We’ve all met them.  The person whose behaviour in our monthly business update meeting is so bizarre that all the post-meeting talk is about them (“what was THAT about?”) rather than about the business.  The person everybody has labelled as “difficult” and whose office nobody visits – unless they HAVE to.  The person who seems so calm and on top of things one minute so that we are surprised when, suddenly, they respond to something we say in an entirely different tone.

Daniel Goleman, in his book Working With Emotional Intelligence, draws on the field of neuroscience to identify the “amygdala hijack”, the moment when something in our external environment stimulates emotion in us which is disproportionate to the event itself.  Sometimes we observe it in someone we know and are taken by surprise.  Sometimes it is the regularity with which we observe it in someone that prompts us to call them “difficult”.

What can be more challenging is to own that we, too, are stimulated in this way.  It is challenging because, as an observer of others, it is so clear that their response in a given moment is not rational – so clear that we judge.  And when we, too, fall prey to this ancient cocktail of stimulus and response, what then?  Are we to judge ourselves as harshly as we judge others?  No wonder we prefer to look away as if we are not witness, too, to our own behaviour.

I am reminded of this today when my work with a coaching client prompts me to offer an alternative perspective.  Marshall Rosenberg, author of Nonviolent Communication:  A Language for Life, describes such moments (and more besides) as “a tragic expression of an unmet need”.  Rosenberg’s phrase captures with compassion an assumption which is also at the core of neuro-linguistic programming (or NLP), the assumption that every behaviour has a positive intention.

At times, our attempts to meet our needs are highly ineffective.  This may be because we are overtaken by an amygdala hijack.  It may be because we lack the skills to take effective steps towards our desired outcomes.  It may be because we are so fearful of the feedback that is coming our way that we refuse it, so that we miss a valuable opportunity to adjust our course.

When we respond to ourselves and others with judgement, when we see such actions as irrational and inept, we are liable to tell ourselves that somehow something is wrong with the person, as if we are our behaviour.  A equals B.  Worse still, it is as if we are our behaviour at our moment of greatest ineptitude.

Rosenberg’s phrase and its first cousin assumption in NLP offer a more compassionate view.  We were trying.  We were trying to meet a need.  We did not meet it well in that moment.  Paradoxically, this more compassionate view does not excuse us so much as open up new possibilities.  For, if I can recognise that I have a need which is not yet met, I can try new ways to meet it.  And if I can see past the behaviours of others to embrace them as people who, like me, also have needs which they did not meet well in a given moment, I have an expanding range of possibilities in the way I respond so that both my needs and theirs might be met more fully.

Are you ready to let go of your judgements – of self, of others – to connect with the needs that lie beneath our most irrational and inept behaviours?

PS  Just to let you know, as a member of Amazon Associates UK, I shall receive a referral fee for any books you buy using the links in this posting.