[chillacy]

I found two books so far that had pretty actionable plans to address this.

They first is Difficult Conversations, largely about nonviolent communication, which provides a structured template for “learning conversations”. The relevant advice was: when you feel a strong feeling of disagreement, you tell the other person instead of bottling it up, which lets you ll then transition to a listening state. Like: “When I heard that my first instinct was to disagree because of X. At the same time I know you (insert reason like “have different life perspectives” or “are my friend and care about me”) so I would like to learn more.

The second is The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leaders, which offers a metaphor for the mental state between judgement and curiosity they call “the line”. Being “above the line” is a state of curiosity, “below the line” is judgement and defensiveness. The book goes into physiological reasons, the advice they give is to develop strong awareness of your emotions to detect when you go below the line, then use breathing exercises to quickly resurface. They also have other exercises for developing empathy for other points of view you can do on your own, like isolating narratives from facts and working through all possible narratives for a given situation (like “Tom thinks I am incompetent, I think Tom is incompetent, Tom thinks I am competent, I think Tom is competent”)

I’ve used both to some pretty good success so far, after receiving some feedback that I was not listening well.