Stop, get curious, then comment. It’s advice I give often, and in 2016 I ignored it.
This week a comment exchange from 2016 resurfaced on my blog. A farmer had read my post on native vegetation laws and came away certain I’d called farmers backwards and careless. The post called farmers custodians and praised Landcare as the best practice model. It also argued that farmers, like everyone else, need rules. We wear seatbelts and license our dogs because humans are poor at regulating themselves, and farmers are human too. She read it as an attack on farmers.
Instead of getting curious about what she’d heard, I defended myself. I sent her links to my awards, asked if she’d read the Further Reading, and told her to step back and remove the emotion. She came back angrier. Reading it now, I can see what upset her.
Years of leadership training have taught me to pause and ask for advice before I hit reply. Today I’d ring Charlie Arnot from The Center for Food Integrity and ask him how to show her we’re on the same side. His research shows shared values count three to five times more than facts in building trust. So I listen and ask better questions. I start by being curious, and I might learn something. She taught me there’s more than one way to say what I mean. Ten years later, I’m writing this post because I listened.
Yale researcher Dan Kahan has studied how identity shapes the way people read. My family has farmed here since 1831, so I understand why a post about farming practice can feel like a post about your family. Farmers are like everyone else in this. We all read through our own lives, and I suspect that explains a lot of the conflict on Facebook.
That’s what makes her comment so valuable. A like is easy. A conversation requires someone to put their thoughts into words, risk being misunderstood and perhaps have their thinking challenged. She took that risk, and I learned from it. Social media makes it so easy to register agreement without ever exploring why we agree. I wonder whether we’re becoming more comfortable expressing opinions and less comfortable discussing them.
Plenty of you are working on this too. How to Express Your Opinions Respectfully is one of the most read posts on my blog, and I updated it this month with what I’ve learned since.
Yesterday I got the chance to use it. A Facebook friend messaged me about my post on the Coalition’s spending cuts and wanted to know why I was singling out boomers. These days I know how to reply. I told him I’m a boomer too, and that plenty of us are doing it tough. Then I explained what the post was about and finished with: I suspect we actually agree that governments need to think much more carefully about where public money goes.
He wrote back within the hour. Thanks for your answer and clarification.
Different people see the same words through different lives. Now I know to get curious about theirs before I reply.
