Engaging through frustration, disconnection and alienation

A reader asked about how to engage when this happens:

• Someone asks what they can do to support you and you don't know what will help.
• Someone does something you don't like and you're so busy being shocked or wondering what to say, you look happy or compliant.
• When you have a lot of tasks and are firefighting — especially when wrong information is also involved — you feel like you can't act, and will be overly emotional.

The situation described above is about how we engage on an interpersonal level when we are physically, emotionally and mentally alienated and in a different lane to someone else.

For those who think about engagement as a commercial metric, this may seem irrelevant. But the concept and processes of engagement remain consistent in any situation where humans engage — interpersonally at work, in marriages and families, in customer service, across a siloed organisation, in geopolitics, and in market forces as customers interact with products and new technologies.

A few thoughts:

1. Keep communication going, little and often

When we let customers down, go through messy organisational change, have hard family times, or go through political unrest, we can let communication be the first casualty. We release a single press release or email, and then fold our arms.

Communication is oxygen. You've got to breathe more than once. And clear communication is pure oxygen. Keep communicating, little and often — just like how we breathe.

2. Use the past-present-future method

A useful way to hold conversations:

• Past: What is our shared story up until now?
• Present: What is currently needed?
• Future: Why is this needed, and where will we end up?

By framing the narrative and the journey, we anchor ourselves.

3. Or, keep coming back to the WHY and to the WIN (What's Important Now)

This is more action-oriented, for when you don't have the luxury of a longer recap. It's very good for quickly engaging those who want action over talking.

4. Don't pre-judge YOURSELF through other's eyes

Often we are silent in these situations because we are perfectionists or overly compliant, wondering how we appear to others. In close relationships, this is agony to live in. Imagine how hard this is at an organisational level.

Rather than asking "stupid questions", we can use these methods to seem very intelligent indeed.