Tara Parker-Pope has written a fascinating article showing that the way you argue with your spouse impacts your health—as much as if you smoked cigarettes! Check it out in The New York Times.

This topic interests me because we’ve often found that the way you argue—the way you handle crucial conversations—determines your success in a wide variety of business and personal settings. And now evidence is piling up that communication style also impacts your health.

In our book, Influencer: The Power to Change Anything, we devote an important chapter to vital behaviors. We describe vital behaviors as the two or three concrete actions that, if consistently practiced, will produce the change you’re after. In most areas there are two or three actions that either lead directly to the results you want, disrupt negative cycles of bad behavior, or pull a whole host of positive behaviors with them. If you can find these few vital behaviors and influence them, then change will follow.

The ability to effectively handle disagreements—to stay in constructive and caring dialogue instead of descending into cold silence or escalating into an angry outburst—may be the vital behavior of all vital behaviors. One of the directions we’ve taken in our research over the last few years has been to identify crucial moments—times when a crucial conversation can tip an organization toward either failure or success.

In healthcare we found seven crucial moments—situations that are simultaneously common, imperative, and difficult to discuss. The vital behavior in each of these crucial moments is to have a crucial conversation rather then allow the issue to remain undiscussible. Individuals who find themselves in one of these seven crucial moments, needs to speak up in an effective way. You can read about this research at www.silencekills.com

We’ve also studied organization-wide changes, such as mergers, corporate restructurings, major quality projects, re-engineering, and other enterprise-wide initiatives. Here we found five crucial moments that must go well. Again, each required a crucial conversation. You can read about this research at www.silencefails.com or read the published article in this summer’s MIT Sloan Management Review.

So now the evidence is growing that crucial conversations, when poorly handled, affect your health. It’s interesting that the impact on health wasn’t due to the problems a couple faces or whether they describe their marriage as "happy.” The health impacts were driven by the vital behavior: how well they handle specific disagreements. It would be interesting to see if we can identify the crucial moments—the five to seven kinds of disagreements—that have the greatest health impacts.

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Posted by David Maxfield on October 4, 2007 7:08:00 PM MDT #