In the security industry and other related fields a lot of emphasis is being given to the provision of Conflict Management Training, the thrust of which is based on what a person needs to say and do to  ‘control’ another person’s disruptive, challenging, angry or aggressive behaviour.

As such the content of a lot of training programmes focus on the inter-personal communication and de-escalation skills that are taught to staff as a means of providing them with the tools to manage the behaviour of another.

But what about us? What if what we are being told to do doesn’t make us feel good about ourselves?

In many communications skills training packages very little guidance or training is given I how an individual should handle their own intra-personal communication, the internal dialogue that we have with ourselves – yes we all do it, we all talk to ourselves, and it doesn’t mean we are mad.

The fact is that the way we communicate with ourselves is as important, if not more important, than what we communicate externally.

Many of you reading this will be aware of verbal and non-verbal communication and that 93% of all communication is non-verbal. This is taken from the work of Albert Mehrabian who pre-disposed that only 7% of communication was the spoken word and the other 93% is made up of 38% tonality and 55% body language.

We are told that the non-verbal communication (the 93%) supports our verbal component in terms of the actual words spoken (the 7%) and that the non-verbal component of our communication also communicates the way we feel about what we are saying. In other words the outstanding conclusion from Albert Mehrabian work is that typically more than 90 percent of our ability to influence lies outside of the actual words we use.

And this is important. But what is possibly more important is that fact that what we communicate internally has direct implications for how we feel about ourselves and this can have far reaching effects in terms of not only our ability to get our external communication across in a genuine and empathetic manner, but also in relation to our health.

For example, if in an attempt to calm someone down who is being verbally challenging or aggressive, because it is your job to promote good customer service, you are taught to smile at them and talk nicely to them when internally you are saying to yourself I could kill them, you are communicating mixed messages.

And what if we manage to calm them down but walk away from the situation feeling as though we have been made to look stupid, or possibly still angry at their behaviour or the way they have made us feel, so we walk away generating negative internal dialogue, for example, ever had to smile at someone whilst saying to yourself “I could kill them”? This isn’t good for us.

How we feel about how others make us feel affects our heart.

In a study published in The Lancet two years ago, stress and other psychological factors were found to add more to the risk of heart disease than diabetes or having a family history of heart attacks. There is also a recognised medical condition - stress cardiomyopathy - in which the heart can be damaged with no signs of plaque or clots in the blood vessels which is brought on by intense stress, with sufferers having 30 times the normal level of the stress hormone adrenaline 30 I their bloodstream. This is not good.

The Lancet study also found that heart attack patients were significantly more stressed due to work, family or money problems than the healthy controls. Such factors were estimated to account for 30 per cent of heart attack risk.

Therefore, we may be able to ‘do’ the behaviour required but if by ‘doing’ we leave the situation with emotions of frustration, humiliation, injustice and / or threat we may be doing ourselves more harm than good. This type of ‘toxic emotion’ can have serious detrimental effects on our well-being.

Toxic emotion

David Beales is a Doctor who specialises in behavioural medicine. In a recent article which appeared in the Daily Mail on the 25 July 2006, he said: "The toxic emotion is hostility. Long term, it raises adrenaline levels, which increases cholesterol and makes it very hard to relax."

High levels of hostility significantly increase your chance of dying if you are under 60 or younger. According to a study in the journal Health Psychology, it might be a better predictor of risk of heart disease than traditional factors such as high cholesterol, smoking or excess weight.

Dr Beales shows his patients how negative emotions can alter the heart's rhythm with a device that monitors blood flow and connects to a computer with software that shows changes in heart rate variability (HRV).

"Patients can see on the screen the way their HRV changes as their emotions change," he says.

“When you have negative emotions, your HRV shows up as jagged and disorganized. But once you start focusing on positive emotions, the pattern becomes more coherent, lowering the levels of harmful inflammatory chemicals in the blood that raise the risk of heart attacks.”

Seeing these changes on a screen makes it much easier for Dr Beales to teach patients how to use emotions to influence their hearts in a positive way.

Research also shows that emotions can change the composition of your blood. Being depressed makes your blood stickier and more likely to clot, doubling your chances of having a heart attack. Positive emotions make blood composition healthy.

Happy people also have lower levels of the inflammatory stress hormone cortisol, which raises blood pressure, heart rate and cholesterol levels.

Other studies have also found that being optimistic can protect the heart. Out of 1,000 men and women studied for nine years, those who rated themselves as 'highly optimistic' were 23 per cent less likely to die of heart disease, regardless of their blood pressure or whether they smoked.

Know thyself

Understanding how to communicate wit ourselves more effectively should be a pre-requisite for all Conflict Management training for staff who are expected to communicate and de-escalate confrontational situations.

It is a perverse dichotomy that many staff are being trained in ‘customer care’ and ‘communications skills’ packages with a view to reducing conflict in the workplace may actually be a catalyst for increasing levels of stress in staff and as such the risk of staff suffering illness or disease as a result. In short it is a false economy.

The reality is that in today’s world we have at our fingertips the knowledge and research available to us to enable each individual to be able to know how to take control of their own internal dialogue, reduce personal stress levels, and lead more fulfilling and longer lives.

We are now providing enhanced training courses in customer care and conflict management training that are possibly some of the most forward thinking of their kind available.

The courses include training and instruction in positive psychology and NLP technology which allow staff to not only understand the corporate benefits of why good customer care is important, but also the personal benefits.

For more information on how we can assist you in developing a more productive customer care strategy contact us today.