The defense mechanism

One reason people don’t listen carefully during a negotiation is purely psychological. Generally speaking, people don’t want to get bad news. Some people state this derisively, as in, “Oh, he just hears what he wants to hear.” Catchphrases like that almost always have more than a kernel of truth in them. In fact, everyone filters out bad news to one extent or another. Every animal has stunning built-in survival mechanisms. One of the most important survival mechanisms is to hear danger coming. A predator, a fire, even a storm all have some advance warning signals that animals that want to avoid danger must hear and assess. Animals run from approaching danger. Although humans have retained many useful self-defense mechanisms, such as blinking, ducking, and flinching in the face of danger, we seem to have lost a very important one — the ability to hear danger coming. Perhaps we’ve decided that simply not hearing the danger is a better approach than hearing and, subsequently, having to deal with it. Not so. This is one case where animals are more advanced than humans are. Only when you hear and can accurately assess the danger you face are you in a position to avoid or defuse it. In fact, you should force yourself to probe even deeper if you suspect that bad news is lurking.

People use defense mechanisms in different ways. Some scream and holler, causing others to flinch. Some cave in to the predatory aspects of aggressors and instead hold in frustrations or grievances, using silence as a defense. The best thing to do is listen. In this modern world, words — not winds or sounds or temperature shifts — are the harbinger of bad news. In the workplace, you don’t have to worry about a physical attack. You have to worry about a future event that you can only learn about if you hear or read about it. So listen. Listen very carefully. It’s important for you to get as much detail as possible about whatever bad thing is coming your way. Unlike an animal that must run away from danger, you must stand and listen and absorb as much information as you can.

Barton Fink, by the Coen brothers, exemplifies not listening as a defense mechanism in all its glory. The film is about a newly successful New York playwright, Barton Fink, played by John Turturro, who accepts an offer to write a film while living in a creepy Los Angeles hotel. He finds himself with writer’s block. The Hollywood studio chief who hires Fink to write the picture is Jack Lipnick, played by Michael Lerner, a loud, brash, overbearing executive based on MGM’s legendary Louis B. Mayer. Watch the scene where Fink has his first meeting with Lipnick. Instead of listening to Fink, Lipnick uses every scare tactic in the book to command the room. Because he failed to hear Fink, Lipnick thinks he gets what he wants. In this case, he commissions Fink to take the writing job. If he had listened, he would have heard the bad news that Fink was not the man for the job. He would have known that Fink simply wasn’t going to write the script. He would have been a lot better off hiring someone who at least wanted to try to write the script.