If there's one thing that I personally struggle with, it's feeling defensive. It's natural,

but it's also the number one killer of conversation. If you feel defensive, you shut everybody

off. And if they feel defensive, they're not going to listen to anything else you have to say.

On today's episode, it's all about how do you handle defensiveness. Welcome to the Jefferson Fisher podcast, where I'm on a

mission to make your next conversation the one that changes everything. If you enjoy learning

tools to improve your communication, I'm going to ask you to follow this podcast, and if you

would, leave a review or a star or anything. It really matters, and I read them all. If you have

any topic suggestions, just throw them in the comments.

I'll also want to make sure that you know my book, The Next Conversation, is officially out on pre-order,

and I put the links down in the show notes.

If there's one thing about defensiveness, it's that it's so easy to do.

It's just biological.

It's natural because anything that you perceive as a threat or a challenge you fight against.

It is natural as part of your fight or flight.

On any argument that you're going to have, there are two sides.

There is an ignition side and a cooling

side of it and that ignition is triggered by things that trigger you. So anytime somebody

challenges your opinion or disagrees with you, your body perceives that as a threat that says, I don't like that. Somebody gives you an

opinion and you disagree. Your body says, I don't like that. Somebody's telling you what to do.

Your body goes, I don't really like that. So every time that happens, there is a desire to push back

against it. If somebody's telling you, you need to go do this, you automatically want to go,

no, I don't. If somebody says, oh, you're behaving this way last night, you were in a bad mood last

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