Need Driven Communication
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In this day and age of technological advancement, there is an increasing awareness of how we perceive and how we are perceived by our actions. Communication should be focused more on a need to fulfill and less on the emotional reactions caused by the need. In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom take the argument between Joe Biden and Cory Booker as an example, showing the need to be careful with the language that we use because that can trigger an emotional response in people. They also discuss how apologies are not necessarily the solution when one makes a mistake.
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Bill, I’m excited to talk about an event that is a great opportunity to talk about people’s needs and how focusing on needs is important. Can you help lead us into this and then we’ll talk about the event?
The main thing is when a person is focused on the emotion as they’re communicating. When a person has an emotional response, the other person triggers and works off of that emotional response instead of taking a moment to find out which need is causing that emotion to show up. What happens is they’re focusing on the emotion, not the cause. In communication, if you don’t focus on the cause, the emotions start escalating. Judgment and criticism start occupying the space. People are not focused on things and it handcuffs it, it chains us to a narrative that’s not clear. This is what we are going to talk about, how to watch that. The person that gets angry first is the person that’s wrong. That’s not what’s fully true. The person has maybe a good reason to become angry. Their need for justice or fairness wasn’t met and they have some judgments about how they would like fairness and justice. Because they’re communicating and trying to explain something in a debate in that moment, they will be digging themselves into a hole.
That’s what happened. I’d like to set up an example if I could. At a fundraising event, Joe Biden was commenting about his work in the past with some other senators early in his career who he vehemently disagreed with on policy among many things. He was talking specifically about two men that were unabashed and outspoken segregationists. He didn’t at that time aligned with them, meaning he was not a segregationist. Joe Biden was trying to highlight his skills as a negotiator and some of his qualities as a person that he doesn’t have to agree with everybody. He doesn’t have to refuse to work with people, negotiate and find common ground to achieve a greater good because he doesn’t agree with them or believe the same things that they believe.
In Joe Biden’s mind he was trying to communicate something positive about himself. The unfortunate part is as he was talking about one of these two segregationist senators, he’s saying, “He never called me boy but he did call me son.” To Joe Biden, I’m sure it was incidental or maybe somewhat trivial aspect of it. He wasn’t necessarily trying to defend the segregationist. He was talking about despite another senator calling him, “Son,” instead of, “Senator Joe Biden,” or addressing him more professionally, he still worked with them.
If we go back to the ‘60s or whenever this thing was, the use of language and how a triggering language takes place, all you’ve got to do is put a sentence from back then into a present moment sentence and we lose historical perspective. We lose, “This is what the person said. This is how the person addressed me as a first-year senator or as a junior person in this room. This person was coming from a generation back from that and using that derogatory towards me.” How is that going to play in 2019, 2020? All you have to do is say, “We’ve had years of that derogatory language used in our direction. We’re angry and we’re mad about that.” A person can experience hurt by the use of that language.
This becomes problematic quickly because the focus is on the emotion of the word that is being used as a trigger. What’s not being spoken about is what the need is. At least from what I’ve seen up to this point, Cory Booker has made a response to it. What we would like to do and what we’re trying to contribute is a fresh new perspective about how to have an integrity response versus a reactive response.
Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, but the more vocal one and the one that’s getting a lot more attention is Cory Booker. He demanded an apology from Joe Biden because of the use of the word “boy” and what he was describing. That’s such a hurtful word to the African-American community because it was derogatory for a black person.
That’s focusing on the trigger and not focusing on the cause. It’s most certainly not focusing on the solution. An apology is not necessarily a solution. That could upset people when they hear me say that, but it’s not necessarily a solution. Many times, an apology is used as a get out of jail free card. It’s not used as a deepening of compassion and empathy for what the other person went through. It’s used to, “I apologize. I’m done.”
It’s like, “I made a mistake, here’s the cure for the mistake,” when apology is not the cure. The apology should be an example of something deeper that did try to right the wrong.
“I have a compassionate understanding of how you got affected by it.” That’s what an apology is for. It is not used as that now. It is used as a get out of jail free card. Rather than an apology, it’s better to let’s do Joe Biden first. Let’s get out of the reactivity because it will soon become a circular firing squad of who is getting shot by which person. You don’t have to do that. You don’t have to shoot at Joe Biden, and Joe Biden doesn’t have to shoot back to Cory Booker.
How could have Cory Booker reacted differently that would have not had the emotional response and to have gotten to a better place quicker?
Instead of the word apology, the word awareness needed to show up. It would have sounded like this, “What I’d like to hear from Joe Biden is that there is awareness that the word, boy, over years has had an adverse effect towards the need for respect and equality for African-American people.” See what I did?
You took Joe Biden to school in a way through that statement.
I’m schooling him. The word, boy, over the years, since the 1960s has had an adverse effect towards mutual respect, equality and justice for the African-American community. If he could say that back to me, I think we would be good.
Joe Biden would have no choice but to say he does understand that.
It gets better like this, “I appreciate Senator Cory Booker bringing that to my attention because back there in the field of time, they were talking down to me and putting me as the same category.” Now, I see what Cory Booker is going for. All they are doing is spitting words at each other and not understanding about where each other is coming from.
Joe Biden initially thought what he said was benign and helpful to his campaign, now he’s being attacked for it. When Cory Booker said that Joe Biden should apologize, how Joe Biden reacted to that was emotional. It seems that he tried to play the role of the parent.
All of a sudden, there is a big trouble that’s going to show up next. The thing called “should have known better” is going to cause anger instead of the passion that’s needed from both people. We’re going to get a slingshotting of anger instead of slingshotting of passion. Let me show you the difference. When people are focused on emotions, they become distracted from the needs that are being spoken about inside another person. If you want people to be docile and subservient, disconnect them from their needs. That’s what happened. This shapes their brain to wonder how others are judging them instead of focusing on how their needs are unmet.
If I’m going to be Cory Booker, I’m going to say, “I’d like Vice President Joe Biden to have awareness about the impact of the word, boy.” During his interview with Don Lemon, he could have moved up 5 to 10 points by saying, “This is what mutual respect would look like. As a presidential candidate, I would like us to have greater language and awareness versus Donald Trump that doesn’t have this language awareness.” Here’s the person, that’s the problem. In that case, it would be Trump’s language. Just to have a little bit of more awareness and consciousness about mutual respect, how the word, boy, is used moving forward and how we want to use the word, boy, in the sentence, so that we don’t create this docile and subservient language to each other. We’re talking about the need for equality and justice, which I believe Vice President Joe Biden was striving for. He becomes an ally.
Instead, Vice President Joe Biden got put in a defensive position being asked by the media, “Are you going to apologize?”
It’s worse than that, he put himself in a defensive position because he doesn’t have this language awareness. If you don’t have a language awareness, you’re going to get dinged on multiple levels.
We’re starting to see that. Joe Biden comes out of the gate as the savior of the party, the elder statesmen, the guy with experience, the adult at the table who is going to have the best shot at beating Donald Trump. We’d see him continuing to deal with self-inflicted wounds and show that he is a little out of touch with things in 2020 and then that’s a bad label.
That’s a part of Joe Biden’s story. His story is someone called him a boy. Someone is trying to get him to be submissive and he stepped into it. What both of them are fighting for is not the truth about what happened. Both of them are fighting for a different version of truth perspective about the environment which is not what was happening in the field of time. They are in an angry place instead of being in a passionate place. The passion about equality, mutual respect and anger that’s rooted in and is caused by a judgmental language of should, right and wrong, label and diagnosis, “He should know better.”
He is inflaming people that have voted for Senator Cory Booker to make him a senator that like him. He is now taking those people that are on the margin. It’s called stealing sheep. It’s like, “Why are you stealing the sheep for? They’re your sheep. They are in the same faith and identity.” Here’s the weird part about it. This is what causes people not to vote, “My person is not the candidate therefore, I’m staying home.”
That doesn’t help anybody.
“Bernie Sanders was my guy and because Hillary Clinton is the nominee, I am staying home.” This is a time for inclusion. Both of them need to think about inclusion. When a candidate that puts their foot, either accidentally or from an awareness piece, in a pile of crap by the language choice they made or by a clip that is misrepresenting them and not taking advantage of that, the need for truth can eliminate or isolate people. John McCain learned this one tragically.
How so?
There is this wonderful older woman that came out on stage and said, “Barack Obama is a Muslim.”
I remember this out of one of his rallies. She said, “He is a Muslim, I can’t vote for him because he is a Muslim.”
John McCain cleaned it up. He says, “Ma’am, he is not a Muslim.” I have different ideas and I have different facts. What happened was it de-escalated. He was going for truth but he was correcting a judgment instead of empathizing with the woman which would have gotten him votes.
That’s a clip that they played for many years later. They still play it and it probably hurt John McCain’s candidacy. What could he have done to show respect for Barack Obama, respect for truth, but not hurt himself so much?
Lead with the need, “Ma’am, we are running a respectful campaign that does not separate us as Americans. A respectful campaign looks like that other people of faith get to vote for us. Even though you have the idea that he is a Muslim, that’s not fully true but what respect looks like is that all voices count.”
Instead of arguing the fact and saying, “No, he is not a Muslim,” as if being a Muslim would be a disqualifier for running for President, in the first place, the better place to go is from the need and say, “America is a place that embraces people of all religions.” I disagree with him on the issues. He may be a Muslim or he may not. He could have done a little bit of Donald Trump thing, but uncertainty hanging is out there. He could have done that.
“My experience of him is he is not Muslim, but what we’re talking about in leadership is respect for different viewpoints and religions looks like this. We are not a nation that runs on religion. We’re a nation that runs on mutual respect for each other.” He polls somewhere between 100,000 votes on his side that he wouldn’t have gotten or 100,000 of people that would have stayed home. They were going like, “I’m empowered to get my butt out of my house to go vote for John McCain because he is a respected leader.
This is the way leaders are supposed to talk.” How truth gets purchased and gets hijacked is when the emotion comes up, you get the other side to go to anger or get stuck on judgment, criticism or a label and amplify that. Take the word deplorable, which was used in Donald Trump’s campaign.
He is still running against Hillary Clinton even though there is a speech that announced his re-election candidacy.
He has Hillary Clinton married to the Democratic Party. He says, “She is bad, they’re bad.” Diagnosing it, he is stoking the anger piece and it is a short-term way that people get wins. This is the way he has gotten wins in the past is by using anger when somebody doesn’t know how to diffuse his anger. Most of the democratic candidates don’t know how to diffuse an angry sentence.
They meet it with either judgment, explanation or rule, “We’re going to beat them in court.” You can’t beat an angry person in court. He has flamethrowed you already. You could get to justice through fairness, integrity and equality, but not through anger.
The huge part about this thing is how we get ourselves locked up, how we chain ourselves in our narratives. Elizabeth Warren, by making a statement and then explaining things, is not as strong as her making a statement and then having empathy for the other person’s belief that she needs to listen to her. That’s where the power is. It’s the same as Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Pete Buttigieg and all the rest of them.
Amy Klobuchar made a mistake. She did the same thing. She goes, “Here are my first 100 days. This is the way I worked as a manager. I planned these 100 days and this is the first 100 days. No other candidate has done the 100 days.” We can see what you’re going to do in your 100 days. Tie them to needs, don’t tie them to your performance. Start tying them to what value the voter is going to get out of your 100 days. You don’t have much time to judge what the other person has done. You don’t have any time to do it and Americans don’t have the stomach for it. We’re tired and exhausted by the impulse tweets and the chaos. The person that empathizes and starts picking the higher ground is, “It sounds like most Americans are feeling tired about not having their need for stability met inside the White House.” I did not say Donald Trump or his policies. I didn’t say this, “It sounds like Americans would like more predictability in their government, vote for me.” Start claiming the space.
There is a big vacuum there in the middle with everybody missing the target and what each of these democratic candidates is doing to try to jock you for the position and try to move up within the ranks of all these different people who are running.
It will sound like this, “Medicare for all will look like stability, safety and financial security for Americans so they are able to live productive lives not thinking that one illness will wipe out their retirement.” A lot of them don’t know yet. The awareness and skills are the problems. They are not seeing it fully from our perspective. That’s where the strength comes from. This is called power with somebody, not power over somebody. You can’t power over somebody saying, “I have greater strength than you. I’m standing for a better value.” The other side will say, “No, you’re not. Our values are better than yours.” All of a sudden, we’re in a middle school fight.
The next time we get together, Tom, we want to come off these candidates and identify where they are missing, where their messages need to change and what they can take as bits like what’s safety for Americans look like is an open dialogue and narrative so the Iranians aren’t scared of us. They don’t have to react instead of making them angry at us. That’s what we did, we made them angry and they reacted. It gives our news media some emotional reaction that gives some political party to say, “This bombing of this oil ship was done by the Iranian government.” There is a partial truth to it but it’s our reaction to it and limited people on their side making reaction to it. The dollar sign and the impact of Americans from that country at this point, please.
I like the idea of moving forward talking more about what these candidates are saying and doing, taking them to school or pointing out their opportunities and their misses and hopefully their success.
We’ll see, Tom. I’m looking forward to the next time. I’ll see you then.
Take care.
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