The Two D's and the Two L's

I'm starting to discover - finally - why we have so much trouble with effective communication. It really has very little to do with our intention and much more to do with our biology.

People respond to anything they don't know with defensiveness. It becomes a physical response. You can see it in their posture and the set of their jaw. And it all goes back to that reptilian brain way inside our heads.

The reptilian brain is the oldest part of our brain, that part that gives us that fight-or-flight response to anything new or unexpected. That part of us is rigid, obsessive, compulsive and paranoid. It is the part of our brain that keeps repeating past behaviors, and doesn't learn from them.

Thankfully we do have two other more evolved brains in our heads: the limbic system, or the middle part of the brain, and the neocortex, or the most highly developed outer part of the brain. In terms of size, the neocortex makes up more than two-thirds of the entire brain. So why is it that the smallest and most primitive portion of our brain is often the one that takes over? Shouldn't we be able to override that instinct with our intellect?

Is it any wonder we humans get defensive in our communication style when faced with new information or unfamiliar subject matter or, worse yet, new emotional ground? We don't know how to listen because we're too busy defending. We're in survival mode and we don't know any better because we haven't practiced anything else.

What if you changed the rules for yourself and didn't get defensive when you heard something that went against your initial beliefs? What if you changed the rules of your game and didn't make it wrong that people get defensive?

We're humans, not reptiles. We have every opportunity and every responsibility to let our neocortex in on our communication. What if, as Jerry Hirschberg of the Nissan Corporation once said, we fight the 2 D's in our communication (Defensiveness and Debating) with the 2 L's (Listening and Learning)?

I'm confident that noticing which of our brains is responding to new information in a communication setting will start alerting us to new, more effective habits in our behaviors.