Communicating and leading, one lesson a day

Imagine you manage a public greenhouse. You arrive on a cold morning and find three benches of seedlings near an open vent. The temperature log shows a sharp drop overnight. At ten, you have to meet with the weekend volunteers, and your first thought is immediate: they did not take the closing checklist seriously.

That thought feels like a fact. It is not. It may turn out to be true, but right now it is a story attached to a fact. Learning to separate those two things is one of the most useful communication skills you can build.

The model comes from cognitive therapy. Albert Ellis called it the A-B-C model. A is the activating event. C is the emotional consequence. Most of us experience life as though A causes C: the vent was open, so I became angry. But B sits between them. B is the belief, the sentence your mind supplied in a fraction of a second. The volunteers were careless. They do not respect the work. I am going to be left cleaning this up.

The anger lives in those sentences, not in the temperature log.

That does not mean nothing went wrong. It means facts and interpretations need different handling. A camera could record an open vent, a low reading, and damaged leaves. It could not record that someone did not care. That is mind reading, one of the patterns David Burns describes as a cognitive distortion. You might add all-or-nothing thinking: the whole volunteer system is useless. Or overgeneralizing: this always happens when I am away. Or personalization: they left this mess for me.

You do not have to pretend the seedlings are fine. You do have to stop treating a guess about motive as evidence.

This matters because the usual plan for an angry meeting is suppression. You tell yourself not to let the anger show. James Gross's research on emotion regulation found that suppression carries a cost. Your body stays activated, the person you are talking to gets more stressed too, and you remember less of the conversation. You look controlled without becoming clear.

Reappraisal works differently. You find another reading that fits the known facts. Perhaps the latch did not catch. Perhaps someone opened the vent because the afternoon was unusually warm and forgot to add a second check after sunset. Perhaps the checklist is vague about who makes the final round. None of those explanations excuses the failure. They change your role from prosecutor to investigator.

A useful reappraisal here is: the closing system failed, and I need to find the weak point. That sentence preserves the loss and removes the invented motive. It gives you a problem you can solve with the people in the room.

If the heat rises during the meeting, use affect labeling. Matthew Lieberman's research found that naming a feeling can reduce its intensity. Say silently and precisely: I am angry because I believe people were careless with living things. A full sentence is better than a command to calm down. Naming the feeling moves it from an alarm you obey to information you can examine.

Then make the conversation useful. DEAR MAN, an interpersonal skill created by Marsha Linehan, gives you a clean structure. Start with Describe: only what a camera could see. The east vent was open at seven, the room reached forty-one degrees, and eighteen trays were affected. Express how it sits with you, without accusing anyone: I am worried we may lose two weeks of growth, and I cannot protect the collection without a reliable close. Assert what you need: I need one named closer and a photo of the latched vents after every weekend shift. Reinforce the benefit: then volunteers can run the house independently, and nobody has to come back at night to double-check.

The rest of DEAR MAN helps you hold the line. Stay mindful when the conversation drifts toward who usually does more work or whether the old latch is terrible. Return to the ask. Appear confident by speaking slowly and without piling on evidence. Negotiate the method if someone has a better way to create a reliable final check, but do not negotiate away the result.

Ask questions before settling on a cause. Who made the final round? What did the latch feel like? When did the temperature begin falling? Curiosity is not avoidance. It is how you keep the first story your brain produced from becoming the team's official explanation without evidence.

Notice what this approach does not require. You do not have to stop caring about the plants. You do not have to decide in advance that nobody made a mistake. You only have to give facts, motives, and requests their proper places. Facts begin the conversation. Questions uncover causes. A request changes what happens next.

One thing to try today: before a conversation you expect to enter angry, write three lines. First, the event a camera could record. Second, the story your mind attached to it. Third, another explanation that fits the same evidence and turns you toward a solution. Cross out the story, keep the facts, and use the new sentence to choose your posture. If the feeling returns, name it privately. Then describe, express, assert, and reinforce.

That is the lesson. Events matter, but the sentence between the event and the feeling shapes what you do next. Write that sentence carefully, and you can be both honest and effective.

Sources for today: Albert Ellis on the A-B-C model. Aaron Beck, Cognitive Therapy and the Emotional Disorders. David Burns, Feeling Good. James Gross on emotion regulation and reappraisal. Matthew Lieberman and colleagues, Putting Feelings Into Words. Marsha Linehan, DBT Skills Training Manual, on DEAR MAN.