If you try to put out a fire with more fire you can only guess the result. Yep, you guessed it, more fire.

Similarly, the result of countering a passionately argued topic with equal or more passion will likely result in increasing amounts of passion and two closed perspectives.

A proactive approach to passionately argued topics or communication, in general, is outlined below:

1. Have a calm voice. Put a smile on your face, relax and try ending your sentences at a lower pitch than how you began them. This will create a sense of trust and good intention that will help you to reach a win-win. Additionally, a smile is also scientifically proven to make people more likely to collaborate and problem solve rather than resist.
2. Mirror. A mirror reflects an image, a good listener reflects what they hear. This serves the obvious purpose of ensuring clarity when you repeat back what you heard and it gives the person speaking to you the opportunity to confirm or correct what you heard. Additionally, if someone is making an unreasonable claim often hearing it reflected back to them allows personal reflection that leads to a constructive conclusion they can reach on their own.
3. Silence. It’s ok to be silent. Great orators control an audience by increasing and decreasing their tone of voice as well as the speed which they spoke. So to can you practice control and by becoming more comfortable with silence.
4. Repeat. There was an experiment with waiters that displayed two different behaviors. One group of waiters would repeat the orders of their customers back to them and the other group would respond with vague exclamations like, perfect, no problem. By a landslide, the waiters that repeated back the order got high tips. People like to feel heard and repeating back what you hear is an important step in that direction.
5. Seek first to understand then be understood. A 10,000 view of human psychology divides emotion into two categories, the behavior, the external evidence of beliefs, and the feelings or motives behind the behavior. Agreeing with another person’s values and beliefs is sympathy. However understanding a situation from another person perspective is the tactical empath, a step beyond. Tactical empathy is understanding what is behind those feelings so you can increase your understanding and problem-solving skills.

Next time you find yourself in a heated discussion, I hope you can find these tools helpful and being a new chapter of countering fire with water.