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There’s almost no conflict that doesn’t begin with a false or distorted assumption, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that couples have bitterly divorced and that nations have gone to war over those assumptions.
He doesn’t really care.
She’s only in it for the money.
They’re taking our jobs.
We are wired to seek and secure tribal affiliation and to categorize other humans as “in” or “out” of our tribe. This is not a defect to be excised or denied; it’s just a fact, and when you understand how it works, you can make choices that optimize your relationships with friends and strangers alike. You can cognitively choose how you define “tribe” and your nervous system will follow.
This is important because when you unconsciously label another “out,” your system orients to protect you from that other: to compete, defend, fight, or even annihilate. You imagine the other person might be against you in some way, may wish to harm you or take something from you, whether material goods or social status or freedom. Again, this is not something that’s wrong with us; it’s part of our nature, and we do occasionally need to protect ourselves from others.
The challenge here is that we tend to throw our guard up far more than we need to, so often that the guarding becomes habitual. For some of us it becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy. We wear our armor like it’s skin and feel as though the entire world is against us. This might look like picking a fight or pushing someone’s buttons compulsively without even knowing why you’re doing it. It might look like knee-jerk sarcasm or criticism or defensiveness. Or many other things.
Assuming positive intent is a magical ninja trick.
When you assume positive intent, you unconsciously categorize the other person as “in” your tribe, and your nervous system does the opposite thing: it looks for ways to understand, to help, to collaborate, to share, or at the very least to tolerate. It makes you care, intrinsically, about the other human’s well-being. You may not become besties, but you will lose your desire to shoot laser beams out of your eyes at them.
And that’s the powerful ninja move: the shift in your own physical embodied state. If you’re feeling afraid of the other person, no amount of mental discipline can convince you to sit down and listen to them. Your body will conquer your mind every time.
But if you tell your body–convincingly–that the other person is actually on your side, is part of your tribe, is part of you, then there’s a very good chance that different words will come out of your mouth, and that you will make different choices.
It took me years to master this particular move in the presence of another person’s anger. Anger is a normal and healthy emotion, but for me, it was a trigger that sent me fleeing the room. I even experienced a phenomenon called “delayed anger” in myself, because my body did not consider it a safe thing to feel. It craftily hid it from my conscious awareness for a week or two or twenty, to be sure that I was out of danger.
Your nervous system is creative and intelligent.
I still remember the moment I did the ninja move for the first time. My husband was angry, and my practice at the time was just to stay in the room. That’s it. I had failed at this for years and then suddenly, I succeeded. I stayed. After a few minutes, I sat down. It felt like I was on a different planet, in a different body. In a way, I was. We talked. It was over. We re-wired our whole relationship dynamic in about 10 minutes, and if that is not magic, I don’t know what is.
And although it took me years to work this magic in this one particular, very charged context, assuming positive intent is also something you can do casually, like flipping a light switch, when the stakes are much lower, like in a meeting or at a party when someone says something awkward.
Experiment with this and please share your discoveries in the comments! If you’d like to learn more about the coaching process, reach out to me for a private consultation.
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