During the conversation, be aware that difficult interactions generally have three levels of conversation happening simultaneously:

 - The facts level (what you’re talking about)

Do you remember your first kiss?

Of course you do. But how about the second?

Human beings remember “firsts”—the first time something happens, or the beginning of an experience—and this initial memory tends to carry over to the rest.

This process, called the “primacy effect,” is why beginnings are so crucial: Everything we see and hear gets filtered through our initial opinion. Start off the right foot, and the rest of the interaction will be colored by it, thereby tipping the scales in your favor. On the other hand, an unfavorable first impression can prove impossible to overcome  even if the rest of the interaction was impeccable. Litigators know well how much their client’s first impression on a jury can affect the outcome of the trial and often spend hours preparing for this very first moment.

What does this tendency mean for you? Simply that if you start your interaction on the right note, it will color the rest of the experience.

So how can you start off right? Our body language is one of the key ways we communicate with people; far more in fact than we realize, and far more than our words do. The Harvard Business Review recently detailed research showing that the delivery of a message is far more important than the message itself. A negative performance review accompanied by positive body language was received much better than a positive review accompanied by negative body language.

As one University of Pennsylvania study put it, your body is a continuous transmitter, revealing your feelings even as they change from moment to moment. Everything about you, from the angle at which you hold your read to the position of your feet, is broadcasting information to everyone within sight at the rate of several thousand signals per second.

To broadcast empathy, try putting yourself in their shoes. What if you had been born in their circumstances, with their family and upbringing? Maybe you would’ve turned out just like they have, or as Bradford put it: There, but for the grace of God, go I.

Once you have a feeling of empathy, you can go a step further. Have you ever been with someone who truly and completely had your best interest at heart? Didn’t it give you a nice warm feeling? Wouldn’t you like to give that same feeling to others? All you need to do is to focus on how you could be of help to them; take their best interests at heart. Not only will you feel more connected to the person you’re speaking to; you’ll also be perceived differently as this genuine empathy and altruism plays out in your body language.

As babies, we learn to focus our eyes. As we grow, we learn to focus our hearing; for instance, to hear just  one conversation without being distracted by the background noise.

Why not learn to focus your mind in the same way? As Peter McWilliams describes in the hilarious Life 101: “You would have charge of your thoughts. You would not find yourself thinking about things you didn’t want to think about. Your mind would be directed, creative, and positive at all times.”

Great, say you, but how? Well, Neuroscience and Cognitive Science are actually coming up with some pretty practical tools for this.  One good starting point is Stephen Hayes’ excellent “Get Out Of Your Mind.” Another great insight into the mind’s tricks and traps is Barry Schwartz’ “Paradox Of Choice.”

Another series of tools come from meditation– you can think of meditation as a fitness program for your mind. The best primer I’ve come across (a witty, practical intro) is “Wherever You Go, There You Are” by John Kabat-Zinn.

Are you a victim of “inattentional blindness?” A great piece in the Daily Telegraph describes:

Working with Christopher Chabris at Harvard University, Simons came up with a demonstration that has now become a classic, based on a videotape of a handful of people playing basketball. They played the tape to subjects and asked them to count the passes made by one of the teams.
Around half failed to spot a woman dressed in a gorilla suit who walked slowly across the scene for nine seconds, even though this hairy interloper had passed between the players and stopped to face the camera and thump her chest.
However, if people were simply asked to view the tape, they noticed the gorilla easily. The effect is so striking that some of them refused to accept they were looking at the same tape and thought that it was a different version of the video, one edited to include the ape.
Here’s the original video

The mind sees what it wants to see; indeed. This prompted me to think about how little we question what our mind comes up with.  Just like there are optical illusions– your eyes are convinced they’re seeing things that are not there– there can be thought distortions; your mind convinced of the truth of its thoughts.  (for more on why certain distorted thoughts can seem so valid, see Jill bolte Taylor for the chemistry & neuroscience behind this process).

Not that long ago we were convinced the earth was flat. It seems silly now. But why should we be so certain of the solidity of any of our other convictions? This applies to your thoughts about the world, about other people, and equally about yourself. Just because a thought is in your mind doesn’t mean it has any validity.

One useful way I’ve found to think about it is to see thinking as just one of our abilities.Seeing is what your eyes do. Hearing is what your ears do. Thinking is what your mind does. No more, no less.  We wouldn’t want to do away with our thinking, any more than our seeing our hearing. But we shouldn’t give it any greater credence either. You don’t take the sights you see to be a verdict of who you are (if you see an ugly sight, you don’t take it to mean that you’re an ugly person).  The same could be said of your thoughts.