when others see the world as you do and then find a way to let you know. It’s very unsettling when others don’t share your understanding of reality. When they do, however, it puts people on the same team and opens them up to collaboration. Procedural justice is about getting a fair hearing. It’s when people can ask themselves, “Did I get a chance to actually be heard?” and answer in the affirmative.

We’re far more likely to accept an outcome if we feel like we’ve been listened to and understood. Not only does finding something to agree on fulfill both of these psychological needs, but research also suggests that people tend to automatically reciprocate. So when you agree, your opponent is more likely to find something else to agree with you about in turn.

Wait, though: What if agreeing makes you look like a pushover? What if the other person really is to blame for something–will you be letting them get away with it? And if you give a little ground, won’t they just take more? These are all important concerns. But the fact is that they remain liabilities whether or not you find something in their argument to agree with; acknowledging common ground doesn’t totally invalidate your argument.

You can agree and remain very strong about what matters to you. You can agree and still address how you came to be in the situation. And you can agree and stand your ground. Having created the basis for shared reality, procedural justice, and reciprocity, you’re less likely to meet resistance for standing up for your own needs in these ways.

So when you find yourself locked in disagreement, the emotionally intelligent thing to do is to agree–not necessarily with the other party’s conclusions or proposed solution, but with some truth in what they believe. It could be their goals, intentions, concerns, emotions, or something bigger-picture that you share. It has the surprising and counterintuitive effect of disarming people, so you can move past disagreement and on to collaboration.

There’s one more, often unexpected result of this approach. Agreeing tends to bring out the best in other people, but it can also bring out the best in you. By pushing yourself to find common ground, you can shift your own thinking in a more collaborative direction, too. A little more flexibility and understanding–on all sides–is surely a good thing.

Your kindly Donations would be so effective in order to fulfill our future research and endeavors – Thank you

%d bloggers like this: