A lion never loses sleep over the opinion of the sheep.
African proverb
The taxi ride to the Minneapolis airport was a long one, because it was right in the middle of afternoon rush hour. But I wasn’t in a hurry. I had plenty of time before my flight. I was tired, because I had just finished my fifth seminar in five days. Talking for eight hours a day can be draining, especially for an introvert. I had used up all my words for the week, so I was hoping to relax and just stare out the window during the drive.
My driver had a different agenda. He was one of the chattier drivers I’ve encountered over the years and was committed to having a conversation. His thick Ugandan accent was tough to understand, but he talked almost nonstop (often gesturing with both hands off the steering wheel, which was a little disconcerting). At first, I responded with short answers, hoping to buy just a few moments of quiet. But he missed my subtle hints and asked question after question.
I have to hand it to him; he did a good job making conversation. He seemed to follow the exact pattern I described in my book How to Communicate with Confidence—initiating, finding common ground, exploring, expanding, etc. Eventually, he asked, “What do you do?” I told him that I lead seminars in different corporations. He wanted to know the topics, details, and settings.
Finally, he found his hot button. “So let’s say you stand in front of one hundred people to speak. They’re at the same level as you, so they know as much as you do. How do you keep from being shy?”
“Shy?” I said.
“Yes, shy. You know—like when your hands shake and people see it and they don’t like you.”
I figured out that he was asking about feeling nervous and intimidated.
“I think everybody feels that way the first time they’re in front of the group,” I said. “The more you do it, the more confident you get.”
We were pretty engaged in the conversation by then, so I figured I could have my quiet time when I got to the airport.
“So how do you get over that?” he asked. We talked about different options, because it seemed that he really wanted a solution.
As we approached the airport, he said, “Someone told me once that if you’re nervous, you should look over everyone’s head and not look in their eyes. That’s how you keep from being shy.”
“Well,” I responded, “I’ve heard that a number of times, and other gimmicks just like it. But from experience, I’d have to disagree.”
“But isn’t it more scary to look right at them?”
“It seems that way,” I said. “But I’ve found it does just the opposite. If I try to avoid looking at them, it reminds me of how intimidated I feel. It’s like not wanting to open your eyes during a scary movie, because you’re afraid you’ll see something that terrifies you. But when you look directly in their eyes, you connect with them. You have one of those human moments when they become a real person instead of something scary. They feel more connected to you, and you’re able to relax. If you’re ‘shy,’ they usually don’t notice. And if you’ve connected with them, they don’t care.”
“What if you’re talking to the mayor of the city?” he said. “How do you keep from being shy with him?”
“Look him in the eye,” I said. “He might be the mayor, but if you look him in the eye, he becomes a person.”
How to Keep from Being Shy
When someone makes solid eye contact with us during a conversation, they project confidence. If they also have a stronger personality than we do, it’s easy to feel intimidated. We compare ourselves to them and end up on the inferior side of the equation. Once that happens, it’s hard to have healthy dialogue. We see them through the filter of “you’re better than me,” so the balance becomes unrealistic. We’ve given them a competitive edge.
Tough communication only works when there’s honesty in the relationship, no matter who it is with. I’m not talking about not telling lies. I’m talking about keeping the integrity of the relationship. We need to see the other person as they really are, not as an image we’ve projected onto them.
If we compare ourselves with people’s outsides, everybody is either above us or below us in some way. If I see myself as inferior to you, I’ll be frustrated and lack confidence in those tough conversations. If I see you as inferior to me, I won’t respect you. The only way to make a relationship work is to see each other as people of true value. The inside, not the outside, determines our worth.
My wife, Diane, and I went to an exhibit last weekend of human bodies that had been preserved chemically so they could be permanently observed. They were real bodies, but the skin was missing so you could see the actual muscles, organs, blood vessels, nerves, etc. It was fascinating to be able to get a close-up view of the inner workings of the human body.
There was no way to tell what those people looked like when they were alive. One might have been a little taller or had a broader skeletal system, but they were essentially identical.
I thought that was a good lesson about intimidation. We tend to be intimidated by what we see on the outside. But under the skin, we’re all the same: human. We could look at a homeless person and the president of a country side by side and have totally different reactions. But inside, they’re the same.
In my line of work, I encounter some pretty high-powered executives in major corporations and government agencies. There was a time when I was intimidated in those situations, because I figured they were in a different league. But with experience, I’ve discovered that they’re just normal people who have achieved some great things and lead a lot of people. They might be taller, more experienced, richer, or more powerful than I am. But they put their pants on one leg at a time, just like I do. On the inside, they’re human, just like me.
It doesn’t matter if we’re talking to a spouse, boss, child, family member, neighbor, politician, or executive. They might seem intimidating by their temperament or approach. But the common ground of humanness is where we connect without intimidation.
When I teach seminars, I have people fill out evaluation forms at the end of the session. They give their opinion about the content, the relevance, and the facilitator, rating those issues on a scale of 1 to 10. In talking to other people who facilitate regularly, we’ve discovered that we all approach those evaluations in the same way:
We’re more interested in what they think of us than what they think of the seminar, and we’re upset if one person in the group doesn’t like us.
If fifty people like a session and one doesn’t, it’s only logical to say that the one person is the issue. If one person likes a session and fifty don’t, I have to admit that I’m the issue. (Someone said that if one person tells you you’re a horse, just ignore them. If fifty people tell you you’re a horse, look for a saddle.)
At first, I thought I was the only one who focused on the negative. But in training and mentoring facilitators over the years, I’ve discovered that this is common ground. Why is it so easy to focus on the negative and ignore the positive?
In the same way, why do single, negative experiences when we’re growing up determine our lens for evaluating every relationship in the future? If someone told us as a child that we were irritating, we go through life trying to avoid being an irritation to others.
It turns out there are actually physiological reasons for this. Some of the most recent brain research has discovered that our brains are wired for negative stimuli more than positive stimuli. One researcher said that our brains are like Velcro for negative experiences but like Teflon for positive ones. We tend to overestimate how bad a danger is and underestimate how valuable a positive experience can be. We also tend to underestimate our abilities to deal with negative experiences as well as to take advantage of positive opportunities for growth and advancement. In other words, we think with a negative bias. We’re more likely to be pessimistic than optimistic by nature.
There’s a tiny part of the brain called the amygdala that’s responsible for such things. When it picks up a negative experience, it sends that experience into long-term storage immediately. But we have to focus on a positive experience for about twelve seconds before it gets stored.
Our brains are wired to go after bad news and ignore good news. That’s why we can be in the middle of ninety-nine good experiences but focus on the one bad thing that happens. We focus more on threats than opportunities. If we miss an opportunity, our brains tell us it’s okay—another one might come along tomorrow. But if we feel a threat, our brains remind us that it could mean pain that might last a long time.
So how does this apply to relationships and tough conversations? There can be a lot of positive things happening in our relationships. But when something negative happens, we focus on it. We lose perspective because we concentrate on the one negative and ignore the dozens of positives.
We pass by a friend at church and say, “Hi.” They make eye contact but don’t respond or smile. We think, “Why didn’t they respond?” We spend the rest of the day wondering what we did that upset them, and it ruins our day. But when we finally talk to them, we find out that they didn’t even see us. They were lost in thought about something, and we didn’t even register on their consciousness.
We pick up cues from other people and interpret them without ever checking to see if our perspective is accurate. From that point on, we believe our perspective is true, and it impacts our relationships with those people. All of this happens in our heads, and the other person doesn’t have a clue!
When we get intimidated by another person, it’s usually not because of what they say or do. It’s because of how we interpret what they say or do. We assume the other person is feeling a certain way without finding out if it’s true.
As an example, let’s revisit our discussion about temperaments. Extroverts tend to be quick on their feet and speak their minds quickly. Introverts tend to think deeper but need time to process information before they express their thoughts.
In conflict, the extrovert might feel they’ve won the argument because the introvert couldn’t come up with a good answer. The introvert feels intimidated because they can never hold their own in a tough conversation. “It’s hopeless,” they think. “I never know what to say, so I can’t compete with them. Any time we talk through tough issues, I lose.”
It goes back to perspective. Introverts assume that the other person is more confident because they speak their mind so quickly. But that ignores the facts about the differences in temperament:
As we learned earlier, extroverts tend to think faster. Introverts tend to think deeper. Success comes when both sides recognize the reality of their temperaments instead of thinking the other person needs to change. Introverts need to understand that reality. When an extrovert shoots out quick, forceful arguments, this doesn’t mean they’re correct. It means they have a different style.
When an extrovert is talking, an introvert needs a realistic response to avoid intimidation. “Wow, you make some really good points. Right off the top of my head, I’m not sure how to respond. I need a little time to think this through. Let me play with your ideas for a day or two, and I’ll get back with you. Maybe I’ll shoot you an email with my reactions, or we can grab a cup of coffee. Then I’d love to hear what you think about my thoughts.”
Writing and pondering give introverts a chance to think first and then respond well without intimidation. That’s an introvert’s strength, and they shouldn’t be embarrassed about it. This approach gives both extroverts and introverts a chance to process in their own way.
What Are We Supposed to Do?
Knowing how our brains operate with a bias toward the negative, we need to be conscious about how we process perceived threats. We need to rewrite the warning on our right-hand-side car mirror: Objects in this mirror are smaller than they appear.
When we don’t connect with the people in our lives, our minds make up stories about what they’re thinking (and those stories are usually negative). When we believe those negative stories, we get intimidated.
Psychologist Daniel Amen refers to this process as ANTs: Automatic Negative Thoughts.1 These are the thoughts that come into our minds automatically and ruin our day. He says that they should have taught us in second grade that we don’t have to believe every thought that comes into our head, and we have the ability to challenge those thoughts.
He suggests that whenever we feel sad, mad, nervous, or out of control, we should do two things:
Amen says, “One way to learn how to change your thoughts is to notice them when they are negative and talk back to them. If you can correct negative thoughts, you take away their power over you. When you just think a negative thought without challenging it, your mind believes it and your body reacts to it.”2 We don’t want to give someone else the keys to our sanity. Intimidation comes when we fail to question someone else’s perception of us.
So anytime we feel intimidated by someone during a tough conversation, we might need to remind ourselves of what’s true:
So how do we keep from being intimidated? By focusing on what’s true instead of what we feel—choosing accuracy over perception. Doing so takes time and effort, but the return on this investment can be huge. This is a different way of thinking, but it can help us hold our own when a conversation gets tough.
Tips for Tough Conversations
How can we keep from feeling intimidated by others?