InnerSpace / Stripe Communication Workshop

Editor's Notes

• #3: who are we lucky to be part of a team that took this stuff seriously (communication & culture) fortunate to be involved in the early part of a company that was well run and had a successful exit and was the founder of a company that may or may not have been well run, but didn't have a successful exit
• #6: ***feelings & emotions music has treble and clef 1. if you only have cognition and words without feelings, you don't have the full score, the full story 2. most of the time, people are "leaky" -- however they are feeling, they are emoting non-verbally. incongruence btwn words v behavior comes at the expense of credibility. therefore want congruence (so you dont want *only* thoughts or *only* feelings -- you want to communicate both) 3. "there's no room for feelings in business" -- is inspiring pple important in business? how do you inspire people without making them feel something?  important for motivation  Suppressing leads to lack of congruence – we are leaky.
• #7: I’d like everyone to pause for a moment.  In your 2-min introduction, think about what you chose to say… and what you chose not to say. Out of your entire life – your past, your future, your personal life, your hobbies, everything there is to know about you as a person…  what did you choose to share.  Why? pause  What decisions did you make about what was relevant or interesting or safe to share with this person in this context? Now you’re going to introduce yourself again… and this time I want you to step outside of your comfort zone and share something you didn’t the first time. Imagine my hand on your back gently encouraging you to challenge yourself a bit.
• #10: “…highest-performing managers show more warmth and fondness towards others than do the bottom 25%. They get closer to people, they’re significantly more open in sharing thoughts and feelings than their low-performing counterparts. Note that they also scored high on “thinking” and a need to have power and influence over others, but that didn’t distinguish them from the bottom quartile.
• #11: 1:21- 1:21
• #12: Johari window is a tool for thinking about how intimacy (knowledge of each other) is shared in a relationship. In the top left corner is stuff I know about myself or my behaviour and you know about me – open/ pubic. In the bottom left is stuff I know about myself but you don’t – private. In the top right is stuff you know but I don’t – my blind spot. A lot of the stuff here is how I am perceived by you, by others. Maybe you think I’m talking to fast and you can’t follow. And the bottom right corner is that which is unknown to both of us. If you think about it, this has a lot of parallels to the net model we showed at the beginning – a way of thinking clearly about what’s in your head, what’s in my head and how those might not always be as similar a point of view as we think. So we already talked about disclosure – a way of expanding our shared information by making more private info public. Now we are going to talk about feedback – a way of expanding our shared information by sharing our reactions to other people.
• #15: Why is feedback scary? Might hurt person’s feelings if they knew how I feel? If I tell them how I really feel, they might tell me how they really feel?
• #17: Feedback is scary, we’re sharing new information with someone that might change their understanding of their behavoural landscape, of our relationship, of themselves. So we need to talk a bi about threat response. In our next workshop, which doesn’t exist yet, we’re going to go more deeply into how it turns out these brains of ours actually work and what that implies for interpersonal relationships in general and startup life. But for now, the quick thing to know is that most higher order reasoning, executive function, empathy and social relationship, all exists in a thin layer on top of what is basically a reptilian brain. And that reptilian brain basically sits there asking the question over and over again – am I safe? Am I safe? And if the answer is yes, it sort of allows higher order things to happen. But if it detects a threat, it seizes control and we experience a threat response: We often call this the body gets ready for fight or flight. powerful cascade of physical cognitive and emotional responses to perceived danger. Blood flow to the core, adrenaline rush, sweaty palms, tight chest, cognitive capacity goes down, creativity goes down. Monitoring my level of fear is basically the top thing I do as a person to try to be my best self.
• #24: Setting the Context for Feedback Groundrules Discussion (What groundrules would help me be an effective participant in giving and receiving feedback)   Organize folks so that each person has two people they work with/know well Give them time to plan feedback with each Bring them back and do “speed dating” format feedback– two rounds so that every person has done it twice Facilitator calls out time for switching "Second conversation" about feedback
• #25: If an objective 3rd party jury was able to tell you that 50% of the feedback was correct and 50% was not, you have a choice about where to focus. Our suggestion is to spend 90% of your attention on the part that’s correct. The only opportunity in the part that’s not correct is in the possiblity of delicately correction an incorrect assumption. In the part that is true is a double benefit – improve the relationship, make the person feel heard In the part that isn’t true there’s a lot of risk: person doesn’t feel heard (risk to the relationship), miss an opportunity to learn, defensiveness, a fight, etc (75% risk)