The easiest place to start is at the points of most disruption in communication, perhaps the loudest, most memorable, or most cringe-worthy. The longer you’ve carried a moment like this with you, the more obvious a tip-off it will be. The authors still remember being involved in screaming arguments and throwing our hands up in disgust at feedback in the previous century. The first place to look is in these moments of the past, and whether any of the reasoning or behaviors that led you there are things that you still encounter today.

Another place to find tip-offs is, of course, in the way other people perceive you. Many organizations have instituted 360-degree reviews to help people discover the perceptions of their colleagues. You can check for feedback on your own with sympathetic colleagues after meetings: “Did that feel like it went well? Do you think I was a bit hard on x?”

It’s a little more challenging, but with practice, you can even learn to feel yourself slipping into a behavioral pattern. For example, think about how you change your voice and the cadence of your speech when you give a presentation. This is a form of behavioral pattern that we invoke consciously. There is a sense of intense focus on the moment, with an almost zen-like quality of concentrating on the big stuff – the strategy of the talk, the wealth of insight behind the words – and letting the small stuff – the words themselves – flow. Indeed at the most pronounced end, behavioral patterns are part of what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi describes as flow.¹ Anti-patterns tend to be so tied up with emotion that it can be harder to be self-observing when they appear, but feeling the argument sweep you away or shut you down is generally a sign that a pattern is taking over.

That time may mean more than just leaving the meeting and getting the hot drink of your choice. You need to fully internalize the other party’s suggestion so you can empathize with it. If you catch yourself thinking “[This person] is such an idiot, his suggestion is ridiculous,” you’re probably still not ready. Nine times out of ten, your colleagues aren’t idiots. To distance yourself from the initial emotional response, take a break from the work for awhile so you can approach it with a fresh eye, and the alternative suggestion from your team in mind. This will help you identify whether you were caught by the IKEA effect – that is, being a little over-invested in what you made.

Work with your colleague to identify any previous times that this anti-pattern may have occurred in situations they have witnessed, and any causes or resolutions they have observed. This works both ways – for your behaviors, or the ones of your colleague in question. It’s important to understand the context of this behavior pattern and whether you’re causing it or responding to it.

There are lots of patterns in this book that can be repurposed to address anti-patterns other than the ones we’ve attached them to. Try role playing the scenario again with a few candidate patterns – some of the very broadly applicable ones include Stepping Back, Paraphrased Playback, Yes and …, and Breaking the Meeting.

If the anti-pattern has a more physiological basis, look at what you could do in the form of a pre-meeting ritual to address it. This can be as simple as a context reset – James has taught himself that snapping the elastic band around the cover of his Moleskine notebook means a change of context, and that acts as a useful reset. If, for example, you become terse when hungry, it could mean getting into the habit of having a handful of peanuts or a banana before late-morning meetings. If you slow down while digesting and the fatigue affects your interactions, try to avoid having a heavy lunch when you’ve scheduled a 2 p.m. session.

Knowing that you have a toolbox full of patterns to call upon can be helpful all on its own. As you enter interactions, that knowledge lets you take a more strategic view of the conversation and opens up opportunities to guide the conversation in fruitful directions that may not otherwise have been available.