What do you want to accomplish?

Today is Thanksgiving in the United States, a day for looking within, looking back, and looking ahead.

You can apply any of these at any time. Just one will help, but applying all of them will transform your relationships.

While you cannot stop someone else from getting defensive, you can give them less to get defensive about. Because we all know that telling someone they are being defensive makes them more defensive. And someone with that behavior pattern is unlikely to change on their own.Behavior patterns in...

Tomorrow, I will give you insights into how to disarm and minimize people's defensiveness. You cannot control whether someone else gets defensive. You can control how you interact and communicate with people to reduce their chances of getting defensive and disarm defensiveness when it shows up.

I find it sad and alarming how rarely people hear their thoughts, feelings, and needs accurately expressed back to them by someone who has listened and understood.

Another reason we resist giving empathy is because we rarely receive it. We sometimes withhold it for an intentional reason, such as spite, revenge, or anger. I take no pleasure in highlighting that, but we do.

Empathy is an unbelievably simple act. All it requires is full focus on the other person. Concentrate on their message, their feelings, their needs, not yours.

Your circumstances will not always work in your favor. They insert friction, barriers, and adversity between you and the outcomes you want. Other times, most of the time, circumstances are indifferent to your desires, as they are indifferent to mine.

Fear tells us that pain is bad. It tells us to run away from pain. But pain tells us private truths. Pain teaches us unique lessons. Lessons we can only learn by facing pain and working through it. If we obey every fear, we will never hear the lessons in our pain.