No matter how big an iceberg appears to be, it is always bigger under the surface of the water. Someone who is looking just at what they can see above the water’s surface is only getting part of the picture, so they’re missing a lot of information about the iceberg. Just as an iceberg has much more going on under the surface, so does communication. A lot of communication occurs without speaking, with body language and facial expressions conveying a great deal of information. Additionally, when someone does speak, they can reveal a lot through the words they avoid, the words they choose, and how they use them.
Many exchanges that I see on a regular basis (as well as many more that I once participated in) only focus on what is immediately visible. An individual’s basic worldview, values, opinions on existing problems, and proposed solutions to those problems are frequently overlooked in such exchanges and the focus is kept on one small aspect of whatever is being discussed. This prevents participants from finding areas in which they might see eye to eye and increases the chances of their dialogue going off the rails. When I’m centered, I can observe such an exchange and see that, more often than not, the issue is a lack of good communication rather than a difference in morality; two people can agree that something is a problem but disagree on the best way to solve that problem, and they both end up thinking that they’re on completely different pages when they actually agree for the most part. It’s much harder for me to do this when I’m in a difficult exchange, but I’ve managed to do it on a few occasions by keeping my emotions under control and keeping the bigger picture in mind.
Simon Sinek’s Start With Why has helped me a lot with this stuff. That book explains the importance of making your motivations clear to others and how much that does to facilitate good communication. Bringing to the surface everything that is normally hidden under rhetoric, assumptions, and limited thinking is a far better conversational approach than burying all of that stuff even deeper and making productive dialogue that much more difficult. So if you find yourself in a difficult situation, take a page from Start With Why and think about what’s going on under the surface of that exchange. That simple mindset shift can make all the difference and turn a hostile exchange into a civil conversation.