why things escalate...
Transcript of this video:
I passed a guy on the street the other day
who had his mobile phone to his mouth.
And the only bit of the conversation I heard was,
“I’m not shouting,” which he was… shouting into his phone.
I guess we’ve all been there where
we’ve been wound up in an argument
and the story we have in our head is slightly mismatched
with the performance that we’re giving – in his case,
with his mouth and his voice.
And it reminded me of a bit
of research I came across years ago about why
fist fights escalate.
And the basic principle is: if you hit someone, say,
use your fist on their face, what you feel
with your fist is less than what they feel
with the slightly softer flesh of their face.
And when then they reciprocate with what they perceive
to be an equal amount of force,
the same thing works in reverse.
It has more impact on you than they realise.
And when you realise
that, you understand why these fights escalate.
You might begin to wonder how we get along
as human beings at all.
And I think what’s true in fist fights is true in our
psychological fights as well.
In a world that’s very overstimulated where it’s easy
to find ourselves fighting for attention,
I think we’re all probably shouting,
making more noise than we realise
pitching our ideas a bit too hard, trying too hard
to get people to pay attention,
and creating a kind of tower of babel or a cacophony,
and not noticing in that process,
we’re actually losing our relationship to each other
or certainly diminishing it.
And one of the things I want
to explore in the practice groups that I’m creating is how
to create enough space for more proportionate sensing
of what’s going on within us and between us.
And this story I’ve just told you, it sort of relates
to all three of the themes I’m exploring.
Being immersed in story
and being a little bit wary of the stories
that we’re telling ourselves moment to moment.
How we are performing: the mismatch
between the idea we have in our head
and the performance that we’re actually giving.
And being unhurried: somehow creating the temporal,
the time space, and the physical space
and the emotional space to tune in a bit more carefully to
what we’re doing and the impact we’re having on each other.
Photo by Oleg Laptev on Unsplash
