In Conversation

Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods, to the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible. That if we all work together, there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. It’s getting closer to the edge, though. Every day, more of the things that we took for granted seem to be either falling apart or being dismantled. It’s becoming increasingly impossible to pretend that business as usual and everything is going to carry on tomorrow, as it did yesterday. I’ve been away for a few days, and somewhere along the way I read a quote from Robin Wall Kimmerer, which said, and I’m paraphrasing: ‘all flourishing is mutual’, which is obvious but very useful to have it set down in clear terms. All flourishing is mutual; human and more than human. That is a given. And yet the schisms in our culture, the tribal divides, the limbic hijack that is quite deliberate, seem to grow deeper and more powerful by the day. But it doesn’t have to be like this. It can’t continue like this. And we do have the tools of connection, of genuine listening, of offering trust to gain trust and offering respect, to gain respect.

Manda: We do know how and when to put these into practice. Or at least some of us do. This week’s guest, for instance, is someone who practices and teaches conflict resolution daily, which is what we’re talking about. Carm Aufderheide has a master’s degree in Conflict and Dispute Resolution, together with qualifications in positive reinforcement dog training from the Karen Pryor Professional Dog Training Academy, and in separation anxiety from Malena DeMartini. And she brings both of these to her consultations in her North Star training solutions, which she runs from Oregon. Brought all together, this cocktail of qualifications puts her right in the middle of quite fierce conflicts that rage around the dog training world over the various styles of dog training, most of which boil down to do we use force or don’t we? Do we believe in dominating our dogs or do we work with them? It’s pretty much the same in dog training and quite clearly in human interactions. So carm lives at the centre of the tornado, that is a perfect microcosm of the greater macrocosm. And she brings her multiple skills to this with grace and intelligence and a fierce compassion that is a joy to encounter. I first came across her on the Functional Dog Collaborative podcast, which is one of my absolute must listens whenever a new one comes out.

Manda: And I was totally blown away by the clarity of her thinking, of her feeling and her capacity to live true to her convictions. I made contact with her pretty much straight away, and we set up the time for this podcast, and that was somewhere around six months ago, before the US election, when the world was a different place. And then today we were recording on the day of the Pope’s death, as yet another part of the jigsaw of our world falls away. And it feels ever more essential that we learn everything that Carm has to teach. She suggested a whole set of reading before we recorded, and I have put links to all of the books, as well as to her North Star Training Solutions website in the show notes. Please do go there afterwards and have a look at everything. So here we go. With really clear ideas of what we need to do now to begin the healing of our world, people of the podcast please do welcome Carm Aufderheide of North Star Training Solutions.

Manda: Carm, welcome to Accidental Gods. How are you and where are you this fairly sunny spring day?

Carm: Hello Manda, it’s lovely to be here. I am fine, I’m great actually and I am in California at the moment. I’m in Southern California. It’s not where I live, I primarily live in Oregon, in the Pacific Northwest, in the States. But I split my time between Oregon and Southern California to come down and visit my grandson. And so we have a place here that we come stay at for a couple of weeks at a time. So I’m enjoying some sunshine and some really lovely spring weather.

Manda: Yay. And no earthquakes this time. Last time we spoke, there were earthquake monitors going off, which was kind of scary.

Carm: Yes I know! We have no earthquakes. The earth is not moving beneath me today.

Manda: Okay. This is a good thing for our podcast. All right lovely, so we’re talking because you are my go to person for conflict resolution. And it seems increasingly important that we find ways to speak across divides. So let’s open that up, but let’s start with how you became interested in this, how you got into it, how it became the, I would think leading factor in your life, or one of them.

Carm: Thank you for asking that. Because, you know, it’s been a journey. Honestly, conflict resolution and communication skills when we find ourselves in uncomfortable situations or dialogue, isn’t something that has always come easy to me and it’s certainly a skill that I’ve had to learn over the years. I came to conflict resolution late in my life. Most of my life leading up to going back to graduate school to study this, I had a varied relationship with conflict. My usual response when I found myself in that moment where things felt very uneasy, my stomach would tighten, I felt like I was closing in, my heart rate starts racing, all of those things. To either shut down and kind of recede into the background or flee, if I could. I would try my best to get away from it. If I couldn’t get away from it, it was like, fight back. It was always fight back. And I never walked away feeling good about it. It always felt like there was a winner and a loser in that whole dialogue, and I usually walked away feeling like I had lost miserably. Thinking about all the things I should have said afterwards, you know that come to you. Like, oh, I should have said this, I should have said this. So in my 50s, I have three children, and when my youngest was off to college, I was deciding what to do next with my life. Because I had been an at home mom for several years and had been a nurse prior to that. So I had kind of left a nursing career to be at home, raised three girls while my husband provided a very nice life for us. And then now I’m empty nesting and I’m like, what am I going to do?

Carm: I started looking at courses at the university near us, which is the University of Oregon. And nothing really kind of struck a chord. I’d taken several classes just as a post-baccalaureate, which is something you can do after you have your bachelor’s and you’re coming back to kind of decide what you want to do. So I did and I had discovered this program, a master’s degree program, a graduate degree program that was housed under the College of Law. So under the law school. And it was in conflict and dispute resolution. Not something that I would normally put myself like front and centre in, but I started looking at the curriculum and I was like, this is really interesting. These are skills I don’t have, this is something I would really like to learn. But it had been 25 years since I had gotten my bachelor’s, my undergraduate degree. And so to apply I had to take the graduate record exam, the GRE, and I had to do a whole lot of prep work to apply, including write some current papers, take some classes and write some current papers that I could submit to my application process.

Carm: So in that process, I had started taking some classes with a focus in areas of disagreement, areas that were polarised in our world. Nothing really had kind of struck me in that way, that had really kind of said, yeah, this is what you want to do. And I was going to take one more class, one more class to kind of decide am I really going to do this? Am I really going to go this length and effort to apply? And the class was called Conflict and Gender. Super interesting class. And so I’m sitting in a class, probably surrounded by about 30 other 20 something year olds, and I’m like 50. So I’m like the old duck in a little duck pond, right? And I’m sitting there and one of the gentlemen that was in this class with me was a returning veteran, and he had served some time, a couple of tours in Afghanistan and had served in active war duty. So he had seen and experienced a lot. He was really lovely. He often would sit next to me. His name was Tucker. We would sit next to one another.

Carm: He was very cordial most of the time. He had this jawline that was very intense, though. He had that really sculptured kind of face. So when he spoke, I was always watching him very carefully because it was very telling what was happening for him and just how he would sit and what his facial features would be. So we’re going along in class and we are at the end of one class, and our instructor whose speciality and expertise was in eastern, like Israel Palestine conflict. A super interesting woman. Really, really intense, but very, very knowledgeable. And so she had kind of pointed out the reading that we would be doing for the next week and what we would be discussing, and I honestly don’t remember what the topic, and you’d think I would because this whole experience made such an impression on me. She stated what we were going to do and as soon as she started talking about this topic, Tucker, sitting next to me, brings his feet really tightly together, pulls them right underneath his knees, grips his pencil or his pen tighter. His jawline started to clench and there was a tension in his shoulders and his body. He just sat more upright and everything just kind of came together.

Carm: And I was just like, oh my God, oh my God, oh my God. I don’t want to be sitting next to this whole thing when it explodes because I’m not comfortable with this. So he spoke up and he disagreed with this reading that we were going to be doing and he was really emotional about his disagreement. And so Diane asked him to stay after class and to speak with her for a few minutes. Everybody left. I left. I don’t know what happened in that meeting, but what happened next is the reason I decided to study conflict and dispute resolution. We come into our next class time, our next class period, and at the beginning of class, Diane our professor goes to the front of the room and she mentioned that she and Tucker had met after class after the last class period, and she gave him the floor. And she gave him the floor for as long as he needed it to express and tell his story of war and what his experiences were there. And he faced some extremely horrific situations, one of which he lost a very, very close buddy of his, whose body was then later used against them. And the other side had strapped bombs to it and they couldn’t recover the body and it was just it was an unimaginable situation.

Carm: And then he also was expressing how he’s looking into the eyes of boys and men his same age, who also are showing the same fear. And they are told that one another is the enemy, and the only way out is to kill the other person. And it’s just these unimaginable situations. And he was extremely emotional and he was really vulnerable, and there wasn’t a dry eye in the room. And I had never, up to that point, had a professor whose experience with war, experience with conflict, and her truth in it was very different than his lived experience. And she gave him that platform, respected it, didn’t try to change what he felt or what his experience was, but just actually listened to his experience to understand what it was and still then we proceeded with the class. But it gave him his voice. It gave him this opportunity to feel heard and understood, and he was able to really share something with us that was incredibly personal and visceral to him. When I saw that happen, I don’t even remember the rest of the class. I don’t, because all I remember in that moment was, that’s what I want to learn to do. That’s what I need to learn to do. When somebody really emotionally disagrees with me, that’s the tool I need to develop. And so that’s how I ended up applying and doing conflict resolution.

Manda: Right. Thank you. Thank you. And even in that, there’s so much to unpick. So let’s continue a little bit on your story, because I came to know you through the Functional Breeding Collective, and you were presented there as someone who helps to mediate different sides of what feel like really quite intense differences of opinion within the dog world. Like hybrid dogs versus pedigree dogs, purebred dogs and that kind of thing. Positive reinforcement versus whatever else, whatever it is we call the not positive reinforcement. And people get really worked up about those. And now we’re in a world where geopolitics is getting to the point where everybody has to take a side, it feels like. And yet it seems to me, as I understand it, the only way we’re going to get through this as a species is if we learn to talk to each other across these ever widening, ever deepening chasms. You and I talked about a week ago and in between I went up to Scotland and I stayed at an Airbnb, and the gentleman came to show me how to turn the shower on and all the stuff that they do. And we talked about whatever was happening in the world at that point. And within two sentences, it was really clear that if I stand on one side of this divide, he was a long way on the other side. And I remembered all the stuff that I’ve been reading, all the books that you told me to read, and I was very tired, and it was quite late, and I had driven a long way, and I could not bring myself to do the “so tell me more about that”, or “please, tell me why you think it’s really good that”; I just held my breath and didn’t say anything. Because I had internalised that the kinds of conversations are: what is this about? How do we feel about this? And who are we? And what it seemed to me he was doing was establishing his tribe, which was not my tribe. And once I’d established that, it just seemed easier to step back. But that wasn’t helping the world. I was aware that here was an opportunity for me to ask more, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. So I’m really interested in your process. Let’s look at what the principles are of really connecting, and then how do we do the internal work to get to a point where that feels even doable, never mind actually feeling okay?

Carm: There’s a lot that goes into that. And thank you for sharing that story because it’s a hard moment, right? And I think that the first thing that I would remind everybody of is like every moment when we encounter somebody isn’t always the moment to engage. You were tired, you recognised there is a division here; he was very clearly stating his position, who he is, what he aligns with. You’re tired, you’ve driven for several hours, it’s late, and it’s not the right moment to really kind of engage in that. So I actually really appreciate that moment of of stepping back, because it’s not always that we have to do this, right? It’s more about self control and understanding when the moment is right to actually do it. Because usually when the moment is right, both parties have agreed to engage in this dialogue. They know that they’re coming together to engage in this dialogue. Not that somebody is coming at you with a story and it’s just like I’m going to fight back on this. There’s an actual process to a more effective way to communicate and share our stories and share our positions and what’s emotionally important and drives us forward. So there’s a lot that goes into the process of learning how to have a dialogue with somebody when we are very polarised, and often in opposite corners of our belief system. And the first part of it is we want to remove the binary of it’s an us and them; I’m a Republican, I’m a Democrat, I’m a this or I’m a that. If we can at all remove the binary and kind of start there.

Carm: Rehumanising people. This is a person standing in front of me with very, very deep held emotional beliefs that mean something to them. And there’s a history to that. I don’t know what that history is but just humanising them as a person in front of me, not the enemy. Because if I can remove that binary and start there with this is a person just like me, doing their best to try to change the world in the way that they see is going to benefit it, even if it’s not how I see benefit or change happening in the world. And a lot of that has to do with what is our role, what is our relationship with our position in what we believe and what’s our relationship to the conflict? Because we’re an important part of that formula. You are. It’s not just that they are coming at you with the wrong information or a really bad platform or something that you see as incredibly dangerous to the world. It’s that I’m playing into this as well. And so I have to really look inward at myself first and understand what triggers me. What is that? And what’s my response to feeling that way? So that’s the first part.

Manda: Can I ask a question before we go on beyond that? Because at the point when we’re triggered, it’s really hard to do that inward looking. So were you trained to to look at your triggers in advance? And also to have, I don’t know, a breathing technique or something? Because  certainly if I go back to this particular conversation, there was an energetic force wave that came in before the words came in. And I could feel myself brace against that. And I had at least enough time to go, okay, and my usual would be okay let me explain: here are a dozen reasons why you were completely wrong in your belief system and I am totally right. Let’s not do that. Let’s at least just nod and say nothing and he’ll go away. But the force field coming in, every bit of me was like, okay, now I need to fight back. How did you or how were you told or how have you evolved a way to see the triggers before you react? Because our amygdalas react very fast.

Carm: Oh yeah. So fast. That’s such a good question. I love that you’re kind of backing up and wanting to start there. So what we’re really getting at here is emotional intelligence, and it is a skill that we have to develop. It’s something that I’ve had to learn and had to work on. When I was studying conflict, and I’ve considered myself a student of conflict ever since I started the program, for like a decade now, because I continue to read, I continue to study. We did a lot of mediation training, but that was more about mediating and understanding, helping two other people, not me, that was in conflict with them. And so learning how to engage and understand what emotional intelligence was and help myself take that step back, was something that I actually went to the side and read and developed on my own, outside of the program. And where I honed those skills really happened when I worked with inmates inside correctional centres, working a restorative justice program. Where there would be a lot of conflict in somebody that would come at me very angry with something, because I was holding a mirror up to something that they had said and holding them accountable to either their words, their actions, or something in their history that they didn’t necessarily want the mirror held up to. So that’s really where those skills started to develop. And how do we do it? It’s a process. Whatever you use, and everybody’s mindfulness exercises are going to be different. For me it’s learning to pause. When I feel that tension and that force field you’re talking about, that you felt the energy come in the room, and there’s a way that this person is standing, the way that they’re walking and approaching and coming into you. There’s something to that that you can’t even put words to, yet you don’t know what their position is, but you feel it. And then the words come.

Carm: And whenever I feel that, what I want to do is recognise, and this is exactly what you did, Manda, which was beautiful and lovely, is you recognised this feeling in yourself. And you’re right, that amygdala, that part of our brain lights up in that moment. It just lights up and it’s an automatic response for us to go into whatever our usual response is, which is fight, flight, freeze, subdue, maybe kind of shrink into the wall. Or for other people, once we’re out of that, it’s substance abuse or whatever we use to kind of cope with that feeling in that moment. That can be very destructive. And so first part is just learning to recognise it’s happening. This feels really unsafe. And it can feel really unsafe. This feels unsafe, this feels scary, this feels big, this feels whatever it is. And in the back of your brain immediately that part that wants to put the gas pedal to the floor and just fight back, if that’s your initial response, if that’s what you usually your go to response is, once we notice that, just take a few breaths.

Carm: I usually in my head will count to ten backwards, start taking some deeper breaths, slow my brain down, to slow that part of my brain down that wants to fight back or wants to flee, and just sit there in the moment. And it may not be the right time, like what you found. It may not be the right time to engage. And so it’s just understanding what do I feel emotionally, pausing to slow that part of my brain down so I don’t get emotionally hijacked. So that if in the future I have an opportunity to actually engage with somebody like this or this same person, where we’re coming together with the agreement of like, hey, I really want to understand your position; we disagree on this, I don’t see it. Are you willing to have a conversation with me? Then I’m in a better position to actually navigate through that moment. And my motivation, if I’m getting emotionally hijacked, is just to fight back and give somebody a piece of my mind and tell them they’re wrong; not the right motivation. So emotional intelligence has to do with that pause, that recognising what I’m feeling, understanding that I need to slow it down for a second to be able to then either decide, is this the right moment for me to engage? How do I want to engage? What’s the best step forward? Because once I’m emotionally hijacked, anything that I would hope to gain from that interaction is going to be lost.

Manda: Okay. Right.

Carm: Then it stays in high conflict.

Manda: Yes. And so many things we could unpick from there. But one of the keys was that good conversations, generative conversations, both sides have agreed to be there. And both sides are there without wanting to change the mind of the other, which also seems to me quite hard. Again, we think the world is going to hell in a handbasket, both sides think that, and both sides think they have the answers. And then getting ourselves to the point where I’m genuinely curious about what you think, you person on the other side, and I just want to know more about it without you realising the obvious fact that you’re completely wrong and I am totally right. Which is hard. With the ponies we had this thing about you go into the yard and you have no agenda. And for years I used to talk to therapists and trainers; but I have the agenda to not have an agenda. It’s really hard. And the ponies know. You go in there, you’ve got an agenda and they just walk off. If you give them the freedom, they just go ‘I’m not playing with you, I’m going’. And so they were a very good mirror of how do I actually go in the yard and not have an agenda? But people are less clear than that. Or maybe it’s okay that the ponies choose to walk away, whereas it’s less easy if we’re having conversations. So again, having the agenda to not have an agenda and genuinely being curious about somebody’s opinion when they’re on the other side of a chasm. How did Carm get to that place? And if you want to pick a dog related example, people will be able to key in with that. It’s just sometimes useful to have an anchor.

Carm: Sure. Yeah. So I think one of the first things that I would say is I love the concept that you just brought up of how do I not have an agenda? How do I set that agenda aside? And it really comes back to one, I have to remember that I can only change myself. I can’t change somebody else’s mind. And it’s not my job, I don’t see it as my job to change their mind. I can only change myself. And in changing myself, that comes with really understanding who they are, what they believe, why they believe it, and why it’s so deeply held for them. So I have a phrase that I often will say that I quote from Marshall Rosenberg, who wrote the book Non-Violent communication. And the quote was something along the lines of ‘in order to practice the process of conflict resolution, you must completely abandon the goal of getting somebody to do what you want’.

Manda: It really is.

Carm: And that’s a really big ask. Because it’s like we want them to. It’s like there’s this belief that if they only knew the facts, if they only knew the truth of what they’re leaning into and how really wrong and horrible and damaging it is. And it’s almost not even just damaging to the outside world, but to themselves as well. Then they would, you know, they would change their mind. And what I’ve come to realise, and it’s been a real practice, that practice, of slowing myself down and relaxing and just really leaning into I can’t change their mind. It’s not my job to change their mind. It’s not my position to coerce or get somebody to understand my feeling that I’m right and they’re wrong. And I want to separate out that right and wrong, that black and white, that binary thinking if I can. And just as open as possible, knowing that it could be very uncomfortable, because if we’re talking about something that is damaging or something that’s really a pain point for me, then it’s going to be hard. So let’s just say, as a dog training example, and this is something that I see a lot in my positive reinforcement training community and world. Let’s say that we have somebody come into the training room who has sought out help for their dog, who is really reactive, having some very big emotional responses to, let’s say new, unfamiliar people on the street and other dogs. And lunging and barking and it maybe had a bite history or actually bitten somebody. And they come into my training room and they have a prong collar, or they have an electric collar on their dog. It happens all the time where they come in. And I know trainers that would be like, I won’t work with you when you’re using that tool. It’s absolutely not a tool I promote or endorse. I don’t promote, I don’t endorse it either.

Manda: But if you do that, their only choice is to go with the people who do promote and endorse those.

Carm: Exactly. Their only choice is to go somewhere else. And they have booked a positive reinforcement trainer. Maybe not totally even knowing what that is, right? Not fully knowing what I do, how I’m going to approach this, how we’re going to humanely change this dog’s emotional response or work towards changing this dog’s emotional response to these triggers. And also teaching the client how to read their dog better and change the relationship that they’re having. So my initial go to isn’t to give them all the reasons and all the facts about why that tool is causing harm, and why they’re doing more harm, and why it’s actually probably causing an increase in the dog’s escalation to reactivity and aggression. I’m going to abandon that. All of that falls to the side, because what I really want to know is what’s important to you, why is it important to you? How did you come to use this tool? Maybe this tool is because it’s around safety, and it’s the only way they feel like they can manage and have any hope of this dog not actually reaching somebody and stopping them in a behaviour that is unwanted. So what’s important to them? Why is it important? How do they lean into this tool? Is it working? Is it not working? What’s happening with it? Let’s get the information.

Carm: And then as I’m gathering information about what’s important to them and what’s happening with this dog. Because they’re counting on me to be able to handle whatever comes into the training room. And if that is a pain point for me, every time I see a dog on an e-collar or prong collar that somebody’s yanking on really hard, really quick. And the dog then just tenses and reacts even faster to the next trigger. Then if I’m so quick to not hear what’s happening for them, then I’m going to lose my opportunity to help the dog and help them. Because if I just jump into fast telling them all the reasons why what they’re doing isn’t working and that they’re damaging their dog, I’m revictimizing them. I’m telling them they’re harming their dog. They love that animal. They love that dog. They just don’t have the tools. And so I spend the first portion, the very first portion of any training session or behaviour consult, really listening to understand what’s happening for them, what scares them, what’s going on, what they’ve tried, why they’re using this tool, why it’s important. In order to then gradually give them the tools that they need to help their dog, to help them to remove that tool. To get them off of that prong collar, to get them off of that e-collar, to move them away from that and successfully do it. And I’m much more successful at doing that because I invest in the person first. I hate these tools, I don’t love these tools, These are not my tools of choice. I think they cause harm, I think they’re damaging to the dog and I know this person loves this dog and they just don’t know what to do. And these are the things that are easy, at their disposal, that either they’ve looked it up online or somebody’s giving them advice, to use these tools and they don’t help. I hope that answers your question. I’m not sure it does.

Manda: It does. Although what I’m noticing is that you do have an agenda up to a point, because in the end, we want not to have the electric collars or the prong collars, but we put that aside while we’re beginning the conversation. And it seems to me a long, long time ago on this podcast, we talked to Sarah Schlote, who does what she calls pony vagal theory as opposed to Polyvagal theory. So she has Polyvagal theory in horses. And she talked about people and horses needing to feel they’re feeling heard and getting gotten, as in I really get who you are, I really understand you. And with my body language and all of the nonverbal ways that we communicate as well as the verbal ways, I am on your side. And then we can begin to have a conversation. It doesn’t matter if you’re a human or a dog or a horse or any other species that is sentient and communicates, you’ve got to have that sense of ‘I speak your language and let’s share our experience’. And I’m remembering back to various other books that you suggested I read, which I will put into the show notes and How Minds Changed by David McRaney. And he looked at people leaving things like the Westboro Baptist Church. So people leaving really deep, deep tribal things and moving into a completely different intellectual space. And they were able to do it because they had belonged to one tribe, but they’d got another tribe that felt like a safe space that they could move into. And I’m wondering, other than the fact that this is a thing, how do we evolve this politically? There were other suggestions in How Minds Change, but what I’m noticing is there’s a lot of people doing really, really good work where they go and have 1 to 1 conversations with people, and we’re still at a point where the side that’s interested in the continuation of complex life on Earth does not seem to me to be running the show at the moment.

Manda: I’m trying to follow my own train of thought. A long time ago again, we spoke to Braver Angels on the podcast, who were really lovely, and they were bringing in groups of Democrats and Republicans and using the tools that people had evolved for really contentious marital breakdown and getting people to understand. And the thing that really stood out for me was that there were a group in Los Angeles who’d spent an entire weekend exploring the meaning of the word liberty, which meant completely different things to either side of the chasm. And they didn’t know that when you say that word, you assume it means what it means for you. All language, you assume that it means what it means for you, and you don’t have to be doing therapeutic work or teaching work or anything very long to realise that language is a very flexible thing and often means something completely different to other people. And in the end, what seemed to be with the braver angels, because both sides need to at least be prepared to come into this meeting, they had a lot of Democrats and very few Republicans. And so I guess where I’m going to is in the broader picture of global geopolitics, are you seeing moves from both sides towards engagement and conversation?

Carm: It’s a really interesting question. Globally I think there are pockets of places where we see that occurring, where we see movement. Generally where it occurs is where people, when they come together that they’re willing to engage and have a facilitator that’s skilled enough to be able to keep them engaged in a very hot topic conversation, because the natural response is to find the common goal and only focus on that and walk away and just go, oh we have this common goal, but we didn’t touch on any of these other things that are still really important and very contentious in the room. So a skilled facilitator is going to be that person that allows for very heated discussion and emotional expression of why something means so much to them and why they are really deeply entrenched and rooted in this position for themselves. And where we see that happening, it can happen in peace talks, it can happen in a global picture. But if those conversations are avoided and they are very contentious, and then there’s a break and what happens in the process of when you separate, you have a skilled facilitator who is like, okay, let’s take a break. They don’t try to stop the conversation from happening. They don’t try to stop or tell any side, either side, that they’re wrong or that they’re misguided or that anything is wrong with how they’re thinking about it.

Carm: They just are like, okay, let’s take a break. Everybody that believes this go on this side of the room. Everybody that believes this, go on that side of the room, and people will go to the sides of the room, still very divided, right? Still very, very divided. But what happens is that, because it doesn’t happen in a day, they keep re-engaging, they keep re-engaging, they keep going deeper in this conversation. They start to humanise one another. They start to hear things from the other side that says, hmm I didn’t know that. Hmm I didn’t learn that, that’s not what was taught to me. That’s not what my family experience has been. And they start to understand the human side. Like actually humanising people. They start to see it from that. And we can start to then maybe walk away not agreeing, but understanding where the other side is coming from. And that’s where those points of progress get made, because that’s where agreements can start to be made with the understanding of who and what’s important to the other side. Without them having to completely abandon all of the things that have been held very deeply and close to their heart, that maybe have a history to it; and a generational history of this is what my family believes. This is what we’ve suffered and what we’ve experienced at the hands of your people and at the hands of what your political people are doing or your side is doing and their beliefs. Which they see as a power grab or a money grab or whatever.

Carm: And it might be, but it’s like we have to really argue. Like we have to allow that space for emotion and uncomfortable things to be expressed and experienced by both sides and not avoid it. In fact, at Harvard University, one of our higher private universities in the states, in their business college there was a gentleman whose name is Bob Bordone, he taught in the law school there. And he taught conflict resolution and he used to hold these summits where he would bring people, law students that were doing also a specialisation in conflict resolution, together in these groups and say you are going to now as a group talk about these topics that are very polarised. And they’d have people in the room to facilitate it or teach other people how to use these tools. And what he started to find, even in his law students, is that people would walk out of a session going, oh, we solved all the problems, we’ve all agreed on something. And he’s like, really? You agreed on something? How did that happen? Tell me what you agreed on. And what they agreed on were the things that felt like they had a common interest, but they never touched on points that were the really hot stuff. And so then over time, that stuff continues to fester, continues to build, becomes a bigger cancer, becomes a larger conflict. And so we have to allow for this conflict to actually happen in a facilitated way, where it’s okay to be uncomfortable in this. It is okay to be angry. It is okay to be emotional. And we’ll take breaks, but the point being that we still have to come back together and hear one another. And that’s where a skilled facilitator allows that to happen, doesn’t allow it to go too far, and then breaks and brings everybody back, if that makes sense.

Manda: Yeah, it totally does.

Carm: And so what he found is he had to rethink what the students are doing because they’re avoiding the thing that needs to be talked about, right?

Manda: Because nobody likes being in conflict.

Carm: Nobody likes it. Exactly. And so we always want to ask ourselves, when we’re we’re going into a contentious conversation, or maybe even with my grandmother who has this certain belief about, you know, an example of maybe she’s thinks that all the Confederate statues in the states that were years ago being taken down by groups that felt like this promoted slavery or promoted white supremacy, beliefs that we shouldn’t want to hold in the States and memorialise these people. But for the grandmother it had a different meaning. And they would have these very difficult things. And before we go into it we need to ask ourselves, what’s important to me? What’s important to me in this and why do I believe it? What’s important to her? What do I think is going to be important to her? And then, am I willing to sit and really engage in this and learn from her and learn why it’s important? Because I’m not going to change her mind and abandon that goal of changing her mind, that she’s wrong. And then what happens when that uncomfortable conversation happens over time, they don’t agree, they don’t see eye to eye, but they do understand one another better. And it changed the relationship because they’re able to respect one another’s perspective, knowing they hold different viewpoints on this. And that’s okay. It’s okay to hold different viewpoints. It’s just not okay to be at odds where we aren’t able to actually understand why we hold these viewpoints. And when that understanding starts to happen, that is where the shift starts to happen towards progress, towards collaboration, towards working together. So globally where this starts to happen is usually in smaller groups. And we interestingly saw this happen more when women started coming to the table in negotiations, versus men, because they negotiate differently.

Manda: Right. There’s a tendency to want to build consensus instead of trying to find zero sum.

Carm: Yeah. Really interesting. And if you find yourself in a really hard moment, I always want to ask myself if what I think I want to respond with, does it need to be said? Does it need to be said by me? And does it need to be said by me now?

Manda: Okay. Oh, that’s an interesting one.

Carm: And maybe it doesn’t need to be said by me now, and maybe I just need to listen a little bit more before I dive in with does it need to be said?

Manda: Right. Okay. That’s really useful. Does it need to be said at all? Does it need to be said by me? Is there someone else? Does it need to be said by me at this moment now?

Carm: Correct.

Manda: That’s really interesting. I’m remembering back in my 20s when I was suicidal and I had a very similar do I need to die this moment now? No. Can I get through? I was an anaesthetist at that point. Can I gas the next dog? Okay, yes. Or can I get through to lunchtime? Yes. And they’re really useful.

Carm: Yes they are.

Manda: I’m in my 60s now. I’m still here. But shaving down the what matters and who’s priority is it. But I’m still thinking, a really interesting example of the statues. Because what we’re trying to get to you and I, or what I internalised from the books that you recommended was let’s not make Conversations a zero sum game.

Carm: Yes. Correct.

Manda: And yet statues are either there or they’re not. That is a binary thing. And if they’re there, they’re going to upset all the people who see them as lording slavery. And if they’re not, they’re going to be seen as an assault to the people who want to maintain their heritage or their history or whatever it is. What happens under those circumstances? How do we get around the binary ness of some things?

Carm: Yeah, I think that the best way to get around the binary, like winner/loser kind of attitude or belief system is really in taking that step back and humanising the other person. So when I started working with inmates and I started doing restorative justice work with inmates, and I would go, I’m a dog trainer, every Monday night, I would drive an hour to go into a medium security prison and work with this group of 20 some guys that had done some pretty horrific things in their past. And I heard some really terrible things, I heard some really traumatic experiences that had happened to them. And we worked through this. And the people on the outside that I worked with in the dog training industry would be like, I don’t understand how you can do that. And they would binary them into those are terrible people. Those people are bad. And they’re right, those people are in there for a very specific reason. However, just labelling somebody as bad dehumanises them, which is what the whole incarceration system in the US does. It completely dehumanises somebody. It strips them of their identity. It strips them of who they are. They have to be uniform, and they have to follow all the same rules. And they’re told when to get up, when to eat, when to sleep, when to go into the yard, when to do all of these things. They have no independent thought and they’re actually penalised for it.

Carm: So they’re stripped of anything that is really personal to themselves. And then there’s little cliques and groups that happen and gangs that happen on the inside. But much of that binary thinking causes the binary picture to actually cause a deeper divide. And what we need to do is we need to start seeing people as human beings. And if we can humanise somebody that we feel is the enemy or we feel is evil, as hard as that can be, if we can actually humanise them in some way, then we’re going to make more progress. We’re going to be able to close that divide towards conversation. Maybe not agreement, but we are going to be able to converse. And the longer that we stay divided in a binary way, the further apart we’re going to get, the harder it’s going to be to come back together, because the divide becomes its own echo chamber. That is dangerous on each side, because there isn’t a good echo chamber that happens on one side or the other. It’s like those echo chambers can be just as damaging.

Manda: Echo chambers are by definition.

Carm: Exactly. And so really we have to learn to take a step back and start to ask ourselves God, I wonder who they were? I wonder what happened to them that made them feel like this was their only option? This was the path that they took. Where did that turn start to happen? What was going on in their life? What happened? I want to know more about who they are in order to be able to remove that label of you’re evil or you’re bad, or it’s a binary belief system, if that makes sense.

Manda: It does. I’m still thinking of statues. Statues, yes or no. Where it’s taking me, though, is I’m remembering Audrey Tang, who was digital minister of Taiwan, and they had an Uber yes or no. And they did was they put it out to broad consultation and she created amazing software basically that helped to find the uncommon ground. And they discovered there were five sets of people; there were Uber drivers and existing taxi drivers, potential Uber passengers, existing taxi driver passengers and bureaucrats. They were a separate group up on their own. But what they did was asked each group what their solutions might be, and then brought the solutions together. You know, it’s back to Sociocracy and ‘good enough for now, safe enough to try’. Which solutions could there be that everybody would agree to? And then can we put that forward to the bureaucrats and get them to pass it through Parliament? And in the end, they managed to find something that everyone agreed on. It was a way of having Uber that didn’t turn it into what it has been everywhere else. The statue is either there or it’s not and I’m still really interested in how you work around that one.

Carm: I know. A lot of the statues got taken down. A lot of the statues were removed. There was a moment in history where those things were celebrated, a moment when for those people, for that group, it either saved them or it gave them some path forward. Maybe now I would look at it and go, that’s not a great path forward, right. But generationally, for that time in history, it was celebrated. Those people were heroes then but not so much seen as heroes today, and in how we understand history and how we understand the impact of what they believed and what they did and how they got there. So I think that for that grandmother, there was that generational ‘this is my history. This happened to my people. That person saved them. And I dedicated myself to always supporting that because they saved my family or they saved whatever’.

Manda: Exactly. This is my tribe and this is the emblem of my tribe.

Carm: This is my tribe. And you’re not going to change her belief in that. But it did allow him to see, oh, now I understand it. And I still believe these statues need to come down because the message that they send is damaging and it’s not the message our history of today wants to have in place. We’ve evolved from that, right? And so the statues, many of them came down, didn’t change her belief.

Manda: But then the people who didn’t want the statues to come down are then left feeling actually traumatised. And that’s very possibly one of the reasons why the electoral system has returned the result it did, is because a whole bunch of people were feeling that others, not of their tribe, had insulted them. And I remember reading, I think it was in one of the books that you recommended, that every single person the writer had met inside prison, they could bring it down to whatever the person had done that had caused them to be in prison, came down to feeling disrespected.

Carm: Yeah. And that’s a dangerous place to be, right? Because when you feel disrespected, you feel not heard, you feel pressed against the wall, you feel cornered, you feel undervalued, and the only way out is to push. Is to do something extreme. And that can happen to these groups of people. The statues come down, one group is celebrating, but it’s important to us to still hear what’s important to those, that generation or those believers that these statues shouldn’t come down. How do we still manage to memorialise something for them that’s important to them that doesn’t damage, doesn’t cross over in such a way that we feel like we’re not moving forward in society. Because it had its place in history, it definitely was there. And the coming down, just like the coming down of the Berlin Wall, the coming down of all of these things; they had their moment in time. They had their purpose, they had their thing. But there are people involved, in their lives were engaged very heavily in these movements and in these actions, and it has meaning. So I think you touch on a really important thing. Just seeing the statues come down as a win, that’s binary thinking, right? That’s like we win, you lose.

Manda: Yeap. Suck it up. It doesn’t matter.

Carm: It should never be about I win, you lose, we win, you lose. It should be about, okay, this is changing and this is shifting for this reason, how do we still support you? What do you need?

Manda: Right.

Carm: What do you need? Because we want to support you and feel and help you understand. We still value you. They haven’t lost their value. So I think that’s the danger of binary thinking, of winner and loser and that kind of thing, because it just puts us in that position of winning and losing. And so it’s about really understanding the other side. How do we then support them through the pain and the grief that they’re going to experience when they see that happen, and what that means for why they were so heavily invested in being very entrenched in that system, or that echo chamber or that belief. Because we can’t rob people of that opportunity. We shouldn’t rob people of what’s important to them. We should understand it and help support them through the grief of losing it.

Manda: Yeah. Yeah. And if we’re going to get to total systemic change, it’s not by exactly that. It’s not by heading into binaries where one side wins and the other side loses, it’s because we all get together and we we change the system as a unified whole because we found the values that we all agree on. Because it seems to me I don’t know many people on the alt right, but the ones that I do know, when I get to a place where I can ask cleanly what is it you really value? What they want is for people to be kind to each other. And they they view the progressive left or whatever it is we call the other side as as being dangerous and aggressive and assaulting them by taking statues down or changing the nature of marriage or whatever it is. Feels like a real assault on values. Okay. If we knew how to shift this, the world would not be in the place that it is.

Carm: Exactly.

Manda: I mean, I would go Carm, how do we fix this? But if it was an easy answer, we’d be fixing it, we wouldn’t be having a podcast about it. Let’s shift a little bit, unless you have something to say on that. I’m thinking one of the things that really leapt out at me when I first heard you talking, and then when I read the book on how minds change, was the work of the street epistemologists. So maybe let’s… I mean, if you have any ideas on how we fix the world, please do tell me. And I think we have the local conversations, we could have conversations with people who want to converse. And that seems to me getting progressively harder. So let’s flip into what does work and then maybe how we can generalise it. And street epistemology seems to be one of the systems that works quite well. So tell us a little bit about that.

Carm: Street epistemology is such an interesting thing, and it is a really great skill. And it’s hard. It’s really hard. And there are people that are extremely good at it. So for our listeners that don’t know what street epistemology is, really the primary goal of it is to engage in critical reflection with somebody on the reliability and reasoning process of those deeply held beliefs that somebody has. So it’s not a challenge; I’m not challenging you on what is a deeply held belief. What I really want to do is examine the reliability of the methods at which we learn. This is important to me, the methods at which we start to embrace these things. So street epistemology; we might have a street epistemologist kind of set up camp on let’s say, a religious university. And that person is not there as an epistemologist to challenge anybody’s belief. But his question of the day might be should abortion be legal or not in the States, because Roe versus Wade got turned over. So should abortion be re legalised? And it’s a hot topic for people. Understandably so. So it’s not about challenging your wrong for believing it shouldn’t, that women shouldn’t have rights to their body and those kinds of things, or that I’m right, you’re wrong. It’s more about asking them, do you think that this should happen? Should this be legalised? And then going down through very strategic lines of questioning and kind of peeling away the layers of an onion to understanding. Okay, so that’s your statement, that’s your elevator talk, this is what you believe, right? Because people will give you that, like, elevator; this is what I believe in; I’m very firmly rooted in this, this is what I’ve been taught. And they’re very kind about it and they’ll just be like, okay, that’s really interesting. Can you tell me more about this or where that comes from? And even maybe challenge is there a time or somebody that they’ve known that maybe has faced this situation, was that right or wrong, and all of those things. And kind of take them down understanding where their evidence is coming from, why they believe in that evidence. And it’s a process of self discovery for the person engaged with the street epistemologist. It’s not a challenge. It’s actually a very genuine dialogue of interest and understanding what do you believe. That’s the statement you’ve made, so tell me more about where that really roots for you. Do you have an example in your life that you know has really seeded this? Has it been really hard for you? All these things. And it’s just like unravelling where people’s belief systems come from, what they use as evidence to believe it and why they lean into it.

Carm: And what often happens in these situations, in these conversations, is people will start to recognise what they believe. You know, I’m always asking myself, what do I believe? Why do I believe it? And what if I’m wrong? And so they haven’t really gone through that process. So I’m asking them, what do you believe? Why do you believe it? And I’m not asking what if you’re wrong? But they kind of come to that on their own. Sometimes they don’t. Sometimes they feel very good walking away going, yeah, that is exactly why I believe this and I still feel very deeply committed to that. And nobody said you’re wrong for thinking that. Nobody said you’re right for thinking that. It’s just like, that was a great conversation, thank you for engaging with me. Some people walk away going, I don’t know why I believe it. Now I feel really confused. Now I’m not really sure. Let me walk away and think about it. And the next time that epistemologist shows up on that campus, oftentimes those people come back and are like, hey, last time you were here, we talked about this, and I’ve thought about it a little bit more. Do you mind if we talk about it again? And they go a little deeper and they go a little deeper.

Carm: So it’s really this process of critical thinking and helping somebody learn to critically think and get underneath the surface of why they believe what they believe, and what evidence are they using to support those belief systems. Sometimes it’s just an emotional feeling. This emotionally feels right to me. I can’t change that. I’m not going to argue with that, that’s okay for you, right? I don’t agree with it, but okay, now you really understand. You don’t have evidence, it just feels right to you. And it’s just a process of self-discovery that eliminates the need to battle it out. And I’m going to tell you, this absolutely needs to change and you’re going to tell me, no. But I just want to have a deeper understanding and help you reflect and understand why you believe what you believe. What’s the evidence you use? Where do you go to for support? Who supports that position? Is there another way to think about this and start to engage in being able to kind of step outside the box and think for yourself a little bit, as opposed to like following a line of thinking that maybe you’ve been following. Some people continue down that path, others start to question it.

Manda: Yes. And it seems to me, I went away and thought about this quite a lot. My understanding of human cognition is that most of our decision making is made at limbic level, and then we do post-hoc rationalisation, where our cerebral cortex layers on, tells us reasons that sound good to us, of why we made a decision that actually was made at a really, really deep emotional level. And it seems to me that what street epistemology and other things like that are doing, is clarifying that pathway a little bit for us. And in some cases, it seems, reading their website, reading the book, that there is a really interesting building block sometimes missing between the deep amygdaloid feeling and the cognitive stuff we’ve layered over the top, and that when we see that gap, it allows our cognitive mind to override or to change or to shift the colours of or the textures of the really deep emotional stuff. And it seems to me that If humanity is going to make it through, we have to make it through because we all have to start finding the common values, wherever we are on the political spectrum. And that the skill of helping people to unpick the post-hoc rationalisation of ‘this is my tribe and everything they say is right. And that’s your tribe and everything they say is wrong’, down to, ‘okay, so here’s the evidence on climate emergency. What do we actually think about it?’ Is really critical. And that that’s a place where shifting the global narrative or shifting the hegemonic narrative or offering people narrative options feels really important. Partly because that’s my thing and I think narrative options are really important anyway, but maybe I’m employing post-hoc reasoning on why that’s important. Does that make sense? Does that seem to you what’s happening?

Carm: Yeah, yeah, it makes perfect sense. I think one of the things that Epistemologists do extremely well is looping. And what looping is, is where somebody will state something or they’ll start to express why they believe this deeply held belief in something. Epistemologists will loop in to essentially rephrase; and just before we move on I want to make sure I’m understanding you correctly, I want to make sure I’ve got it right. And they’ll loop back the general thing that was just said. And what happens in that process is the person has the opportunity to go, yeah that’s it. And the epistemologist doesn’t move on until they get the ‘yeah that’s it’, because if they’re like, no, no, no, no, you didn’t hear me correctly, you’re misunderstanding me, then oftentimes nobody’s really asked them before to explain and go deeper into why they believe something, and to where that that comes from for them, where the support comes from, where all of that happens. And so if they get the ‘no, that wasn’t quite it’, then they’re like, oh, okay, so help me understand it. Like what did I miss?

Carm: That person then has an opportunity to revisit how they’re expressing and explaining what they believe, which takes them deeper into their own process of why I believe this. And they’ll loop this back and forth until they get ‘yeah, that’s it. You got it’. And he’s like, okay, great, let’s go on. Let’s move on to this next piece of it. And the, the best part of what an Epistemologist does is they’re very skilled at not challenging somebody, very good at active listening, they’re listening to understand, they’re not listening to respond. And in their responses they’re looping to understand deeper, which helps that person go through the reflection and the personal reflection to understand their own position better. Sometimes it reinforces their position. Sometimes it makes them question their position. And I agree with you, I think that we should have the license to have different narratives. We should have the license. I’m not who I was when I was 20. I’m 61. I am not who I was when I was 20 and I don’t want to be who I was when I was 20. We evolve as people, and we need to allow ourselves the opportunity to find those commonalities that leave space for where we disagree.

Carm: Because if we only lean into where we have these commonalities and we can make some progress forward, that progress is going to get stopped if we don’t still allow space for conflict. That’s going to then get added, we can layer it into the process of moving forward. So we need to be flexible in our narrative. We need to allow ourselves that flexibility. You’re not who you were when you were 35. I’m not who I was when I was 35. I’ve evolved. I’ve changed. I’ve developed. I’ve grown. My core beliefs have changed as a process of evolution, of how I understand myself and who I surround myself with, where my support systems come from. What’s important to me, what I’ve said isn’t good for me, and I’ve been able to set that over here and not revisit it because it’s damaging to me. Those kinds of things. So I think that what you’re talking about is a really important here. And it’s really one of the things street epistemologists are probably best at that I think we can all learn from.

Manda: Yes. So what I’m hearing, and I hadn’t really put it all together before, is in the looping we’re ironing out the differences between language apart from anything else. This is this is back to 48 hours spent discussing the meaning of liberty. If I were able to feed back to you what I think I heard and it isn’t what you meant, then we can begin to hear. Then I begin to get to know you better as a human being, and vice versa. And what I’m really feeling that I hadn’t got before again, is in my fairly blocky understanding of cognitive neuroscience, there are broadly dopamine based and serotonin based reward centres. And the serotonin mesh is enduring and additive and is what we look for. Francis Weller says we’ve never really got over our expectation when we’re born that when we look up from the firelight, we’ll be in a circle of 40 pairs of eyes that really care about us and respect us. And that if we grew up in a whole and healed culture, I would go through various rites of passage in which I would learn who I am. I would have pride in who I am, and that pride would arise by the fact that I would feel respected by people for whom I feel respect.

Manda: We’d have that mutual respect. And that that void will never be filled by dopamine. It doesn’t matter how many boxes from Amazon or how many rockets we send to Mars, or how many elections we win, the dopamine blips are never going to fill that lack of that serotonin. And that what we get when we are able to talk in a way where I can reflect to you what you said and you can reflect back to me what I’ve said, is a sense of mutual respect. And I’m thinking, and this wasn’t in the books, and I’m throwing it at you to test it, that what happens is that the people who go away feeling well and good about this are the people who feel they’ve been heard and respected by someone they are learning to respect, because we don’t come at each other in a binary ‘this is a debate where one side is going to win and the other side is going to lose’. Am I putting too much on these or does that work for you?

Carm: No, that absolutely works. That’s everything. It comes down to does somebody feel heard? Does somebody feel validated? Does somebody feel like I haven’t challenged them to the point that they need to feel defensive about what they believe or what you know they’re talking about. And that’s what creates the whole foundation of a safe environment for us to actually continue to engage in this conversation. Because the moment somebody feels like we’re not in this, it’s like my dog training example; if I have somebody coming into the room with a prong collar or an e-collar on their dog, and I’m going through this process, the first thing that I need is to create an environment where they feel comfortable enough to be able to express to me what’s important to them and why they’re leaning into this tool. And that comes with safety. And there’s only two things. One is having a mutual purpose; they need to have the perception that when somebody is meeting with me that’s using a tool and coming into the room with something that’s very offensive to me, I don’t show that this is offensive. They get the perception that we’re coming together to work towards a common goal, which is helping their dog and helping them develop their relationship. And then for me, my goal might be eventually, I’d love to see them move away from this tool. That’s really up to them to decide. I don’t get to say you have to abandon this tool. This is really their decision to make when things start to work and they don’t need that tool anymore. How I might express that to them is that my hope is that in our work together, you won’t feel the need to use that anymore, because it you just won’t need it, right? You just won’t need it. If you feel you need it, I get it.

Carm: That’s the tool you have. But not to judge them, right. So one is mutual purpose; they feel like we’ve come together to work towards a common goal, which is helping their dog, helping them with their relationship with their dog. Second is mutual respect; at no point in time in our work together will they ever feel the need to defend or become defensive about something they’ve said, done, or I’m hearing them. Because once I do that, I close the door; they tighten up that whole thing of being able to peel the layers off of tell me more. Close. They close because they feel like now they have to defend themselves. It shifts them into a different part of their brain, and I’ve lost my opportunity there. So that thing that you’re talking about really revolves around safety and feeling heard, validated, understood. Ability to express. I don’t have to agree with it, I might never agree with what they’re doing and the tool that they’re using, but I want them to feel, if I have any chance in hell of having an opportunity to impact and influence how we’re going to move forward together and how we’re going to understand one another and work together, they have to feel heard and validated. And that’s exactly what you’re talking about here.

Manda: Yeah.

Carm: One of the other things that I often lean into, because this is hard, this is hard work for people; opening yourself up in this way to a stranger for the first time, that’s not an easy ask. In an uncomfortable moment, particularly for very opposite sides of what we believe here, I lean into somebody’s body language a lot. I watch their body language. So just like that example of where we saw Tucker, in the very beginning of why I decided to even study conflict resolution, his feet just slid right up underneath his knees. He held his pencil a little tighter. His jaw got tense. Those are very subtle things. And they weren’t like big outward expressions of something, they were just very subtly kind of coming together, but I noticed it. And I notice it in people. So where this comes in most helpful for me is if I’m in a discussion with somebody that has a very opposite position of mine, they have a very different belief system than mine, and it’s a very deeply held belief for them, and we’re at odds. If they say something and we’re in discussion and I’m looping for confirmation, let’s say, and they’re like, yeah, that’s it. But their body language is telling me it’s not totally it.

Manda: Right. Okay.

Carm: It’s not it. I’m going to lean into their body language and I’m going to just be like, okay, so I notice that when you agreed with me there and you told me that I had it, you leaned back a little bit and you kind of disengaged looking at me and we kind of pause for a second. Can you tell me what’s going on? Do I really have it? Tell me a little bit more. And so there’s a rule called the 73855 rule. It was coined by a psychologist named Doctor Albert Moravian way back in the late 1960s and 1970s. He was a Southern California University professor conducting a couple of studies on how emotions impact how we actually communicate. And what he found is that what people are verbally saying is giving us 7% of what’s emotionally happening for them. The tone of voice that they’re saying it in gives us 38% of what’s emotionally happening now. That’s 45%, right?  If we’re only looking at what they’re saying and how they’re saying it, the tone of voice that they’re using we’re getting

Manda: Less than half.

Carm: Less than half of what’s actually emotionally coming up with them. So the other 55 shows up in their body language. And it really shows up when they’re saying one thing, but their body language is saying another, that disagrees, is in conflict with what they’re saying and how they’re saying it. I lean into the 55% and I’ll ask a deeper question. I’ll go there. I won’t move on because there’s something unsaid there. And sometimes they’re saying it because they’re like, I’m not sure I’m comfortable engaging in this further. I’m not sure I know how to express it. I’m not sure. And I have to maintain the safety. And I just might be what’s coming up for you? Because I noticed that when you did that, you told me I had it but I feel like I don’t really have it totally. I feel like I’m missing something. What am I missing? And I’ll ask them and they’ll go a little bit deeper. But they won’t go deeper if I haven’t actively listened, if they don’t feel heard and they don’t feel validated. I lose it altogether. So it’s a true skill in being able to watch what’s happening in the room holistically and engage with people, putting the binaries aside, putting assumptions aside, not labelling people, not doing any of that. I just want to know what your experience is because I can’t help you if I don’t understand.

Manda: Right. You’re modelling then emotional intelligence, it seems to me. If you’re saying what you said and how you were weren’t quite congruent, and I’m really curious to know what’s actually going on, then you are actively modelling the capacity to do that. And I’m thinking, going back to knowing when I had a dog and having dog behavioural problems, people project so much onto their animals. Dogs, horses, mostly those two. And so much of our identity becomes wrapped up in our capacity to to love this animal that we love, and also then to help it to be safe in human culture when we’re expecting it to do things that are really not suitable for the dog or the horse. And we’re already enormously vulnerable coming to ask for help and then somebody is asking us, in effect, to let go of another layer of shielding. How often in your experience do people just close up and how often do they go, okay, now I can really tell you how I feel.

Carm: Well, I’m pretty practised at this. When I started dog training, I started with conflict resolution in my back pocket because I became a trainer as a kind of a result of doing prison animal programming research during my master’s degree. And that was the thesis that I defended and so it’s led me into the dog training world and becoming certified and positive reinforcement. And it’s interesting because I felt like these were tools I always engaged in. When I had somebody come into my training room, this is what I did. I thought everybody was doing it Manda, I thought I was the last person to actually understand it and learn it. I’m like, God, I’m slow to come to this. And then when I started to realise this, I was going to professional conferences is that nobody was doing this. Like there’s very few little pockets.

Manda: No, no. And you’d think in the positive reinforcement world that they would, because they understand cognitive neuroscience. But it’s still hard.

Carm: Exactly. And no, it’s still really hard. And so what I started to see is like where trainers are getting really frustrated is because they’re not asking the right questions. They’re not setting up the room correctly. They’re engaging in binary thinking. They’re offering up all these facts and figures too fast, to tell people why something isn’t working, which is revictimizing them and telling them that they’ve just made terrible decisions for the animal that they love.

Manda: Yep, been there.

Carm: And on the flip side, saying, I’m so glad that you’re here. And it’s just like, well, you just told me this is terrible over here; I don’t feel really great about leading into this. And so what you get is a counterfeit yes. What you get from these people is like, yeah, I’m really interested in engaging in this kind of training and they don’t follow up, they don’t follow through, you don’t get results, you lose your opportunities. And I thought I was the only one. So I’ve always done this in my training world and I don’t know how to do it any differently. And I honestly don’t think I want to know how to do it any differently. But what we find in the dog world is for some dogs, people will come to us and say my dog bit or my dog attacked out of nowhere. No warning signs. Most of the time there are some warning signs that they just don’t know how to read. But for some dogs, they do lose their warning signs because just like people.

Manda: They’ve been suppressed.

Carm: Yes, when we continue to flood them with experiences that are too triggering and too hard for them and nobody’s listening, they lose those warning signs and their only response is to fight. Their only response. So all of those go down, they get pushed down, because nobody listens to them. Nobody’s hearing me.

Manda: Or they punish them for giving the warning signs. And that’s not good.

Carm: Exactly. So we lose them and then they bite, and we have no warning signs. And it’s a terrible result. And it can happen to people too. When we aren’t heard and we aren’t validated, and we aren’t reinforced, when we aren’t given an opportunity to express what’s truly important to us and feel heard, then why engage in it? We just keep pushing down, down, down, down, down, and we go into our identity groups that support our belief systems, which polarises us further.

Manda: Gosh, oh, this feels like a whole other podcast, but let’s just go down this route. Not the identity groups polarising, because I think we know that. But I’m so interested in how you came into a training world of positive reinforcement trainers. So for people listening to the podcast, that means we’re giving a reward, a reinforcement for a behaviour. It’s often a food reward, it’s sometimes a play reward, there are different levels of reward, but we are usually quite good at timing. I’ve actually backed off using positive reinforcement with the horses for various reasons, but mainly because it’s really hard to get the timing and the clarity of food now, not food at other times, so you don’t have a horse that’s continually on food seeking. But dogs, it’s much easier, my experience is. So we’re giving a reinforcement and we’re seeking to enhance the behaviours we want and hopefully de-escalate the behaviours we don’t want. And the opposite of that often is positive punishment, where we actively suppress behaviour which has its own fallout. I trained with Alex Kurland and she says punishment has its fallout, be very careful.

Carm: Yes, it does.

Manda: Or there’s, there’s a whole field of negative reinforcement, which is I take away the things that you don’t like, and that helps you to do what you want to do. Let’s not go into Skinner Quadrants at the moment, but my experience in the positive reinforcement dog and horse world was that there were quite a lot of people who were really quite good at timing and delivery and the mechanics of positive reinforcement, and really, really, really bad at reinforcing people. So they would be really hard on their students and get brilliant results with the animals. And that then reinforces I’m really not a very good trainer, I don’t know what I’m doing. And you come out of it absolutely certain that you’re not a good trainer and you don’t know what you’re doing. And that’s not actually very helpful. And once I found people who didn’t behave like that, my world completely blossomed. So given that as a baseline, given the world that we’re in, everyone listening to the podcast wants to be the best trainer of themselves and the people around them that they can be, in a way. We want to show up in the best way that we possibly can. What we’ve got so far is we listen to people.

Manda: We come insofar as we can, without binaries to agendas that might be zero sum. We listen to people with full attention whenever we can, and we check that we’ve heard what they said instead of what we thought they said or what we would have liked them to have set. And I think one of the key things that I got from you is do I need to speak now? Does what I want to say need to be said at all? Does it need to be said by me? Does it need to be said by me now? And something that you said to me last time we spoke was another acronym by one of the writers, which was WAIT, which is why am I talking? Which exactly is what I used with that guy, was why am I talking? No I’m not going to say anything, because the only reason I’m talking is to engage in conflict and I don’t want to do that. So is there anything else? Have I summarised reasonably? This is a loop. And is there anything else that people listening can bring to their everyday interactions to help move the whole of humanity into a more aware emotional space, I guess?

Carm: Yeah, it’s a really great question. Thank you for asking it. I think we touched on a lot of those pieces, and I think that the the short answer to that would be If you find yourself in a situation where you want to engage in an argument or something; one, asking yourself those questions: why am I talking? Does it need to be said? Does it need to be said by me? Does it need to be said by me now? And am I going to engage because I want to understand? Am I listening to understand, or am I only listening to respond? If I’m listening to respond, then I need to take that step back and disengage, because we haven’t come together in a moment where we’re going to be able to have a really genuine dialogue with humility and understanding. So like we said, there’s a time and a place, and you did a beautiful job of disengaging with that Airbnb gentleman because it wasn’t the right time and place. Why am I talking? Why am I engaging? Nobody’s set up for success here. We’re not set up to have a really genuine dialogue.

Carm: So I ask myself in this moment, am I listening to respond or am I listening to understand? And if I can find myself in a place where I’m listening to understand and ask deeper questions that help me understand more, instead of just responding back with my position, if I’m listening to understand, great, I will go forward with that conversation. If I can answer that question of am I listening to understand or respond, if my answer is respond, I’m going to walk away from that moment and just disengage. Because it’s not the right moment. It’s not my job to change somebody’s mind. I’m not going to do it. It’s not going to be successful. The only way somebody shifts their thinking is because they felt heard and understood, and they started to understand and self-reflect on their own thing, and then they give me an opportunity and are able to hear what I have to say. It’s not because I’ve changed somebody’s mind. It’s because they felt heard and understood and have the license to explore other thinking.

Manda: Okay, final question because we’re way over time, but I’m remembering what you said about the law professor at Harvard, and yay Harvard, for doing what it’s doing. I’m very impressed. There were amicus briefs coming out last week that were gorgeous to read. People don’t like conflict. So when he was bringing two sides, theoretical sides, hypothetical to go through conflict resolution, they were sorting out the easy stuff, they weren’t touching the hard stuff. In our day to day conversations with people, we all tend to talk about the weather in Britain because it’s a thing that we can talk about, and it’s neutral. And yet, talking about the weather is not going to get us to the point where the continuation of complex life on Earth seems more likely than not. Have you any thoughts on how we engage people in the deeper things in our everyday lives? Because most of us don’t end up in a small room with somebody going, okay, go in there and sort the world.

Carm: Yeah, I think in our everyday lives it’s like picking and choosing the right moment. And it depends on what’s my relationship with this person. If this is a stranger, it may not be somebody that I’m able to create a situation where we’re going to have a deeper dialogue. There might be time constrictions, those kinds of things. So it’s like really picking and choosing your moment. So in the real world, if I’m at a dinner party and somebody wants to engage, then I’m just like, are you really interested? I’m really interested in knowing more from you. I usually start with not asking them if they’re interested in hearing my perspective. I will start with I’m really interested in understanding more about that thing you just said, and engage with them. And then ask them, are you open To hearing, I don’t quite see it that way. Are you open to hearing why I don’t see it differently? I don’t want to disagree with you, I just see it differently. I’m not here to fight with you. But pick and choose your words and and your moments carefully, because every moment isn’t the right moment for I’m going to engage in this. Because I feel like this is my way of globally moving the pieces on the chessboard. It’s more about engaging people more regularly in my understanding their position, because when you do that, they’re more interested in hearing your position.

Manda: Right.

Carm: So don’t argue. But just if I’m in conflict, it’s like, oh, God, I don’t understand that. I feel really differently about that. Help me understand why that’s important to you. And I usually will start from that position. It’s not about me telling you why that’s wrong, it’s about me understanding what you believe. And that opens the door to that larger dialogue. You’ve just modelled to them also a different way to engage when they disagree with somebody.

Manda: Right. Yes. Which is critical and crucial and brilliant and wonderful.

Carm: It’s hard stuff, but positive reinforcement is for people also, not just for animals. And I think we forget that. Even in my industry we forget that and we can be very terrible to one another. And we have to work at that. So it seeps its way into every part of life.

Manda: Yeah. And hearing someone and reflecting back to them is massively reinforcing. Fantastic. Okay. So one conversation at a time, when we pick the right conversations, in the right circumstances, with the right people, we can change the world. Carm, that was so wonderful. Thank you so much. Thank you for coming on to the podcast and for giving us your Easter Monday. It’s wonderful. Thank you.

Carm: Oh, thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

Manda: It’s been glorious. Thank you. And there we go. That’s it for another week. Enormous thanks to Carm, for all that she is and does. Genuinely, I feel such a rush of possibility, of potential, of optimism. And of knowing that there is a bar that I could meet, and it’s quite a lot higher than most of my daily interactions. But talking to Carm, feeling the clarity and the grace and the compassion that she brings to all that she is and does, offers such an extraordinary role model and genuinely gives me optimism that we could all be this. That we could ground ourselves, that we could take a breath, that we could bring compassion and respect and genuine listening to all of the conversations in our world, online and offline. In one of the books that she recommended there were two acronyms. One was AWE, which was And What Else? This came from the Book of Beautiful Questions by Warren Berger. And the other thing that he suggested was the WAIT acronym; Why Am I Talking? And if the answer is you really don’t need to be, then don’t. Just listen. Ask the questions that matter. Get to the heart of why somebody believes what they believe. And if you feel something different and they are open to exploring, then you have the beginnings of genuine conversation.

Manda: And it doesn’t always happen. Particularly it doesn’t always happen in the echo chambers on social media. And it is, I think, social media that has created the deepening of the chasms that already existed. And perhaps if we all bring these skills to our social media interactions, we can begin to heal the chasms. I think this is essential. I don’t think anything is going to heal without it and I am fully aware of how hard it is. But it has to be worth trying, eh? Because I think we’re at that bifurcation point. We either emerge into the new reality where we actually work together, or we crash into chaos and extinction as Ilya Prigogine suggested over a hundred years ago. And yes, he was a nuclear chemist, and he wasn’t talking about social complex systems, but it does seem to apply pretty accurately. So let’s give it a go, eh? I’m suggesting to myself that I, first of all come off social media a bit more. And second, that I endeavour to practice this for at least one day a week, and then I’ll extend it to two and gradually up to seven, so that it doesn’t feel like I’m over facing those parts of myself that need to scream. That’s probably not ideal, but it’s the best I can get to just now. And it fits in with that suggestion of does this need to be said? Does it need to be said by me? Does it need to be said now? And my response is probably not, to all of those.

Manda: Can I pull off everything in cold turkey? Possibly not. Can I do it in graduated stages? I am going to give it a go. So let’s see how this goes. And maybe cold turkey is better. I genuinely don’t know. I’m going to try today and see how I feel by tomorrow. And you’ll get this in about ten days time. So we’ll see where I’ve got to.

Manda: And that apart, we will be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for the production. To Lou Mayor for the video. To Anne Thomas for the transcripts. To Faith Tilleray for working the website and all of the tech that keeps Accidental Gods moving and for the conversations that keep us flowing forwards. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else who is willing and able to engage in this most complex, most important aspect of our world, then please do send them this link. And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.

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