What a great question. Marla had been struggling with preparing for a tough confrontation, and she was intent upon being absolutely honest. Marla wanted to be authentic. But I had advised her to write out her message, rehearse it, even role play with someone, before she sat down to talk to her antagonist. While she agreed that preparation was important, she began to feel false as she practiced her script.
“Shouldn’t authenticity come from inspiration in the moment?” Marla asked. “How can you claim truthfulness if you have crafted every word ahead of time? That’s like reading lines in play.”
Marla and I had been working together on a particularly difficult relationship she had with the Vice President of Business Development. Marla’s role was COO, and the VP of BD is her peer. The conflict between them was ironically one of perceived lack of authenticity. The VP thought that Marla was behaving to accomplish a hidden agenda, that she had personal ambitions that caused her to make decisions not in the best interests of the team. Marla had learned about the VP’s opinion directly, when he stated his concerns during a quarterly executive retreat that included all of their peers and the CEO of the company. The experience of being questioned about her honesty in front of her boss and colleagues was, to put it mildly, unsettling. She had reacted emotionally during the meeting, delaying her return from the break by thirty minutes. When she did return, the atmosphere of the meeting was thick with tension.
Marla wanted to resolve the conflict. The first thing she worked on was attempting to be objective about the criticism. She explored the evidence to see if her behavior had indeed been driven by personal goals, undisclosed and incongruent with the goals of the company. I love working with people who can set aside their own emotional abrasions in order to discover what might lie beneath their conscious understanding of themselves. When you’ve studied the human animal for some time, you come to realize that Freud had some good ideas.
One of those ideas is that the mind can be described as having three levels of reality. One level is consciousness, or as Freud called it, the “ego”, which can fairly be described as the part of our mind’s activities that we can talk about. This includes voluntary muscle movement and conversing not only with others, but carrying on what Carlos Castaneda termed the “internal dialogue”.
Another level that Freud described is the unconscious mind, or the “superego”. In his terms, this meant the part of the mind that operated without voluntary commands. Walking is an unconscious act, in that we don’t tell our muscles to do every twitch. We simply think about the direction we want to go and our body responds. It’s important to note that the unconscious mind is comprised of thoughts, movements and ideas that used to be conscious, but have been incorporated so completely into our habits that they no longer require concentration. This definition of the unconscious is different than the medical notion associated with being knocked out. In this state, Freud included the internalized rules and regulations that our parents and teachers supplied.
The third mind state is the subconscious, or “id”, which is comprised of thought processes that have never been conscious in nature. This mind state is presumed to derive from genetic predisposition, experiential influences that occurred prior to language development and, some theorize, the collective shared racial experience of the human species. Murkiest in concept, the subconscious has been explored through dream analysis, the study of mythology (see “Man and His Symbols” by Joseph Campbell), the study of perception and other avenues of inquiry.
In a conflict between people, all of these mind states are at play. The subconscious may include the effects of traumas from early childhood, and the physiologically ancient response to threat we know as “fight or flight” behavior. The unconscious mind contributes our habitual responses to conflict, created by the reinforcement of prior behaviors that successfully prevented harm from coming to us. The conscious mind provides logic, strategy, and the primary conduit through which the other two mind states can be expressed. The conscious mind includes the ability to observe oneself, and to inhibit or excite the autonomic nervous system. We know when the unconscious or subconscious mind-states are operating through our mouth when we have the experience of hearing ourselves say something that we didn’t plan. You know the feeling. You hear yourself speak, and your immediate thought is “Where the heck did that come from??”
To prevent a conflict experience from being hijacked by the subconscious and unconscious mind states, which would reduce the chance of a constructive outcome, it is important to take into account the three components of mind. First, it’s useful to understand how one’s own history of conflict has contributed to how one reacts. A second ingredient is to desensitize oneself to the fight-or-flight response. To do this, one has to get enough conflict experience to no longer be surprised or reactive to the state of conflict. This is where scripting and rehearsal come in. The more we practice the confrontation, the more likely we’ll be able to prevent our animalistic reactions, instead facing conflict calmly. Scripting and rehearsal also prevent us from saying something that we can never retract. Words are very powerful. They can create lasting friendships or enduring enmity.
Practicing to be authentic is like a musician playing scales of all the modes, hour after hour, year after year. One day, the musician spontaneously creates new phrasing, melody or arrangement. Improvising without conscious thought, the musician expresses her most authentic self, because the music incorporates all of her mind states simultaneously, in an instant of beautiful truth.