If handling yourself better is how you handle collaboration and conflict better, what does that mean? And how do you do it?
Handling As Interiority11Interiority has long philosophical and scientific tradition involving Aristotle, Augustine, Hegel, Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and neuroscientists and cognitive scientists I’ve mentioned. I’ll detail the lineage in a separate blog.[/mfn]
Handling yourself isn’t self-management in the classic sense – staying calm, staying professional, picking your battles. Those are necessary, but they’re not what it means to handle yourself better to handle collaboration and conflict better. Handling yourself better means maintaining interiority under pressure.
Interiority might be a new word to you, but the concept probably isn’t. It’s been examined seriously in Eastern and Western philosophy and science for centuries. Practices for developing it are real, tested, and varied, some of which you no doubt already know from Eastern and Western traditions – mindfulness, meditation, metacognition, congruence.
Interiority is the condition being in contact with your felt experience2The body signals which reflexivity bends back on I call felt experience. That’s a plain language way to say what philosophers and scientists describe in different ways relevant to their disciplines – that there is a pre-verbal, embodied knowing which has to be experienced before it can be articulated. as a situation unfolds – including the operation of your working models or mental maps. It’s the lived experience of being a subject rather an organism which processes inputs. It’s similar to what we think of as subjective, inner life in a psychological sense – but that tends to be after-the-fact reflective and analytic. Interiority means in real-time, not after. It’s being fully present as a subject inside your own experience, rather than stepping outside it to manage it – or others. That’s why it’s important for handling yourself better in collaboration and conflict – it’s the ground or orientation for your handling.
You’re inside a collaboration or conflict moment or situation, not outside it. When inside, signals about your experience reach you through your body, first – nervousness, excitement, butterflies, a tight throat, leaning forward, sitting back. Those signals – your spidey sense – make your working model’s activity visible. It’s announcing itself before thought arrives. Reflexivity bends your attention back on these signals, catching them and your model operating so you can choose from inside the experience, rather than be run by it.
Presence makes interiority possible – you can’t inhabit an inner life if your mind is elsewhere. Interiority makes reflexivity possible – you can’t be aware of signals and do anything with them without inhabiting an inner life.
Interiority is central to handling yourself better because it’s where agency and authorship live. It’s how you stay present and engaged – and how you engage colleagues – without working models running on autopilot. When reflexive, the quality of engagement is visible to colleagues – not as a technique you apply, but as conditions you create for them to do the same.
Beyond Noticing
Many awareness practices cultivate interiority in stillness – but work is rarely still. You can create stillness conditions to practice, however, starting at home.
Listen to a song you know and pause it at any point. Redirect your attention from what you know comes next – can you hear it simulated in your mind? – and reflect on how you feel. When you’re into the song, the feeling comes with it. If you pause, reflect, and put a word on the feeling you create awareness. Is it one feeling? Mixed feelings? What words would you use to describe that moment?
Imagine different notes or words, or tempo, for what comes next. Your brain knows what should come next because you know the song – so how does your experience change if you change-up the song? How do you feel by after altering it? How do you feel after altering it? You can do the same with a movie, a novel, a poem.
To make the exercise a bit more work-like – but still low stakes – you can experiment in a public setting like a coffee shop, checkout line, an airport gate. Anywhere you can legitimately overhear conversations without looking creepy. Does a conversation – even a fragment – cause your brain to instantly build a scenario? How fast do you form an opinion of the speakers or the issue? What’s the difference if your cues are auditory only, or if you see the speakers? Does their appearance change your predictions and feelings?
Notice that in the instant you take your working model’s act of predicting out of the model – even momentarily – you stop its autopilot operation. You can see what it would have done, but didn’t. You can clearly see your working model or mental map at work. It might run automatically – you don’t have to.
When you’re ready to try noticing at work, see if you can find a low-risk situation to practice in. A conversation about the game last night or the new café opening in the building is all you need. See if you can connect what you feel to a conversation cue – to words, tone of voice, a facial expression. This prepares you to practice following cues and turning them into conversation.
When a colleague comments disparagingly about the quarterback, pick up what sounds like a key word – or a look, hand gesture, tone of voice – and ask about it. What makes you say the quarterback is all washed up? You can step this up to honest to goodness work conversations – new exec memo, customer problem, budget cuts – and still be low-risk if you’re not expected to participate fully and share honestly.
When you’re in a conversation where you’re expected to participate fully and share honestly, first do what you’ve practiced privately – track where the conversation is going and notice your experience of it. Notice your body – pulse quickens, frown, nodding in agreement? That attention on yourself – momentarily – spots judgments or opinions coming before you even have words for them.
This is what’s beyond noticing. Or, perhaps more correctly, when you notice felt experience this is what you find – your working model at work. To be reflexive – to bend awareness back on your body – it to spot cues your working model sends you, and to follow them to understand what they mean in the moment. This preserves agency and authorship. We’ll look more closely at cues in What Does Handling Better With Colleagues Mean?
Positional Awareness And Information
In addition to generating more information, spotting and following your own cues improves the quality of your interactions. If you follow cues with genuine curiosity from a place of sustained interiority, you’re not managing the conversation – you’re making your mental map visible and inviting colleagues to do the same. You’re creating positional awareness and encouraging colleagues to do the same.
If interiority is the condition and reflexivity the practice, positional awareness is the result.
Positional awareness is real-time, first-person knowledge of where you are in a situation. It’s not situational awareness – not reading the room. It’s awareness of you in the situation. Of what your mental map is doing as it works. Of the signals you’re receiving and how you’re interpreting them. It’s awareness of the stance or vantage point you’ve taken, tracked as you stand in it.
When you make your position visible – sharing your vantage point including its assumptions, limits, and what you can and can’t see – you’re not analyzing the situation or persuading colleagues. You’re showing them where you stand – and that creates a condition for them to show you where they stand. They feel the information asymmetry, an infomation gap, and are motivated to close it. That’s conversational reciprocity.
Conversational reciprocity is the unwritten social contract of dialogue which creates an expectation of matched depth and honesty. Research shows the expectation is automatic, powerful, and not a conscious choice. Conversational reciprocity invites colleagues to exercise their agency and authorship without you applying technique3How this works in interest, rights, and power-based approaches to conflict differs – and quickly gets complicated. Most of what is said here applies best to collaboration, conflict prevention, and interest-based conflict resolution – situations in which people are working with each other. In rights and power-based conflict resolution, when parties are working against each other, conversational reciprocity still happens, but can work in different ways. It might not be acted on, be acted on to de-escalate, or be acted on to escalate. We’ll explore these paths in dedicated blog.
Once you and colleagues begin making positional awareness visible, you change the information field4I use the term borrowing from Kurt Lewin’s field theory. Lewin studied group dynamics and proposed that behavior is determined not by individual characteristics alone, but by the total field of forces – psychological, social, environmental – operating on a person in a given moment. The field is dynamic. A change in any element changes the field, which changes what behavior becomes possible within it. The parallel to conversation is useful. An information field is not a fixed thing. It’s subject to influences and perturbations, and changes as conversation unfolds – which affects what information becomes available and what actions become possible between people.
An information field is the space created by an interaction. It isn’t just a record of what’s been exchanged in conversation or email. It’s everything available to participants in an interaction. Every word, tone, gesture, silence. What’s said and unsaid, visible and invisible, implicit and explicit. Every signal perturbs each person’s working model. They enter as inputs, models process them against existing predictions, and participants respond – changing the field. The field is continuously regenerated by information which shapes what’s possible next.
When colleagues see how you’re interacting with them, they can match it superficially, adopt it, or reject it. You can’t control which happens. What you can control is what you contribute to the information field and how that contribution creates conditions for colleagues to engage differently. That’s handling yourself better in collaboration and conflict.
Test Drive Handling Yourself Better
Here are some things to try, to test drive ideas in this blog:
- Want to see positional awareness and reflexivity in action? Ask yourself three questions about a signal you pick up – what did I see, what did I make of it, why that and not something else? The first two are positional awareness and the third is reflexivity.
- Think of a time someone was transparent with their view of something. If they had provided more information about their view than you had, did you feel compelled to share more? If you didn’t want to share more, did you have to hold back? This is conversational reciprocity at work.
- Think of a conversation that started in one place and ended somewhere else completely. Somewhere no one saw coming. How did that work? Did it add or change information – or what everyone thought information meant? Did it change what was possible? Perturbations can change what happens next. You’re making observations about the information field.
- Above I said this: “The field is continuously regenerated by information which shapes what’s possible next.” Recall a conversation that was so generative – so productive of new ideas emerging from the exchange – that you were stoked! Did it feel postive and optimistic, like anything or everything was possible? Whether it’s true or not that anything or everything was possible, notice the power of an exchange that felt that way. Notice the energy everyone had when they left the call or meeting to get back to work. Can you see differences in an exchange which produces that experience and one that doesn’t?
A test drive isn’t a test. There’s no passing or failing, only trying and noticing. Sometimes you’ll have an ahh-ha! moment. Sometimes you’ll raise more questions than your answer. Both are the point.
The stance this series invites is different from the problem-solving, technique mindset most professional development offers. The goal isn’t to apply a technique correctly. It’s to better understand your relationship to work collaboration and conflict – so that you know what you’re doing with technique, and why, not just how.