 So, welcome everybody, thank you for joining us. This is fixing the mistakes we all make as developers, teams and leaders. We are of the, okay, let's start with introducing ourselves. I'm Jordana Fung, I'm a volunteer member of the Drupal Community Working Group. I am from Suriname, South America, where our first language is Dutch. And I also speak English as you can tell. And this is Jackie. Yeah, hi. I'm Jackie Young. I also go by Jackie Tenderwolf. And I am an aspiring and new freelance web developer. I'm taking Drupal Easy at the moment. In my past life, I'm an auctioneer. I'll be happy to do some bid calling later. I studied to be a PST therapist, which is what I'm drawing from today for this topic. Which is about communicating better. And right now I live in Tennessee, in the USA. So we are both of the opinion that we don't invest enough time in working and investing in our personal skills, because we tend to do that heavily for our development skills. So this is kind of what the talk is going to be more focused about. So just FYI, we are not experts. We don't have everything figured out. I make mistakes all of the time. If you know me, I'm very clumsy and you would probably see me fall at some point. So this is a talk about learning as we go. So in a few minutes, we're going to take turns today talking about different things related to communicating well. I picked out, so before all of this started for me, before I joined the Drupal community, I was in an intentional community, a lifestyle community, in Atlanta, Georgia. And we talked a lot about, I taught courses and communications. You can imagine living with a group of people. You have the need to communicate well frequently. And so we all learn techniques for this. Now on this slide, I'm saying that I'm a work in progress. I say that as a disclaimer and that I'm not a master of these techniques. I have been known to lose my temper. You can ask Hawkeye Tender Wolf about that. And yet today I want to pull some of the main ideas, some of the most helpful things that I have found in my life for communicating well. So let's start talking about the thing that makes us all work, right? Our brains. So if we stop and think about the thing that makes us think, we can kind of enjoy that the brain is really amazing. It does all of these things for us without us knowing about it, right? Everything happens automatically, right? So we learn something and then we automatically do it, like learning to walk, for example. Think about if you had to consciously think about every step you had to make. You would be tired within two hours of waking up, right? So what happens is our prefrontal cortex sends signals to other parts of the brain. And when we learn something, those inputs start to fade and loops happen. So those loops together with the memory circuits of our brain allow us to carry out behavior without thinking about it consciously. That's pretty great because it frees up a lot of time and spare processing power for us to do things. So one of the negative things about that is things turning to habits without us maybe not necessarily wanting it to. So the brain is amazing, but the brain can also trick us, right? So those habits sometimes turn into biases. And if you look for it, there are so many different biases we have. Something, for example, we all have, and if you think you don't have it, you might have it more than you, it might be worse. So one of the things that confirmation bias is if we already believe something, we will actively seek out things that enforce those beliefs. So why I'm talking about this is awareness about this helps us actually get better at figuring out how that happens and how we can learn from it and how we can change some of those things. So Jackie has also been to talk a little bit more about the brain. So there's the brain, the picture of our brain. And so when Jordan and I decided to present this information together, we found that there's quite a bit of overlap and yet slightly different takes on some of it. So in this case, I'm going to talk about the science and physiognomy of the brain just briefly. So which it's a very complex, fascinating topic, but I'm going to simplify it by talking about two main parts of the brain. So we have the primitives and we have the ambassadors. And so if you're interested in this terminology, I pulled it from a book called Wired for Love by Stan Tatkin. In it, he really details this information in a way that was very understandable to me, even though it's certainly not unique to him. So I'm pointing here to the primitives of the brain, which reside very deep within the brain, close to the brainstem. The primitives have various, very serious, important functions related to survival. Evolutionarily speaking, they're the oldest part of our brain, what helped us be so many of us today. Sure. Is that better? Right on. Thank you. So these parts of our brain, our primitives, are constantly searching the environment for threats. Looking for threat signals, words, sounds, movements, anything that can feel like danger. They pick these up, they cause alarm. They also release chemicals in the brain and instruct glands in the body to release further stress chemicals. So these chemicals, their function is to heighten our awareness, our response time, they slow our digestion, they free up resources away from breathing, so that we can direct energy into our muscles. So most of us have heard of fight, flight, or freeze. And this is the process that's happening when this part of our brain is triggered. So this primitive design is really useful, but in our day-to-day life, life-threatening kinds of situations aren't that often. However, it's still there and still waiting, it's like just waiting to be used. So once this whole system gets triggered and you're in that fight, flight, or freeze mode, you have just a few seconds, honestly, to become aware of it. Before the system takes over, your body's flooded with chemicals, and then that takes at least 20 minutes before it will all flood out. So yeah, so when we talk about biases as well, we also talk about triggers. So what she was talking about, how your brain gets triggered, that's where the word comes from when you're talking about what you said triggered me, because it creates this kind of rush in your body, where sometimes you can't always control it. So this is what she's talking about, like all of these things are coming from some base programming we have. So I thought that was an interesting... Yeah, our base programming is strike first, ask questions later, right? So here in this slide, I'm pointing to the ambassadors, which are in the front of our brain, a more evolved part. They're higher up, again, I'm simplifying, but these parts of our brain help us remember the past, the recent past, the distant past, and compare what's happening right now with that information. We have a part of our brain that is empathic and can help us feel, have access to our feelings, and we have other parts of our brain that give us cognitive reasoning, so that we can think our way out. So you can both feel and think your way out of a trigger. And then this is right here, right up front, is where we have our empathic center, so that we can be aware of how the signals we're receiving from other people and feel what they might be feeling. All right, so that's enough from me about the brain. So when we talk about all of these things and why we think communication is important, we are realizing more and more now, this is the end of the rock star developer, right? We don't live in a bubble anymore. Most of our time is actually working on teams and communicating with each other, so this is why the importance of effective communication has taken over where, when people are hiring more, they are not just looking at your development skills, they're also looking at your personal skills, because that can make or break a team, right? They can create toxic environments. So Google did a whole study of what makes teams great, and they realized communicating well is basically at the heart of all of this stuff. And the sick, I love this quote, we often think we communicate well, but sometimes we miss the picture. So oftentimes we kind of have to make sure that what we are saying is heard, that we are actually communicating well, because the single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that has taken place. I like to say I am a Spanish, I'm kind of, I'm going to use a bad word, I half ask Spanish, like I know some words and I always feel like when people are speaking in Spanish around me, I understand most of it. But then when I go back and say, oh, you talked about this in English, they're like, no, that's not at all what we talked about. And I'm like, okay, so half of the time I really am not understanding anything at all. So don't assume that when you're talking to somebody, you're on the same page, because you may be actually in completely different books and different libraries. So make sure that your goals are clear and just double check with each other, like, do you get what I'm saying? Does that make sense? Does that make sense? Good, great. So if there's one thing you take away from my part of this, I would love that you remember this thing. At the CWG, this is a thing you try to do. This is where we start from. A lot of the times when we talk, we're not listening to understand. We're waiting for our turn to talk. And that's like an amazingly, amazingly ineffective way of communicating. You can think about it. You already know your own thoughts. You already know your own values, your belief system, your own opinion on the thing. So when you're already thinking about what you're going to say during the conversation, you're like losing, oftentimes, some of the information that's being brought to you from the other person. So a little tip I use when I am trying to figure out something or listen to somebody or try to understand them is I try to see it as an interview. So I'm asking questions to understand something better and just listening and not trying to push my opinion or my thoughts onto the other person. So having said that, by starting with trying to understand, sometimes we have the best intentions when we do stuff, but the impact of it is completely different. So when somebody comes to you to tell you something, that something hurt them or they're not getting something, don't minimize it. Don't minimize others just because you don't understand it because there might be a whole frame of reference that you might be missing, a cultural difference, something they grew up with, a trauma, a trigger, that's there and you don't even realize it. So something small for you could be something humongous and heartbreaking for someone else. And to expand on some of these things and communicating better, Jackie has a few tips and thoughts. So in this, what I'm going to talk about now, this is a very deliberate form of communicating, meaning that possibly you've already felt strongly about something and expressed your views and maybe not in the cleanest way, but maybe made a little bit of a mess. So we call this, this is from my community. We called these hot topic conversations. And in our community, we had that vocabulary. We could say, hi, I would like to schedule a hot topic conversation with you. And that communicated a whole lot of information that I intend to talk about ideas and I feel strongly about them. And I want to be prepared and I want you to be prepared and I want us to come together in a deliberate scheduled way for this conversation. So in the real world, so you might want to just let the person know, hey, I want to have a conversation with you about something I feel strongly about and that you may feel strongly about too. So in that way, it's scheduled, it's deliberate, everyone has a chance to prepare and feel their feelings, right? So Tradana said she had one thing she wanted to leave, everyone to leave with, this is the one thing for me that I hope that you'll leave with. And that is that when you're in, to communicate well, you have to be aware, you must remain aware of both the ideas in the room and the feelings in the room. And when you're with very smart people, sometimes it's the ideas that are easiest to remain aware of and it's the feelings that are the harder. Make sure I've got notes. So a hot topic conversation is precisely this. So it's a deliberate and scheduled event and you're going into the room with this idea that you want to change or improve something. Now why do I say that here? Because this is most certainly not a complaint session or a gripe session, which I think has value, you know, certainly among friends to just complain about things. But when you walk into a room like this, it's progressive, it's intended to be productive. So you have a goal in mind. It's also true when you're in these situations that you feel strongly about it. You want something and you recognize that the other person or other people may feel that way too. Okay. All right. So, preparation for me, this quote from Catherine Coles is really important to me. So how do you prepare for a hot topic conversation? It starts with self-care. What does she say? Am I not there yet? There we go. She says, the ideal first step is for you to self-reflect before you respond. In those moments of self-reflection, you tune into yourself and ask yourself these questions. What is my state of mind right now? Am I calm, loving and accepting or am I angry, frustrated and critical? If you are not in a calm, loving and accepting place, stop. You will accomplish little by approaching someone in the state of mind. Now, Catherine wrote about raising children, but I think this applies for adults and dogs and coworkers and your partner applies everywhere. So self-care, what does that even mean? All right. So I have this picture of a robot, a bunch of different robots, because I think of all of us in this room. We talked about we all have similar brains, we all have a survival programming. Well, yeah, we're all more alike. As humans, we're more alike than we are different. And that doesn't matter where you're from, what language you speak. If you're a woman or a man or how old you are, we're all more alike than we are different. However, the differences are where the fun is. The differences is what makes us interesting. And so each of us is gonna have a different way of self-care. And so many of you may already have one. You know, a process of how do you care for your robot, self, and bravo if you do. I have a rather complicated process of self-care that involves meditation and yoga and walking and music. What do you need? You know, I actually overheard someone last night talking about body work and that if they work so hard that they're like, oh, you know, don't take notice. Well, if you're not in your best self, if you don't feel good in your body, it's going to be hard to communicate well. So if you don't have a self-care routine, or you're not thinking about it, this is a wake-up call that you really should be. Like sometimes that just means saying no detains. So, yeah, sure. So the self-care is about promoting a feeling of safety. In your own skin. For the purpose of a hot topic conversation, you're walking into a scheduled meeting where there may be strong feelings. You and everyone else in the room will be human with basic brain programming, which can be quite volatile and violent if triggered. Safety is your main concern. When it's safe, people can talk about anything. We can talk about very critical ideas if you feel safe. So, how do you keep your ambassadors online when your primitives think there's a job to be done? I think it boils down to awareness. You know, asking, giving your brain a complex goal. Such as, how do I communicate my ideas and hear their ideas while building this relationship? How can this relationship, or how can the feelings in this room be as important as the thoughts that I have? And that complex question can keep everything online. That's a hard question to answer. And so, your brain who likes complex thoughts can have something to chew on there. So, maintaining two levels of awareness. This is another way of saying the same thing. We don't want our lizard brains taking over, right? So, to create a feeling of safety, two things that can help or sandwich the whole experience is this idea of acknowledgement and then gratitude. So, you have acknowledgement, you can acknowledge that you have similar goals. We both want the best for the project, or we want the best for this relationship. That's a similar goal. And you can acknowledge that in the other person. And you can have gratitude that you have something like this to work on together. And, to me, those two feelings, sandwiching any ideas between acknowledgement and gratitude is a way to elevate the conversation to something very productive. So, about gratitude, when we do meetups, we do standups, or we talk about mistakes that have been made. Yes, there are gonna be things, the hard topics we talk about, but there are always things that went well as well. So, and we tend to forget to acknowledge those things, which is an important part of kind of realizing that there's a bigger picture. We're not just focusing on the things we need to improve, but we're also appreciating the things that, how far we've come. Yeah, so acknowledging gratitude or habits as much as anything else. Okay, so here's some techniques, some actual techniques for keeping things safe in a room. And the first is stepping in and stepping out. And this comes from a book called Crucial Conversations, if anyone's familiar with that. So, stepping in and stepping out is a way to, instead of simultaneously keeping the ideas and the feelings in your mind at the same time, it's compartmentalizing. So, beginning with how does it feel in the room? And then, when it feels safe, and everyone feels acknowledged, everyone knows that they're welcome and their ideas are welcome and that they are safe, then beginning to converse. And the moment that it feels like tempers are rising or people aren't talking from their heart anymore, maybe they're getting violent. Whether that's through silence or actual violence, you know, is to step back, to step out of the conversation and figure out how to promote safety again. So, I realized that I'm well aware of certain triggers I have now, but I wasn't exactly sure what to do. So, being aware of your trigger is great. So, now when I know I'm not at a constructive phase anymore, I have a thing where I say, this seems really interesting and I really want to continue about this, but right now I can't. And I will just run away from the conversation as needed because you're creating space, safe space for you and for the other person, maybe even, because when you're not thinking clearly anymore, when you're triggered, you're not at your best self. So, earlier I should have mentioned that everybody in this room, I'm grateful that you're here. To me, you have to have a lot of other things sort of handled in life, survival things. You have to be sort of functioning well to want to be talking about communicating better. So, thank you for being here and thank you for wanting to be your best selves. So, the next technique that I use, I mean, every day, whether it's in a deliberate scheduled meeting or just in my daily life is to repeat what I heard. Yeah, so, if someone says something to you, you say, may I repeat what I heard? I just heard you say. You say it back to them. That gives them, first of all, that makes people feel heard, that you are listening and acutely. And then it gives them an opportunity to either say, yeah, you got that right, or say, well, not exactly, here's what I really meant. And this technique slows the conversation. It has the effect of slowing the conversation down so that everyone can be heard and understood. So, those two techniques, these are the two techniques I recommend. Stepping in, stepping out, that's where you have not simultaneous, but sort of back and forth between ideas and feelings. And this idea of paying attention and up to someone that you can repeat back what you heard before you say your piece. Moderator can be helpful. We used to say that it only takes one sane person in the room to keep the conversation civil. It's kind of helpful to have someone in the room who's whole purpose is to keep it nice. How you doing? All right, this is a little gift. When I first started therapy, or taking my therapy training, it came to my attention that not everyone actually knows what they're feeling. So you can say, how are you feeling? And they'd be like, I don't know, hungry? That is not what I mean. So, sachets is a good little, it's a very short list, but it's something you can remember. How am I feeling? Well, I might be feeling sad, angry, scared, happy, excited, tender, or shame. So, if you want a much more comprehensive list of possible feelings that you may be having, the nonviolent communication website has a very long list. It's just kind of fun to even just go through those lists. So, when you asked me how am I feeling, and I said good, that wasn't, that wasn't what I was supposed to say. I'm happy that there are so many people here and to be able to enjoy Drupal Con with you guys. Bravo. Okay, here's some books I referenced. The first one is how to get along with your partner. Second one is how to get along with your colleagues. The third one is how to get along with your children. And the final one is how to get along with your dog. I'm hoping those are not gonna all be the same person, but all right. Another thing I kind of wanted to highlight again is the whole thing about intent versus impact. We say like intent does not erase impact because we often heard like, yeah, well, I didn't mean to. It really doesn't matter because you could have had the best intentions, but if you still made me feel awful, that feeling is still there, even though it does help that you had good intentions, but it doesn't erase the fact that the impact it had. This is why we kind of like focus on making sure that we've heard each other. So, for example, going back and saying, so what I'm understanding is this is how you felt, this is what you said. It's such a great tool in communicating effectively because you're making sure you guys understand each other and you give the opportunity for somebody to jump in and say, no, that's not at all how I felt or this is, or you got, like she said, like you got it right. So, if you guys have any questions or comments. Or if you wanna hear about the vagus nerve or if you wanna hear about the vagus nerve. Vagus nerve, vagus, vagus and overdose. Okay, so I put this slide in here in case we had a little bit of extra time. So, we talked a little bit about the brain. There's something else there. Maybe people know about it already, but it's your ventral vagus nerve. You have a dorsal and a ventral vagus nerve. And this nerve runs from your brain. Do you know this? Brain all the way down to your throat into your heart, down to your tummy and all the way down to your colon. There's a very long nerve. We have, we can affect this nerve by breathing. We actually can massage this nerve and calm ourselves down all the way down to the very root of our feet by breathing. So, that's why it's a very effective technique. If you find yourself coming up here, you know, and accelerating, your heart rate starts to go and your breath starts to get short. You know, these are classic symptoms of your brainstem triggering. Your survival, well, you can breathe that down. That's the one technique that I find so useful, just like, yeah. So, when we started, when we were up here, like nerves hit, and especially when I saw it as many people, I was like, oh, okay. This is happening. This is an actual thing to help, like calming my breath helped me quite a bit in dealing with that anxiety. So, breathing and just taking a moment of realizing what you're feeling and calming the heck down helps a lot with nerves and be able to be actually being able to talk to you like this. I might also be pretending like you guys are all in your, you know, really happy to see me and we're all good friends, but this is also like just a mental thing I'm doing. So. Does anybody have any questions or want to talk about anything? Yeah, go ahead. I was wondering if you could maybe tell us a story of when either of you went into a meeting and you felt that the room was tense, the conversation got pretty tense and then what it was exactly that you did, kind of the thought processes and then the actions that kind of brought the room sort of back to a more like safe, stable place. Sure. We have this a lot as a community working group members where we come into a very loaded room. So, being the moderator is being, making sure that you are the calm, calm and respectful one, making sure everybody's heard, but actually sometimes identifying that there is tension also helps settle it down because sometimes we're not aware that people, sometimes people are not aware how angry they're being or the things that they're like pushing out. So, identifying that this is going to be difficult and what's happening already, sometimes already calms down a little bit and basically just making sure that you're creating a safe space. So saying what are the rules? How are you going to communicate and kind of make sure that we're all level set and setting the tone for how it's going to continue even if before that, that's not what was happening. So. Thank you for asking that question. What comes to mind for me is yeah, frequently in meetings where things feel tense. And I think that negative feelings are kind of like mushrooms, right? They thrive in the dark. And so the moment you throw light on the situation and say, hey, it feels a little tense in the room. And suddenly just the acknowledgement of that feeling will sometimes dissipate that feeling. And I also don't, I think that you can't underestimate how powerful acknowledging another person can be. I think most of us walk around a little bit short of acknowledgement. So in a room like that, if you can say, hey, I really appreciate this about you or what you did, your contribution really mattered to me. It helped me. Maybe then you have room for conversation again. And the same thing, maybe instead of focusing on the negative things, recognizing, expressing gratitude or recognizing the things that have went well. Again, about saying like, for example, in a stressful community working group situation, we will thank the people for actually taking the time and trying to work through it and contacting us because that's already a big step, right? To take the time to acknowledge what's happening and to try to work through it. Because a lot of people can also say like, I'm not gonna deal with this. So the fact that you are willing to deal with it is already a great wonderful first step and acknowledging that and kind of like promoting positivity that way. And I don't know if the other CWG member in the room has any tips or tricks to say. All right. Yeah, anything more? So then, if we do have some extra time, the things we'd like to plug, if we have, the community working group has been working together with lots of different folks on code of conduct training and code of conduct templates and a playbook. This is something very interesting to do and to read through even if you don't have an event. But it has these, it's talking about dealing with these hot topic conversations or these high stress situations where you're gonna have to talk about something difficult and how best to approach it. Thank you all.