Courage in Communication | Psychology Today

When we encounter difficult interpersonal situations, it often feels like we lack the necessary skills to be effective. We imagine that with the right strategy, we would be confident, at ease, and successful. While this is sometimes the case, focusing on skills and strategies in communication can be a distraction from what is often the greater challenge: overcoming anxiety. This anxiety can take many forms, including fear of being criticized, fear of being rejected, or fear of hurting someone else. By realizing that these concerns are natural and unavoidable, we can work with our anxiety, overcome our avoidance, and approach challenging interactions more skillfully.

Consider the following examples from work and personal life:

• You are asked to give feedback on a work project at a meeting, but you are hesitant to share your critical thoughts, even though your ideas are important for the project’s success.
• You are planning to ask for a raise at a scheduled meeting with your boss.
• You’re romantically interested in someone and want to ask them out on a date.
• You want to discuss your partner’s spending habits, but you know they have responded defensively to these conversations in the past.

These are common situations in which you might feel like you lack the skills to be successful. However, they are also objectively challenging interactions in which it is natural to be anxious. These situations have potentially hurtful outcomes, for yourself or someone else, and so they call for special care. While some people genuinely lack specific communication skills, anxiety is often the bigger barrier to challenging interactions like these.

The Real Problem: Avoidance, Not Inadequacy

Anxiety is an unpleasant emotion, but it is not pathological in itself. As the psychiatrist Randolph Ness puts it, there can be good reasons for a bad feeling.¹ Anxiety is a response to a situation that is potentially dangerous or harmful and thus triggers a need to retreat or proceed with caution. In the course of human evolution, we have had good reasons to err on the side of caution. As Ness puts it, anxiety is like a smoke alarm that is programmed to be overly sensitive to threats: it is better that the smoke alarm annoys us by going off for burnt toast than to miss the real threat of a fire.

Our anxiety does not only respond to physical threats. We have a social and relational smoke alarm that is highly attuned to risks to our social connections: rejection, loss of social status, or hurt to those who are close to us. So when we face challenging interactions, like the situations above, we are perceiving real social or relational dangers, and so it makes sense to be somewhat anxious. However, we have a built-in bias toward seeing the dangers as more severe than they really are. This anxiety can lead to avoiding the interaction, which feels good in the short term, but ultimately increases our distress, while leaving our relational problems unsolved.

Anxiety in response to challenging interactions is not pathological in itself. It can make us more alert to bad outcomes and help us proceed more carefully. However, the real problem is avoidance. This is why focusing on skills and strategies can be a distraction: In thinking you lack the skills or knowledge to handle the interaction, you may be just avoiding a naturally difficult situation.

Aristotelian Courage: Finding the Middle Ground

Aristotle’s account of courage is helpful here. Aristotle describes virtues, including courage, as a mean between two extremes.² The virtue of courage avoids an extreme of fearfulness or cowardice on one end, and recklessness on the other. The courageous person finds a middle ground between fearfulness and foolish impulsivity. Courage in communication is not the absence of anxiety in difficult situations, but the ability to assess the risks appropriately and proceed with good judgment. We wouldn’t want to be the person with no anxiety in social situations, speaking impulsively, and remaining unaware of the potential for hurting others.

Of course, sometimes the best response to an anxiety-provoking interaction is to remain silent or leave the interaction. Plowing ahead while ignoring your anxiety is not usually a wise course either. It is best to think of the anxiety as a meaningful signal to assess; it should give us pause, but should not justify avoidance of important communication.

When we recognize that some degree of discomfort in social interactions is unavoidable, we can begin to work with our anxiety rather than against it. The anxiety is usually not a reason to avoid an interaction or take time to develop new skills, but rather a signal to move forward with care. Importantly, Aristotle emphasizes that virtues develop through practice and habituation, not through rational analysis alone.

4 Ways to Reframe Anxiety

Given the need to accept some degree of discomfort, here are some ways to work through your anxiety about a difficult interaction and find the courage to communicate:

1. Accept that difficult interactions will likely be challenging. Some anxiety, discomfort, or awkwardness is natural and unavoidable. Interactions like the examples above may involve conflict, defensiveness, or hurt.
2. Practice or rehearse a challenging interaction to help prepare. This serves two purposes: It helps you anticipate challenges while also desensitizing you to the anxiety involved. Practicing or role-playing the interaction serves as an “exposure” in the language of cognitive behavioral therapy. However, if you assume that practicing makes perfect—such that you can avoid any difficulty or discomfort—the practice can become just another avoidance strategy.
3. Remember that relationship ruptures can almost always be repaired. A difficult interaction or conflict is rarely the end of the relationship. A defensive partner may calm down later and be more open to communication. If you end up feeling you made the wrong move, you can always apologize and try to engage in a different way. It can help to think of the interaction as one moment in an ongoing process within the relationship, rather than a performance that you need to get “just right.”
4. Recognize that you cannot control others’ reactions. No matter how tactful you are, others might be defensive, distracted, or reactive in ways that you can’t anticipate. You can only control your actions.

When Professional Help Makes Sense

While I am emphasizing that some anxiety is natural, this doesn’t mean people should struggle alone with overwhelming anxiety that leaves them feeling paralyzed. As a psychotherapist, I see people make dramatic progress in overcoming social anxiety and shifting difficult patterns in their relationships. Professional resources can help in these cases, but meaningful change ultimately comes from working through anxiety, not eliminating it.

4 Practical Communication Strategies

Once you overcome the anxiety that may be leading you to avoid an interaction, you will likely find that you already possess the skills you need to read the situation and communicate effectively. Here are some practical strategies to guide your approach:

1. Clarify your goal: Try to be specific about your objective in the interaction. Are you trying to solve a problem, advocate for yourself, or help the other person in some way? Many interactions have multiple goals, but it helps to clarify your primary intentions.
2. Show understanding: Consider the perspective of the other person and explicitly demonstrate understanding of their needs and interests in your communication. You can help them feel understood even if you don’t agree with them.
3. Communicate directly: State your needs or perspective clearly and assertively, and try to be specific. Anxiety can lead us to be indirect or tentative in ways that can be confusing to others and undermine our message.
4. Plan for emotional intensity and have an exit plan: If you or others are becoming emotionally overwhelmed in the interaction, plan to take a time-out and return to the topic at another time. Many difficult interactions need to take place in stages. Remember that most communication is a process, not a performance, and you can usually return and repair later.

From Avoidance to Courageous Communication

When you notice that you are avoiding an interaction or feeling anxious, it helps to be curious about why. Usually, there are good reasons for this anxiety involving risks to yourself or others. We should take extra care to be tactful in these situations. Yet our social smoke alarm is often overly sensitive to threats, leading us to retreat from or avoid important social interactions. The search for the right skills or strategies that would eliminate discomfort in these situations is usually a trap that merely leads to more self-doubt and avoidance.

Direct, clear, and tactful communication requires Aristotelian courage—not the absence of fear, but wise action in its presence. When we accept anxiety as the price of authentic connection, we discover that the conversations we’ve been avoiding are often the ones that matter most.