Emotionally Charged Words

Originally written for a business forum. Emotional attachment to words can be detremental

I have been in a surprising number of conversations in the past two weeks, professionally and personally, where a single word has caused a near total breakdown in communication. One word had such an impact that it was brought up mockingly with the same group in a different conversation two weeks later.

In all cases the words were what I call emotionally charged. What does that mean? Emotionally charged words are not said with emotion. They are not yelled. They are regular words that elicit an emotional response in the audience, intentional or not. In a world where political correctness is being taken to extremes, emotionally charged words are everywhere. Something as simple as He can be a dangerous word in the right context. That is not my soapbox. In the world of business, we must remove all the social and political faux pas on a daily basis, so we will assume that they are not in play here.

What is left, then? Really, too much to count, so for this I will focus on subjective comparisons, almost all the breakdowns I saw were due to this. Words like failure, better and enough. These may seem innocent, but used in the right way they have an immense amount of power and will almost always cause an emotional response.

Some subjective examples:
We watch a show that highlights people’s failed attempts at doing almost anything, and we laugh at their misfortune. In this instance failure is not a charged word. Yet to someone who grew up with parents/teachers/coaches constantly telling them they were a failure – especially if they had a sibling who was always a success - hearing that word in almost any context in their job can cause a complete shutdown. The term failure needs to be made a data point and nothing more. The attempt should be celebrated, and the outcome documented as either success or failure. We are more than our actions.

In most areas of our lives, we want to get better. In this context, better is synonymous with growth and success. But as soon as we hear someone is better than us it feels like an attack, the implication being we are no good. Logically, if we accept that we can get better, then it is highly probable there is someone already better than us. Conversely, it is highly probable there is someone worse than us. The emotion tied to the word, however, stifles our logical mind and makes it hard to hear anything that comes afterwards. (Hint: the emotion is likely pride). The reality is that in most cases someone else’s ability has no bearing on our own so we should stop making it so. More than 1 person can be good at something.

An employee who is putting in long hours on a project notices that a team member is not spending enough time on the project. They show up late each day and leave early. The employee feels this is unfair. Until they find out that the team member has a 2-year-old child in intensive care fighting diabetic ketoacidosis and they are spending nights at the hospital – swapping vigils with their partner - and then still doing what they can to contribute to the project. People should be allowed to decide what is enough for themselves. We should give as much as we can to meet our commitments, but no one else gets to decide what is enough for us. Be human. Trust.

If you have followed along this far, thanks! But you may be asking “so what?”. Communication is one of the most important aspects of our lives, and we should always be looking for new ways to improve it. Having these emotional ties to words can impede our success and it may even allow others to take advantage of us. If I know someone is going to react a certain way to being told someone is better than them, I can use that to get the exact response - maybe even action - I want out of them despite what they would normally do. Ever found yourself whitewashing a picket fence wondering how you got there?

The upside is that communication is a skill that can easily be adjusted, if we can get out of our own way. Here are four things we can do to help discharge the power of words.
1) Remove subjective. If we ever want more than 1 person to agree on a comparison then there needs to be clear, objective measurements to do so. These will be situational and fixed once agreed upon by business leaders. Another way to think of it is: what does success look like? Money, customer base, customer satisfaction, funding, lives saved? If you are a strategist, you know that researching who is better is a valid way to set these objectives. Once that is done the comparison needs to disappear. In any discussion of growth, the objectives should be the only thing used. Current common wisdom states that if we want to grow to our full potential, we should not measure ourselves against others, we should measure ourselves against what we did yesterday. I fully support this idea, however, to focus growth we must always have an objective goal.
2) Embrace the reality that we cannot control other people’s reactions. We have no way of telling how someone will react to what we say, especially strangers. The closer we get to someone the better we will be able to predict this, but even people who have been friends their whole lives still get it wrong. So don’t try. Be genuine, honest, and intentional. Avoid using words that trigger ourselves, they will likely trigger others. If someone does react poorly to something we said, stop and take ownership of the situation. Re-word and explain the intent. This may not be immediately remedied, don’t give up. Keep in mind we have a much better chance of recovery without a history of playing games. Trust will usually offer a get-out-of-jail-free card here, don’t abusee it.
3) Stop listening to the words and start listening to the intent. Consider these sentences: “Let’s talk about your career path.”, “What are you doing to improve yourself?”, “How come you don’t already know that?”, “How do you know that?” Now stop for a moment and consider how they made you feel. Did the 3rd one make you defensive? That’s a normal reaction. Without going back to read them again, what was the fourth sentence? If you don’t remember, then the 3rd sentence is emotionally charged for you. If you do remember it, did you have a positive or negative reaction to it? Once we start down an emotional path, everything we hear will follow that path, right or wrong. Back to the sentences, without any emotion, and assuming that people are not being manipulative, the first 3 all have the same intent: communicating the need to learn more. I won’t argue that the message was not delivered correctly in all cases. We cannot control what gets said but we can control how we react to what we hear.
4) Get out of your own way. This is the most difficult step. Everyone has trigger words. The only reason these words have power is because we give it to them. Pride, vanity, the fear we are imposters, needing to prove we are not failures. All these things are weighing down our communication because our history has caused some kind of emotional link to words. That history is what we must overcome, and it may not be simple. I will not trivialize this by offering any kind of suggestions here, but you must make this a part of your life journey. If something is detrimental to our communication, it is also likely detrimental to our relationships and possibly health. It deserves our focus.

To round this out I am going to offer a personal example of charged words that has taken me a long time to cope with. My trigger is not tied to subjective comparisons, though I will sometimes call people out on them – sorry. I am always happy to meet someone better than me. Worst case there is someone else to carry the conversation. Best case I have an opportunity to learn. Unless that person is dismissive. That is my trigger. The most obvious example of this is the “yes, but” conjunction. In most cases this means that the person using the conjunction has not taken the time to hear what I’ve said and has already prepared their defenses, waiting to pounce as soon as I pause for air.

I offer this example of dismissive from the Canadian comedy troupe The Frantics’ skit “Boot to the Head”:
Ti Kwan Leap Master: “Ed Gruberman, you must learn patience.”
Ed Gruberman: “Yeah, yeah, yeah, patience, how long will that take?”

When someone else in a conversation is dismissive – either to me or others in the meeting – I will get very quiet. Anyone who has worked with me knows this is very uncharacteristic. Generally, dismissive people are impossible (near infinitely improbable?) to argue with as they will simply ignore things that they do not want to confront. I used to take the bait and try to defend my opinion. Not anymore, it is not worth my energy. I will admit that if someone has their mind set about something, I still get upset if they ask me my opinion to try to make me feel included. It is a waste of everyone’s time. I’m working on it.

If you are interested in learning more about ways that you can detach emotion from your business conversations, look up Mindfulness resources. Mindfulness offers many more communication benefits than just discharging emotional words, I recommend everyone at least learn what it is. It can only make you better.