Audio Tidbits

Do you find yourself caught up in the vicious circle? That's when circumstances are causing you to falter and your faltering is causing circumstances that make you falter. As you see, it's a vicious circle. If you find yourself in the vicious circle, this pro tip for managing the vicious circle may be just the tip you need.

Do you sometimes have an important point you want to make with a co-worker, a friend, a teenager, someone you have never talked with before? We all have a point to make from time to time. For those moments, here is a pro tip for making your point.

When asking a question or making a point, do you ever start by saying, "This may be stupid but…?" I sure hope you don't but either way, I'm sure you've heard this disclaimer from others. This episode of the Audio Tidbits Podcast does not start with a disclaimer but does wonder about every starting with, "This may be stupid but…." Press play and see what you think about starting what you have to say with a disclaimer, particularly one that suggests that you and what you have to say may be stupid.

Chapter 9 – Crisis Feeling

As we thought about crisis color, we were focusing on the mood, tone, or affect of the individual in crisis. The color, then, is his overall or predominant emotional tone or state. As we talk about communication feeling, it will be important to keep this understanding of crisis color in mind.

MESSAGES WITH FEELING

Crisis color tells us something about the individual as a whole person in the present situation. Communication feeling has to do with the specific messages conveyed back and forth between you and the individual in crisis. As we looked at the content within the communication loop, we saw that each message has a factual or objective meaning. Each message also comes with its own specific feeling. For example, an individual may be very angry—his crisis may be red. However, this does not necessarily mean that he is angry about everything and everyone. In fact, there may be some people, events, or situations involved in his crisis that make him feel good, smile, or feel pleased. A small child who is very upset or angry with one parent may have good and loving feelings toward the other. A teenager who is very upset and apprehensive as a result of her boyfriend’s going out with another girl may be furious with the girl but still have loving, caring feelings toward the boyfriend. Even though the individual’s mood may be predominantly anxious, afraid, angry, or depressed, it is not necessarily or usually true that he is upset about everything and everyone. Similarly, some things may be making him feel fearful while others make him feel guilty; some things may make him feel angry while others make him feel apprehensive.

Jerry, age seventeen, is in a red crisis. He has a very defiant look and sits rigidly in the chair beside your desk. You ask, “How are you today, Jerry?” “Fine. I didn’t want to come here. My father said he would take me to juvenile court if I didn’t come. I’m here because it’s better than going to court. [You ask: Did you get into some kind of trouble?] Yeah, I just got suspended from school. One of the big-shot teachers reported us. This is my first offense. The other two, it’s their second time. He found out we were passing a joint. [You ask: Passing a joint gets you suspended from school?] Yeah. I’ve been smoking for four years and had to get caught. [You ask: How did getting suspended go over at home?] Well, my dad—I was surprised—he just laughed, nodded his head, and said ‘That’s my kid.’ [You ask: How did your mom take it?] She had a fit. She may still be yelling for all I know. My uncle —he was really upset. Now, he’s real neat. I can tell him anything. I don’t really need you people. Any talking I do, I do with him. [You say: It’s nice you can talk with him. We know how your mom and dad and uncle feel about it. How do you feel about getting suspended?] Well, it’s nice in a way. I don’t have to sit in all those stupid classes, but it just gets me further behind. I want to graduate so I can go to college, but those classes are such a bore. [From Jerry’s red crisis and from his somewhat hostile attitude, you might have assumed that he would be quite negative toward school and education. He does not like school, but he is not particularly happy about being suspended. You say: Classes can be a bore sometimes.] They—those teachers—get me mad. I start cursing in class. This one overheard me and made me stay after class. He asked me if I like him, and I told him, ‘Hell, no!’ and ran out of the room. He hasn’t liked me much since then. [You are developing a suspicion that Jerry’s temper may be a problem to him, and you ask: Do you get angry often?] Yeah, I start cursing a blue streak, and when I do, it feels so good that —oh, I haven’t been doing nearly as much….My mom had to go to California for a while, and my dad and I had a really good time. We laughed and joked.

Success requires Focus, Focus, Focus. Your full undivided attention is on your success agenda. You do not permit distraction or competing priorities. You continuously say Yes to your success.

Success requires Timing, Timing, Timing. You are where you need to be, when you need to be there, doing what you need to do. You are always prepared, always good to go.

Success requires Attitude, Attitude, Attitude. It is not a whatever you happen to feel about it today attitude. It is the success attitude. You believe in your success, your capacity to succeed. What's more, you have no doubt about what you do to succeed. You do whatever it takes. …

Success requires Persistence, Persistence, Persistence. You are committed to sticking to it. How long do you hang in? You hang in as long as it takes to succeed. You persist.

Success requires Practice, Practice, Practice. This is the key element separating you from the less successful. However talented, skilled, capable, clever, ingenious you are today, you can improve, can get better, can do better.

It's simple. If you can do better, you do better, a day at a time, a month at a time, a year at a time. With your success, good enough is never good enough, since you know you can do even better.

Success requires Responsibility, Responsibility, Responsibility. The responsibility element is similarly uncomplicated. You do the right things right, the first time, on time, every time.

Success requires Imagination, Imagination, Imagination. The imagination element is where you may nod in agreement but miss the point.

It is pleasant to imagine yourself wildly successful and enjoying the perks of success. However, this type of imagining is potentially counterproductive. It distracts from your success agenda, from today, from the here-and-now.

Imagine yourself as more talented, more skilled, more capable, more clever, more ingenious. How much more? More than today. Concurrently, imagine strategies and approaches to get to more. Yes indeed. Concentrate on your success agenda, stick to your agenda, imagine ticking off the boxes on your path to success.

Success requires Determination, Determination, Determination. Another simple success element. You made up your mind to succeed and nothing less is acceptable. Your success is not a matter of If. The only variable is How soon.

Success requires Effort, Effort, Effort. This is where the game is lost for most. They weigh their current level of effort against the perceived likelihood of success and conclude they are falling short. They refuse to sustain their current effort and do not seriously contemplate an increase. Since your success is a foregone conclusion, your effort decision reduces to whatever it takes. You just do it.

Now you know so there you go on your way to success.

Chapter 8 – Communication Content

Once we understand the color in crisis and that our mood or affect is an important dimension of crisis communication, we can begin to consider crisis content. People not trained in crisis intervention generally focus more or less exclusively on the content when talking with an individual in crisis. As our understanding of crisis color suggests, the mood or tone of the individual in crisis is at least as critical as, and perhaps even more critical than, the specifics of what happened and what is happening. If we look at any of the examples of crisis in the text, we can see that a calm, rational, planning person would be able to understand and deal with the situation. The critical aspect of the situation comes primarily in terms of the individual’s mood or color. It is his anger, fear, anxiety, apprehension, extreme depression, and so on that elevates the now potential and works against his dealing with the situation himself. It is the blue of crisis communication that directly responds to the most critical part of the crisis, that is, the individual’s being so upset or agitated that he is unable to calm down, slow down, and plan ahead. …

At first glance, it may seem naïve to suggest that most crises can successfully be reduced by the simple technique of controlling your mood, or affect, as you respond to the individual in crisis. If you can consistently respond in purposeful shades of blue, assuming that your verbal comments are relatively neutral and innocuous, you will usually need to do nothing more than filter the individual’s communication through your blue screen. If you continue this process patiently, caringly, and persistently, the crisis will pass. With further thought and experience with people in crisis, though, you will see that the intensity of the individual’s emotional state, his crisis color, is what is really keeping him from dealing with the situation himself. Filtering and modifying those emotions, then, is the main thing we have to do to reduce the crisis. If you can stay calm, “keep your cool,” and avoid verbally or emotionally attacking the individual or pushing him away, he will respond positively.

It is important to see that this communication model places primary emphasis on the quality of the interaction between you and the individual. The mood or tone of that interaction is the part of helping that helps the most. Along with the stress on the quality of interaction this communication model also implicitly and explicitly assumes that the individual in crisis is capable of being a rational, planning, thinking person. We do not see the individual as sick or disturbed. He is a healthy, responsible person just as you and I. His problem is that the conflict in his interaction with his situation is extremely stressful to him. It is this stress he is under that is causing him to be anxious, upset, afraid, extremely angry, and so forth. If we can help him deal with these intense emotions and gradually get him to look more critically at his situation, he has the strength, capacity, and integrity necessary to deal with it.

It can hardly be overemphasized that the present approach to crisis intervention assumes that we are dealing with healthy people who are capable of dealing with their life situations. Our mood and tone and the color of our communication help them to use their own reasoning and planning capacities.

A FAITH IN PEOPLE

In human services, there is an adage that directs us to work with the individual in an effort to “maximize his strengths and minimize his weaknesses.” In crisis situations, anger, fear, confusion, apprehension, depression, despair, and so forth are interpreted as temporary weaknesses. They have welled up in the individual, temporarily overpowering his reasoning, thinking, and planning strengths.

Keohane, Nannerl O. Thinking about Leadership. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.

This is a large part of what leadership is all about: providing solutions to common problems or offering ideas about how to accomplish collective purposes, and mobilizing the energies of others to follow these courses of action.

Putting forward ideas for accomplishing group goals is one aspect of leadership; bringing together members of the group to act on these suggestions is the second.

Leaders determine or clarify goals for a group of individuals and bring together the energies of members of that group to accomplish those goals.

Leaders make decisions. Decisions can involve singling out issues from a relevant set; choosing among potential measures to address those issues; determining who else to enlist in the work; and figuring out how to use resources to implement policy.

For each new decision sets a precedent, begetting new decisions, foreclosing others, and causing reactions which require counteractions. …

Leaders devise and implement strategies to achieve their goals. This means thinking ahead, assessing what is likely to happen, weighing the importance of multiple factors. Leaders set priorities among issues that confront the group, so that the course ahead is more manageable and they are not trying to do everything at once.

…they [examples] involve shifting combinations of persuasion, strategic calculation, example, incentives, threats, sanctions, and rewards.

But leaders must be able to make decisions and move on.

Good decision makers improve their skills through practice but do not perpetually second guess themselves.

Leaders routinely face stubborn obstacles, unclear alternatives, stiff opposition, and resistant materials; they often need tenacity and perseverance to stay the course.

Most women leaders display a mixed style of leadership, with some apparently feminine features and others that are more like those of a typical male leader.

Some women in some contexts do lead differently from most men; but insofar as there is a pattern here it stems from socialization and cultural expectations, rather than hormones or genes.

…a few of the personal qualities often useful in leadership are "innate"--more like having perfect pitch than something you can pick up over time. These include the basic intuitions or sensitivities that ground good judgment, personal integrity, and the kind of intelligence that works strategically.

Kennedy, Debbe, foreword by Joel A. Barker. Putting Our Differences to Work: The Fastest Way to Innovation, Leadership, and High Performance. San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc., 2008.

… "Putting our differences to work means creating an environment where people, naturally unique and different--diverse by nature and experience--can work more effectively in ways that drive new levels of creativity, innovation, problem solving, leadership, and performance in the marketplaces, workplaces, and communities of the world."

Putting our differences to work at every level within an organization requires a new kind of intention from everybody. It means consciously recognizing one undeniable fact: that people are the number one source of new thinking and new ideas needed for change and the betterment of business and society.

It is the heartbeat, commitment, and hard work of every individual that fulfills a business strategy and brings about innovation, leadership, and high performance for any organization or endeavor.

We don't trust one another as much as we should, and, consequently, we tend to isolate ourselves, staying with those most like us.

Future leaders must know their particular strengths and how to dra...

What’s your notion of a bad day? I’m not thinking here about big events that foretell major or lasting consequences. Rather I am thinking about those little annoyances and inconveniences that disrupt our otherwise comfortable and more or less predictable days.

You know the kinds of things I am talking about: not being able to find your car keys, dropping your iPhone and cracking the screen, dripping coffee on your clean shirt, getting a phone call that you have to take just as you are leaving the house when you’re already running ten minutes late, remembering as you head out for lunch that you were supposed to be at the dentist two hours ago, realizing that you still haven’t started that report your boss needs this afternoon and you had planned to finish yesterday. …

It just so happens that I am having one of those bad days. My first discovery is that a bad day for me is always personal. By that I mean that like beauty, bad days are in the eyes of the beholder. I think the key is that a bad day gets us off our game. What gets me off my game might not bother you one way or the other. Conversely, what gets you off your game may be something I would just take in stride. As I said, bad days are always personal.

The next thing I have realized is that no one cares about my bad day. Sure, I can tell someone about it and he or she might even have a little sympathy but not much. It’s not his or her bad day and after a small dose of sympathy, I will quickly figure out that I’ll just have to suck it up and move on.

My particular bad day started this morning. It was time to work on my podcast and I realized that I didn’t have anything to say. Normally not having anything to say is no reason for a bad day unless you are supposed to be podcasting, unless your significant other says, “We need to talk,” unless you are ten-years-old and your teacher asks you why you didn’t do your homework, or perhaps unless your boss wants to know why the report you intended to write yesterday isn’t on her desk this afternoon.

Back to my podcast and not having anything to say. I admit it. I am hoping for an inspiration. I know that’s a little like hoping that the coffee stain on my shirt will suddenly disappear or or that the crack in my iPhone screen will magically repair itself. Maybe Teacher will just smile and tell you that you are really smart so for you, homework is optional or perhaps your boss will just chuckle and say, “No problem. When I asked for the report, I was only making a suggestion.”

As for that inspiration I am hoping for, Frank Tibolt said, “We should be taught not to wait for inspiration to start a thing. Action always generates inspiration. Inspiration seldom generates action.” This kind of sounds like that getting the cart before the horse thing.

I guess my personal bad day is likely to stay inspiration free so action is my only viable course. The situation calls for action, for doing something instead of just staring at the microphone, waiting for that inspiration. Alfred Adler said, “Trust only movement. Life happens at the level of events, not of words.” If the point is not sinking in as I sit and stare, I need to remember what Arnold Glasow had to say about this inspiration thing. “An idea not coupled with action will never get any bigger than the brain cell it occupied.”

I may be experiencing a small flicker of motivation, especially given how small a single brain cell probably is. The key now is to see if I can convert that bit of motivation into a modicum of action. I do have a tendency to think that only the great and glorious are worth doing so must latch onto Peter Marshall’s perspective. He said, “Small deeds done are better than great deeds planned.”

I can feel myself moving off the dime. My podcasting paralysis seems to be passing. Yes, I do recall that Ernest Hemingway said,

Chapter 7 – Crisis Color

Crisis always has a mood or color. The psychiatric literature frequently refers to this dimension of people in crisis as “affect.” In crisis communication, color refers to the mood or disposition of the individual in crisis. Does he seem depressed, angry, agitated, anxious, fearful; how would you describe the individual’s mood? Using colors is a convenient way for us to communicate information about an individual’s mood or affect and to describe and understand the three major or most observable moods or affective states.

It may be helpful to think about several people in different situations. As an exercise, think about these individuals. What kind of mood are they in? Using a word or short phrase to describe each person’s mood, think about whether they seem happy or sad, angry or loving, tired or energetic, optimistic or pessimistic, and so on. Crisis communication is unlike most other forms of communication. Developing a knack for describing an individual’s mood or tone in a word or short phrase will help in recognizing and understanding this dimension of crisis situations.

Mrs. J is sitting in her backyard in a lounge chair. She reading a book, and her children are playing quietly in the sandbox near by. It is a sunny spring day, and Mrs. J occasionally chuckles as she reads.

Mrs. K bites her lip as she slams the cupboard door in her kitchen. Her children know better than to bother her right now, and her husband is staying out in the garage. She moves in a very deliberate and methodical way and the pans bang as she sets them on the stove.

Chuck, age six, squirms in his seat and is fiddling with his pencil. He keeps glancing around the room. He is tapping one foot against the leg of his chair and has not turned a page in his picture book for five minutes.

Denise, age nineteen, is talking on the telephone, “Why won’t you be there?” There is a long pause. Her voice is a little shaky. “I don’t understand. Everything seemed okay last night.” Another long pause. “But will you be there later?”

Don is talking quite loudly: “Will you shut up and listen to me. I have told you that a thousand times. If you don’t believe me, there is nothing I can do about it. Call him and ask him yourself. I’m getting sick and tired of this damn routine every time I’m twenty minutes late.”

Ellen is talking very slowly. It is difficult to hear her, for she seems to be swallowing her words. “I just don’t have any energy left anymore. I can’t fight it anymore. I tried and tried and don’t feel like trying anymore. It wouldn’t do any good anyway.”

Ed seems like he is about to cry and keeps clearing his throat. “I don’t know what’s going to happen. The doctor said it may not be serious, but they have to check on it, anyway. She’s so little. It’s all my fault. If I had been paying more attention, this wouldn’t have happened, and she wouldn’t be paying for my stupidity now.”

Frank shakes your hand as he sits down in the chair beside your desk. “We have to get this straightened out. We spend all of our time hassling and arguing about it and seem to get nowhere. It’s the kids. We simply cannot agree on how to deal with them. She is more of an open person and thinks it’s okay for them to run in the house and make a lot of noise and do pretty much whatever they want to. I wasn’t brought up that way. We were taught to respect our parents and to conduct ourselves like ladies and gentlemen. One of us has to be wrong, and somebody has got to tell us which one. She would have come with me, but one of the kids is sick today. She’ll come next time if you want her to.”

In addition to thinking about the mood of the individuals described here, you can make a game out of figuring out the mood of people you come in contact with over the next...

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