#33 When Is "Yes-But" Helpful?
Discover what good things may occur when your own or someone else's yes-but is examined a little more closely.
Hi, I write about the why-do-we-experience-life-as-we-do question.
I find it’s helpful to those who seek to understand why they, and those around them, live in the realities they do and behave accordingly.
You’re very welcome here.
Enjoy getting in touch with the sensations, thoughts and feelings that come your way continuously, and through which your sense making of what’s going on happens.
Oh, and remember to wonder what new perspectives may appear should old thinking habits dissipate or not be taken so seriously!
While running a workshop recently on what makes for a high-performing team, I facilitated an exercise on what I termed “Our Human Operating System”.
In essence I’d condensed much of what I cover here on Helpful Questions Change Lives into a few easy-to-remember phrases, and invited members of the group to explore how true each seemed to them.
One such phrase was We are only ever experiencing the feeling of our thinking. For me, it encapsulates the notion that we humans’ experience of events, other people and circumstances is filtered through the sensations, thoughts and feelings that arise in us about all three. In other words an event is real enough, but our experience of it is governed by whether we notice the particular combination of sensations, thoughts and feelings and the relationship we have with them.
If we don’t notice these combinations - sweaty palms, say, thoughts that evoke self doubt and a feeling of anxiety - we have little option other than to experience that feeling linked to the thought underpinning it.
If we are aware of the combination and observe it inside, from a metaphorical distance as it were, as though there’s a you observing you in the midst of any particular combination, there’s a chance that, more often that not, new options may appear. For instance, you may notice self-doubting thoughts as a habit and turn the volume down on them or argue with them, or play with them. Similarly, you might see clammy hands as a useful sign that you’re in danger of tipping into not a good place, which will inevitably impact your performance. So, if possible, you might wait until it passes and your perspective changes.
The value of exploring the extent to which phrases like this look true to people is that they see they have more agency over what can get in the way of high performance than they first believe.
For most, feelings like frustration, stress, overwhelm, defensiveness are caused by events, people and circumstances, not a combination of sensations, thoughts and feelings. They all lead to behaviours not conducive to doing a great job. But if we see them manifesting within us, their negative impacts needn’t last as long or at all.
In the small break out groups, where people discussed how true this phrase looked to them, most intellectually agreed with the idea that whatever their negative emotion is, it’s emanating from inside them. Then, usually when they think about extreme cases, one or two yes-buts creep into their conversations.
One example of this was a quantity surveyor or QS. He said, “Yeah, I get what you’re suggesting, but sometimes it’s really hard.”
(For those who don’t know, a QS represents a client and estimates how long a job on a build should last and what it should cost. As a contractor talks to their supply chain about the actual job on site, and gets quotes in to do the work, these get compared to what the QS’ estimates and expectations were. Differences here can easily morph into disagreements.)
“What’s hard?” I asked.
He replied with “Negotiating over money and time. You have to stand your ground. That’s what your paid for, else people will take advantage of me and my client.”
“Such negotiations happen frequently on a job right. Everyone is hoping to do the work for a fair price so that they can make money and not lose it. Is that how you see it?” I wondered.
“Sure” said the QS “If the sub contractors don’t make a margin on the job, the whole thing ends up costing a lot more. So I’m with you on the fair-price intention thing.”
“What makes the negotiation ‘hard’ then as you described it?” I wondered.
By now the QS was thinking deeply about this question. He was digging into why that word had come to him at all.
He broke about 30 seconds of silence with this, “I dunno really, but I guess it’s to do with my pride.”
“Pride?” I inquired.
He explained why, “I don’t want my estimates to be seen to be wrong. If they are I’ll lose face. So I pitch up at meetings dead keen on defending myself and knocking down those that have different figures to me.”
At this point one of his colleagues in the group chimed in with “Thanks for being so honest. That’s really helped me understand you and the attitude you sometimes bring to a negotiation meeting”.
For clarity I asked the QS whether the threat of losing face and resulting loss of pride was the hard bit he’d originally referred to. He agreed it was.
I wondered what else he might have seen with respect to the we-are-only-ever-experiencing-the-feeling-of-our-thinking phrase.
He responded with “Once the pride problem is out of the way, it’s not as hard as it first appeared.
“My estimates are based on a set of assumptions and cross referenced to a large database of costs and time on other similar jobs. The contractor and sub-contractor have their own assumptions making up their estimates on this particular job. Our negotiation could be about comparing differences in their assumptions and mine and the maths behind our respective estimates.
“This would be a very different starting point from the adversarial one we have now, where I, and no doubt they, are on high alert of being ripped off, hoodwinked and taken to the cleaners through so-called clever negotiating tactics.”
“Would that make the negotiation easier?” asked one of the project planners in his subgroup.
“Yes it could, if all parties bought into this up front” the QS replied with a sense of new-found hope in his voice.
And, given the theme of of the workshop, a high-performance project team, I chimed in with this question for the subgroup, “If negotiations felt easier, not hard, might this be conducive to better and even higher performance?”
“I think so” said the QS “It remains to be seen, we’d need to experiment a bit to see if it works in practice, but I see several potential upsides. Like we reach agreements quicker. There’s a better climate in the team - we feel less at each other’s throats scrapping for every penny. The principle of everyone on the project making decent margins within the constraints of the overall project budget, becomes uppermost in people’s minds. All these will help I feel.”
“I agree” said the project planner “You’ll be amazed how many problems you don’t have on site when everyone is making a bob or two and feeling good about it.”
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Often, a yes-but can imply disagreement and trigger a defensive response. This could have been the case for me - me thinking the QS just doesn’t get it else it wouldn’t be hard to understand and so on. But my intention wasn’t that he got it, more that he inquired into whether or not it seemed true to him. I knew that if it wasn’t the team would be no worse off than now, there’d be little downside. But if he concluded it was, then the upside potential was considerable.
The twists and turns the conversation took in his case signalled he saw some truth in the we-are-only-ever-experiencing-the-feeling-of-our-thinking statement in good times, BUT, struggled when times were what he called ‘hard’. Yet, when he looked a little deeper at why the word ‘hard’ popped into his head, he realised, for the first time, why it connected to his fear of losing face in a negotiation. Once he’d established this link, you could see the look of relief on his face. The Human Operating System threw up several new possibilities on ways forward that he’d not seen before with the same degree of clarity. It’s good at doing that when we let it!
I hope the next time you hear someone say “Yes, but” or use the phrase yourself, it occurs to you to look a little more closely at what the but might be about.
Thanks for being here. I hope you’ll join me again next time.
Until then,
Kindest,
Roger
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Other useful, free posts.
You can find all the posts in my first series here.
While it’s good to pick those whose titles speak to you most, I recommend these five in particular:
#3 Being Right Here Right Now - Hard To Do? - This covers the idea of being fully present and what distracts us from that.
#4 How We Experience Life Is Mysterious. Isn’t It? - This goes to the heart of the mystery surrounding why we get sensations, thoughts and feelings in the first place, and what the implications are of being at ease with this.
#5 What Influence Do You Have Over Your Experience In Each Moment? - Here I look at what is and is not within our control and where we can exert influence when changing our experience.
#6 If You Saw Wellbeing Like This, What Difference Would It Make? - If BEING WELL RIGHT NOW is the goal, this describes what that’s like and how our feelings can be a useful warning sign of wellbeing’s absence.
#8 Why Do You Respond To “Difficult” Others Like That? - Here I invite you to consider some of the deeper, often-hidden assumptions we hold about the nature of human nature, and their impact on your experience of difficult others.