Three Ways to Avoid Crossed Wires at Work

When you’re setting up several pieces of technology, it’s easy to get the wires crossed so the different devices can’t interact with each other. If we're frustrated, rushed or distracted, the same thing can happen when we’re trying to communicate with our teammates.          

One of my colleagues is Mirabai Bush, co-founder of The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society and author of Working with Mindfulness: Research and Practice of Mindful Techniques in Organizations. Mirabai sat down with leadership coach Elad Levinson for his online course, Thriving on Change: The Evolving Leader’s Toolkit to talk about how emotional intelligence impacts interactions at work.

During that conversation, Mirabai described three simple practices to enhance our self-awareness and empathy skills - two key components for effective communication. Here’s what Mirabai had to say about those exercises and their impact. I encourage you to try these simple yet powerful exercises yourself.

Mindful E-Mailing        

“When I was consulting at Google for their Search Inside Yourself course, we did something called mindful e-mailing. We’ve all done it – respond to emails without much thought or consideration for how the recipient will perceive the message. It happens when you’re in the thick of it. So, we asked people to just type out the message, sit back, take three breaths, and then return to the message. We then asked participants to think about what the emotional impact might be for the recipient, or to focus on the clarity of the message. Will they understand me? Will the tone or intention get lost?

This exercise helps you imagine what their response might be, and change the message, if necessary. It’s that simple.    

After trying it out, one person said, ‘I did the whole thing. I took the breaths. I re-read it, and then I did something radical.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘I picked up the phone.’ He had realized the emotions embedded in the situation were too complex to be handled in an email message.”

Mindful Listening        

“Within any company, and certainly at Google, there are subcultures. Marketing, engineering, management, and so on. Despite their different personalities or missions, people still need to work together. To help the various teams at Google learn how to communicate effectively with people across different departments and cultures, we did a practice called mindful listening.

After listening in silence to someone speak, they would respond, ‘What I hear you saying is….’ In the same way that you witness your own mind, you listen to another person. As other thoughts come into your head about what you know about this, and how you could fix that, etc., you just notice those thoughts, and you bring your awareness back to the person speaking. And then, you respond, ‘Just so I’m clear….’          

The participants reported that bringing that kind of awareness into their relationships helped on many different levels.”

“Just Like Me”

“Along with learning to be more aware of ourselves, we really need to do the complementary practices of cultivating goodwill, otherwise known as the compassion practices. In my work with organizations, we do one called ‘Just Like Me.’ Here’s how it works. You look at another person and think of all the ways in which they are just like me. You are another human being, with thoughts and emotions, just like me. You have been through very difficult things in your life, just like me. You want to be a good person, just like me.      

That awareness of our similarities begins to inform how we communicate and connect with one another. It's quite powerful."

Additional Resources

Thriving on Change integrates the necessary proven-effective skills, tools, and practices to ensure leaders expertly respond to uncertainty, conflict, and inevitable distraction. Unlike other leadership development courses, this program is delivered in bite-size chunks, designed to enlist all of your learning faculties. Register for the full online course today.

Additional Reading

Knowing Every Breath You Take

Mindfulness at Work

The Mindful Office