These small illustrations are created for the website landing page of the consulting psychologist Paul Furey and his team. Each image depicts one of Paul's sentences taken from his blog or webinars.
Visual style is connected to one of the client features: he usually illustrates his speech with small sketches to clarify his ideas to the audience. So I borrowed his childish and spontaneous way of drawing and added some collages to keep the amateur style of the illustrations.
The project is art directed by Wearegoat.
Conflict feeds on unspoken feelings, incorrect assumptions and lack of respect. Listening dissolves conflict.
The first step in preventing a bad situation with someone from getting worse is to ditch the the surface topic for long enough to pay attention to the other person – as a person.
You can’t have lots of feeling signals and thinking signals travelling all at the same time along the same pathways.
Explaining the feeling is always better than just showing it because it demonstrates self-awareness.
Why? always implies a criticism…
‘But’ not only invalidates everything that went before it but it also changes our inflection so that even genuine praise is tainted by ‘but’.
There’s no better way of invalidating someone’s input than to reply with ‘I know’.
Thinking on our feet is really an exercise in priming our subconscious mind to come out to play.
The more urgent something seems the harder it is to think straight. And it’s not about how bright we are – it’s about brain chemistry.
If you want to turn an argument into a discussion… look out for the signs, direct your attention to whoever is having the most feelings – and then respectfully call them out.
We all get into arguments. The important thing is to be able to get out of them so that the conversation can still do the job.
So as soon as we have told the truth about our own feelings our brain chemistry settles down.
We stop having big, invasive feelings when people listen to us – they don’t even have to agree.
