A Hostage Negotiator Made Me a Better Writer

A while back, a freelance opportunity landed in my lap. I was excited about it right up until the first few minutes of the call, when I became increasingly convinced that either I had misunderstood the project or the person on the other end had misunderstood me. This did not sound like a fit at all.

As they kept talking, I could feel myself getting irritated. Had they looked at my website? Did they know what I actually did? I had spent an absurd amount of time making all of that clear. Surely the evidence was sitting right there on the internet, beautifully organized and probably revised seventeen times.

Then came the less flattering realization: I was annoyed because this person had failed to correctly interpret me, while they were calling because they had a problem of their own.

Well, that's inconvenient.

They weren't studying my website in hopes of achieving a deeper understanding of Monica Chase. They were trying to figure out whether I could help them with something. Their attention was exactly where you would expect it to be: on the problem that had caused them to pick up the phone.

I had somehow decided they should first climb into my world, understand my skills, appreciate how everything connected, and then translate all of that back into their needs.

In other words, I wanted them to do my part of the conversation too.

Once I saw it, I couldn't unsee it.

I've always been fascinated by the machinery of personality. I've taken the assessments, read the books, learned the acronyms and dutifully discovered, over and over, that I remain essentially the same person. Apparently the next quiz is not going to reveal that I've secretly been an easygoing improvisational extrovert all along.

There is value in understanding how we operate. I like knowing what I'm good at, where my blind spots tend to be, what motivates me, and why certain situations drain me faster than others. But all of that self-knowledge can become surprisingly self-centered if I'm not careful.

Knowing myself better does not automatically make me better at understanding someone else.

That phone call was a good reminder. Instead of mentally building a case for why the other person had assessed me incorrectly, I started listening for what they were actually trying to solve. What were they worried about? Where were they stuck? What did they need from whoever took this on?

The conversation changed almost immediately. Not because I suddenly became more qualified. Not because they finally studied my résumé properly. We simply stopped talking past each other.

It reminded me of something I'd taken from Chris Voss's Never Split the Difference, particularly the idea of tactical empathy. The phrase sounds slightly sinister until you understand what it means: make the effort to understand the other person's position well enough that they feel understood. You're not agreeing with everything they say or manipulating them into submission. You're demonstrating that you've actually heard them.

Simple concept. Much harder in practice, especially when your internal narrator is busy yelling, BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT I MEANT.

Writers run into a version of this constantly.

We know what we meant. We know why a character made a particular choice, what a paragraph is supposed to convey, why a story begins where it does. We've lived with the thing for months, sometimes years. Then a reader, editor, or beta reader comes along and interprets it differently.

The first instinct can be to explain. No, see, what I was trying to do was...

Which may be useful during a conversation, but it doesn't change what was actually on the page. If several people miss something I thought was obvious, eventually I have to consider the possibility that it was obvious only to the person who already knew it. Annoying, but useful.

I've started carrying that lesson into more than writing. When a conversation isn't going the way I expected, I try to notice when I'm spending more energy defending how I should be understood than figuring out what the other person is actually saying.

Sometimes I've been unclear. Sometimes they're coming at the problem from a completely different angle. Sometimes we simply aren't a fit, and no amount of empathy or communication wizardry is going to change that. That's okay too.

The goal isn't to become so skilled at understanding other people that nobody ever misunderstands you again. That seems both exhausting and wildly unrealistic.

For me, the useful question is much smaller:

Am I asking this person to understand me before I've made any real effort to understand them?

That one has saved me more than once. Including, as it turns out, from an extremely awkward freelance call.

Photo by Zuzana Ruttkay on Unsplash