The Ju Jitsu of handling negative conversations

Maybe you live in the best of all worlds where everybody is nice and friendly and whatever you say is treated as pure gold. Maybe your working environment looks like a Waldorf school where everyone is treated holistically, and the educational process revolves around enhancing everyone’s creativity and imagination. Maybe you and everyone around you have the patience, openness, and respect, plus a great deal of naiveté to assume good intent, to listen without interrupting and to find quality in whatever coworkers say.  

Or, more likely, like me, you work in environments where we react instantly, not always in empathetic way, and cannot avoid frontal combats when faced with disagreement, negativity, subjective judgement and toxic comments. Like me, you have probably found a perfect answer that will forever shut down the mouth of your colleague who opposes you frequently… five minutes after the conversation was over. Or, like me, you obsess about the discussion you had with your teenage child long after it was concluded with you being desperate and them being angry and distrustful.  

If you are like me, it might be comforting to know that handling negative conversations is a little bit like sport. Most of the time it looks like boxing, where having tactics can help, but ultimately it is the stronger punch and quicker legs that get you to victory. In rare cases, it looks like Ju Jitsu, where it is about using the energy of the opponent to redirect their force. 

This article is about how to handle negative conversations, Ju Jitsu style.  

Why most negative conversations are like boxing?  

Let’s first understand what happens in our brain when we are faced with negative comments, toxic opinions or any other sort of verbal attack.  

Being under attack triggers fight-or-flight response in the primal part of our brain, the amygdala. If I were a Neanderthal, living many thousand years ago, and a big animal would be approaching me, I would decide in a split second, whether I go after this animal and get something for dinner – or run away so I don’t become one. Amygdala would equip me to run faster, hit stronger, have more energy and see more clearly.  

Today, animals are not a threat anymore, but the fight-or-flight response triggered in amygdala is still there. The problem is, when amygdala is active it overpowers the frontal lobes where planning, rational thinking, and decision-making takes place. When a colleague attacks me, I am flooded with emotions and I am betrayed by my own frontal lobes (which helped me get through college and did not do a bad job supporting me during my career).  

When we are under the attack, emotions are high and reasoning is low, which makes it so difficult to deal with the situation in a calm, emphatic and, most of all, pragmatic way. We start to punch. Now our opponents are under attack, so they start to punch as well. At the end of this boxing conversation, everyone knows there was a conflict, but very few remember who won.  

Pre-emptive objection handling 

So, amygdala can overpower the frontal lobes. What can we do to help achieve the opposite and the frontal lobes overpower the amygdala? When going into conversations, most of the time we can easily assume who our opponents will be. We can also estimate what kind of arms they will use. 

The first tactic is to deal with their objections preemptively. It’s really simple:  

• Write down the negative questions or comments AND your answers. Why? Because when you write things down you remember better and you tend to be more structured. When you are more structured, you are giving away signals: I am well prepared, I am confident, and I will use your time wisely.   
• When writing down the answers, step in your opponent’s shoes. Don’t make it about how YOU think about the issue, but much more how your answer is meaningful and relevant to THEIR challenges.  

Now you are armed with this great content and the objection will not catch you by surprise. Because you are ready, you will answer in a calm, rational and pragmatic way. Or, you might decide to address the issue yourself, setting it as your agenda, using your vocabulary and taking the wind out of the opponent’s sails.  

Tell me more?

When faced with a negative comment or question, a very simple and efficient response is to follow-up with a short open question. The best wording is technically not even a question: Tell me more.  

Let’s say you are in a meeting and you are presenting your initiative to the board of directors. When you are done, one of them, let’s call him Joe, throws this comment at you: “Yes, but we tried things like that before and they haven’t worked.” You make a deep breath, count to 5 and then say, “Tell me more!” Tone of voice and facial expressions are super important here, they should signal your genuine curiosity and willingness to understand what’s behind this comment.  

And then Joe would reply: “I am just concerned how we allocate our resources in these difficult times. I would like to make sure we are doing the right things and that the lessons we learned in the past are applied to whatever we endeavor in the present.” What does that tell you about Joe? Maybe he sounded a bit harsh with his comment, but he wants to do good for the company and is just genuinely concerned about how the company learns from past mistakes. He can probably be a very constructive partner if you involve his thoughts and ideas into your initiative.  

But what if Joe replies: “I really don’t understand how this is relevant, I think you have more important things to do right now and before you suggest initiatives like that you should first make sure that your other tasks are done.” If the temperature was cold before, now it went down to below freezing.  

Even though Joe is not your friend (yet), with this conversation you accomplished a lot:  

• You have better understanding of who you opponent is and what their priorities are.  
• You bought yourself some time to edit the answer in your head, which can take your reply from OK to brilliant.  

Validate before pivoting 

The temperature is freezing, Joe is in his boxing mode, and it is time for you to surprise him by switching to a completely different martial art: Ju Jitsu. You are going to use Joe’s energy and strength to redirect his force away from you. First, you are going to validate him, and then pivot to your position.  

This is the formula widely used in business:  

Tiny validation + BUT + Long pivoting to your position  

And this is how it sounds: “I understand, Joe, but if we don’t do that now our competitors are going to overtake us which will reflect in our market share.”  

It works wonders if you want to keep Joe’s amygdala active in hijacking his frontal lobes. You punched and Joe is ready to strike back. Great way for both of you to get more and more emotional and less and less pragmatic.  

How about changing to this formula:  

Long validation + AND + Short pivot to your position 

This is how it would sound in practice:  

• Validate: “I understand, so many initiatives were tried in this company and not all of them worked. In trying times like this we need to be extra sensitive about how we spend our resources. Plus, with the market pressure we are experiencing right now having another initiative in place is a challenge.” 
• Connect: “Which is why...” 
• Pivot: “... we want to be the first in our industry with this move.” 

By validating you sent Joe several positive signals: I heard you, I think your point is so relevant that I want to expand on it myself, and I want others to hear, know and feel that, too.  

When you connected using “Which is why” or “And”, you are slowly shutting down Joe’s amygdala and turning on his frontal lobes. Avoid the B word (but) - it is no coincidence that it is very similar to another B word (butt). The meaning of the former is not so far away from the meaning of the latter.  

Short pivoting helped reinforce the validation.  

So easy on paper... 

Sounds easy and it’s not. It takes a mindset and lots of practice to master Ju Jitsu of handling negative conversation.  

First, the mindset: assume good intent. Before responding, consider the reasons behind the objections. Why would Joe react that way? What is he trying to say? Is the harshness of the comment maybe just a cover up for his insecurities? Was he burned by past projects and is now extra cautious? What’s at stake, for him, in this initiative? Following up with “Tell me more?”, you might be much closer to those answers.  

Second, the practice: do it often. Your teenage daughter announces she wants to get a lip piercing, and you follow-up (“Tell me more?”), then validate (“Other kids are doing it, all kids probably want to be so different to their no-pierced parents right now, plus it’s exciting to try something risky”) before you pivot (“which is why would be good to sleep it over just for a couple of weeks”). Your wife says she wants to go to that Indian restaurant, and even if you don’t object, you validate (“right, honey, we haven’t been there for a while, and would be nice to try something different, plus all the vegan options they offer are sumptuous”) before pivoting (let’s go on Saturday and have pasta tomorrow?). 

And so on, endlessly, for the rest of your life… You are now equipped with the martial art that will let you win without much fighting. 

Martina Merslavic is a communication skills coach at Own The Room. Own The Room helps people accross organizations, cultural environments and industries unleash their potential to be better communicators, and better leaders. Handling negative conversations well is one of the signs of great leadership. It is not a matter of talent, but a matter of skill and practice. Own The Room offers virtual and in-person trainings to help professionals master this skill.