This week, Wise Heart explores what reactivity is, how it may show up in yourself and in particular your leaders, and offers some effective strategies to interrupt reactivity through discernment and curiosity.
P.S. If you’re a team lead or part of a team and would love to see your team connect and collaborate more effectively, handle conflict with skill and cultivate psychological safety and trust, please have a look at MCD for Teams.
Seeing reactivity in ourselves and others allows us to connect to compassion in the face of suffering. And then find our way to the underlying tender needs, which gives us a starting place for offering healing and inspiring change. This is true of ourselves, those in our personal relationships, and of our community and global leaders.
For this article, I invite focus on seeing our leaders more clearly, fully, and compassionately. The lack of capacity to recognise reactivity in our leaders has resulted in painful repercussions all around the world now and historically. When we see leaders, or anyone, only through the lens of what we think is right or wrong, we become mired in a tangle of views and miss seeing that the tangle is not life-serving.
Rather than getting swept away by the content of what a leader says or does, you can prioritise wise discernment by getting curious about who is speaking or taking action.Here are some questions that can help you connect with who before focusing on what:
- “Who is speaking?” “Is this a reactive part of this person speaking?”
- “Is this person speaking with a sense of groundedness, compassion, and curiosity?”
- “Is this person able to entertain multiple viewpoints of a given situation?”
- “Are they able to seek and take in new information and leave their favoured paradigm even temporarily behind in favour of discovery and creativity?”
- “Are they able to identify the needs present in any given situation?” “Do they honour all needs equally, regardless of whose needs are at stake?”
- “Are they asking for and responding to feedback? Are they changing course when they see a decision is not life-serving?”
- “Are they speaking mostly in terms of ‘I’ or ‘We’?
The first bullet in the list above requires a capacity to recognise reactivity. In Mindful Compassionate Dialogue (MCD), reactivity is defined as the misperception of threat to one or more needs, along with one or more of the following:
- Physical and energetic contraction or collapse
- Elevated or depressed heart rate
- Shallow breathing
- Narrow thinking or repeating the same story or view multiple times without being open to change
- An inability to consciously consider and evaluate multiple views of a given situation
- The use of labels or judgments
- Expression of any form of deserve; such as stating who deserves or doesn’t deserve resources
- Escalated voice volume
- Attempting to convince, dismiss, or discredit another’s view
- Using power to control or harm others
- A loss of awareness of the impact of a behaviour on the needs of others (lack of empathy)
- A lack of capacity or willingness to seek or accept support or feedback from others
Some things on this list are so common in the political landscape that we may not even notice them as forms of reactivity. And, of course, there are many more symptoms of reactivity. For simplicity, we can also divide reactivity into four types: defend, attack, submit, and withdraw. Here are simple definitions of each:
Defend: The basic argument is “I am not wrong.”
Attack: The basic argument is “The other person is wrong.”
Submit: The basic argument is “I am wrong.”
Withdraw or Shut down: The basic argument is “My experience is wrong.”
In the framework of MCD, we view behaviour through the lens of what’s life-serving rather than using the labels of right or wrong. Labelling behaviour as right or wrong does not help us see what is happening more clearly, nor move us in the direction of a solution or intervention for improvement. Rather, we ask the following types of questions relative to a given situation:
- What need is this behaviour (decision, policy, strategy, rule, law, etc.) trying to care for?
- Is this behaviour caring for the needs it is meant to? If not, what needs are being met, if any?
- Is this behaviour doing harm, that is, not meeting needs? If yes, for whom?
- In a given situation, what needs are present and for whom?
- What creative strategies will honour and care for the needs of all that are involved (this includes the needs of an ecosystem)?
With these questions in mind, it is obvious that responding to reactivity isn’t about arguing the content of what is said or done or “fighting back.” Fighting is just another form of reactivity. Responding to reactivity, whether in a personal relationship or at community level, means identifying what’s needed and taking action to meet those needs.
Practice
Relative to the definition of reactivity, when any leader is speaking or taking action while in reactivity, they are not able to attend to the needs of all with compassion, wisdom, or creativity.
This week, I invite you to notice reactivity in our leaders. What types of reactivity can you spot? What needs are they trying to meet? Do you notice reactivity in yourself? What are the feelings and needs behind your reactivity? To learn the skills and competencies to recognise and manage your reactivity, identify your unmet needs triggering your reactivity, and then make effective requests to meet your needs in harmony with others, have a look HERE.
You are also invited to join our free monthly Empathy Circle, where you can learn and discover what empathy is, and more importantly, practice giving and receiving empathy, allowing you to be deeply seen and heard in whatever challenge or celebration you’re navigating.
If you’d like to experience a powerful coaching conversation, book a complimentary 1:1 Coaching Call with me.
