Don't Prime The Pump

This goes back to a time just before my own, when getting water meant you first had to prime the pump before anything would flow. People do something similar in their heads. Before a hard conversation, we turn it over and over, and that rehearsing tends to pump up the anxiety rather than settle it.

Someone expecting a confrontation will chew on it long before it happens. The result is often more dread about the meeting, or a stock of angry feelings built up in advance of what they assume will go badly. Most of us have scripted our own lines for these moments. We also script the other person's lines, guessing exactly what they'll throw back at us.

The replaying doesn't stop there. A person will run the same exchange through their mind again and again, editing it, imagining how it might have landed if one side or the other had said something different.

Sometimes that mental work pays off. If it nudges you toward a better reaction, the next real conversation can go more smoothly. But the opposite happens too, and when it does, the outcome can be a wreck.

There's an old story I've heard passed around, and I've told it myself to make this very point. A salesman gets a flat tire out in farm country. He has no jack. He's reluctant to go ask a farmer to borrow one, because he's convinced that country folk have no use for traveling salesmen.

The walk from his car to the nearest farmhouse is long, and most of it runs uphill. The higher he climbs the more worn out he gets, and the more certain he becomes that this will go nowhere. He keeps running the imagined conversation on a loop, each version a little nastier than the last, his anger building with every step.

By the time he reaches the farmhouse he's fully primed. He knocks. The farmer opens the door. Before the farmer can get a word out, the salesman snaps, "You can keep your g-- d-- jack!"

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