Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most

by Douglas Stone

The “What Happened?” Conversation is where we spend much of our time in difficult conversations as we struggle with our different stories about who’s right, who meant what, and who’s to blame. On each of these three fronts — truth, intentions, and blame — we make a common but crippling assumption.

The point is this: difficult conversations are almost never about getting the facts right. They are about conflicting perceptions, interpretations, and values.

In the “What Happened?” Conversation, moving away from the truth assumption frees us to shift our purpose from proving we are right to understanding the perceptions, interpretations, and values of both sides. It allows us to move away from delivering messages and toward asking questions, exploring how each person is making sense of the world. And to offer our views as perceptions, interpretations, and values — not as “the truth.”

The error we make in the realm of intentions is simple but profound: we assume we know the intentions of others when we don’t. Worse still, when we are unsure about someone’s intentions, we too often decide they are bad.

our view of others’ intentions (and their views of ours) are so important in difficult conversations, leaping to unfounded assumptions can be a disaster.

But talking about fault is similar to talking about truth — it produces disagreement, denial, and little learning.

Nobody wants to be blamed, especially unfairly, so our energy goes into defending ourselves.

It’s much more difficult to see how we’ve contributed to the problems in which we ourselves are involved.

But in situations that give rise to difficult conversations, it is almost always true that what happened is the result of things both people did — or failed to do. And punishment is rarely relevant or appropriate.

Focusing instead on understanding the contribution system allows us to learn about the real causes of the problem, and to work on correcting them.

Understanding feelings, talking about feelings, managing feelings — these are among the greatest challenges of being human.

The Identity Conversation looks inward: it’s all about who we are and how we see ourselves. How does what happened affect my self-esteem, my self-image, my sense of who I am in the world? What impact will it have on my future? What self-doubts do I harbor? In short: before, during, and after the difficult conversation, the Identity Conversation is about what I am saying to myself about me.

As you begin to sense the implications of the conversation for your self-image, you may begin to lose your balance.

You come to appreciate the complexity of the perceptions and intentions involved, the reality of joint contribution to the problem, the central role feelings have to play, and what the issues mean to each person’s self-esteem and identity.

you may find that you no longer have a message to deliver, but rather some information to share and some questions to ask.

Instead of wanting to persuade and get your way, you want to understand what has happened from the other person’s point of view, explain your point of view, share and understand feelings, and work together ...

This will help you shift to a learning stance when it’s your difficult conversation and you aren’t feeling very open.

when to raise an issue and when to let go, and if you’re going to raise it, what you can hope to achieve and what you can’t — what purposes make sense.

how to talk productively about the issues that matter to you: finding the best ways to begin, inquiring and listening to learn, expressing yourself with power and clarity, and solving problems jointly, including how to get the conversation back on track when the going gets rough.

heart of what is going wrong between us. They won’t agree with what we want them to agree with and they won’t do what we need them to do.

Whether or not we end up getting our way, we are left feeling frustrated, hurt, or misunderstood. And often the disagreement continues into the future, wreaking havoc whenever it raises its head.

Arguing creates another problem in difficult conversations: it inhibits change. Telling someone to change makes it less rather than more likely that they will. This is because people almost never change without first feeling understood.

shifts his purposes from trying to change Karen’s behavior — arguing why being late is wrong — to trying first to understand Karen, and then to be understood by her, the situation improves dramatically:

First, we take in information. We experience the world — sights, sounds, and feelings. Second, we interpret what we see, hear, and feel; we give it all meaning. Then we draw conclusions about what’s happening. And at each step, there is an opportunity for different people’s stories to diverge.

We simply can’t take in all of the sights, sounds, facts, and feelings involved in even a single encounter. Inevitably, we end up noticing some things and ignoring others. And what we each choose to notice and ignore will be different.

what we notice has to do with who we are and what we care about. Some of us pay more attention to feelings and relationships.

Others to status and power, or to facts and logic.

what he paid attention to was what was significant about the experience. Each assumes he has “the facts.”

Yet each assumes that the facts are plain, and his view is reality. In

Often we go through an entire conversation — or indeed an entire relationship — without ever realizing that each of us is paying attention to different things, that our views are based on different information.

Of course, in advance, we don’t know what we don’t know. But rather than assuming we already know everything we need to, we should assume that there is important information we don’t have access to. It’s a good bet to be true.

we tell different stories about the world is that, even when we have the same information, we interpret it differently — we give it different meaning.

We Are Influenced by Past Experiences. The past gives meaning to the present. Often, it is only in the context of someone’s past experience that we can understand why what they are saying or doing makes any kind of sense.

Every strong view you have is profoundly influenced by your past experiences.

all are influenced by what you’ve observed in your own family and learned throughout your life. Often we aren’t even aware of how these experiences affect our interpretation of the world. We simply believe that this is the way things are.

We Apply Different Impli...

Our past experiences often develop...

It helps to clarify the implicit rules that each is unconsciously applying. Thelma’s rule is “It is unprofessional and inconsiderate to be late.” Ollie’s rule is “It is unprofessional to obsess about small things so much that you can’t focus on what’s important.” Because Thelma and Ollie both interpret the situation through the lens of their own implicit rule, they each see the other person as acting inappropriately.

Our implicit rules often take the form of things people “should” or “shouldn’t” do:

our conclusions are partisan, that they often reflect our self-interest.

We look for information to support our view and give that information the most favorable interpretation. Then we feel even more certain that our view is right.

The point isn’t whose rule is better; the point is that they are different.

We usually assume that we must either accept or reject the other person’s story, and that if we accept theirs, we must abandon our own.

Don’t choose between the stories; embrace both. That’s the And Stance.

Don’t pretend anything. Don’t worry about accepting or rejecting the other person’s story. First work to understand it.

The mere act of understanding someone else’s story doesn’t require you to give up your own. The And Stance allows you to recognize that how you each see things matters, that how you each feel matters.

The And Stance is based on the assumption that the world is complex, that you can feel hurt, angry, and wronged, and they can feel just as hurt, angry, and wronged. They can be doing their best, and you can think that it’s not good enough. You may have done something stupid, and they will have contributed in important ways to the problem as well. You can feel furious with them, and you can also feel love and appreciation for them.

It may be that as you share them, your stories change in response to new information or different perspectives. But they still may not end up the same, and that’s all right. Sometimes people have honest disagreements, but even so, the most useful question is not “Who’s right?” but “Now that we really understand each other, what’s a good way to manage this problem?”

Fair enough. About each of those things, you are right. But here’s the rub: that’s not what the conversation is really about. It’s about how you each feel about your daughter’s smoking, what she should do about it, and what role you should play. It’s about the terrible fear and sadness you feel as you imagine her becoming sick, and your rage at feeling powerless to make her stop.

two problematic aspects of our story — our tendency to misunderstand their intentions, and our tendency to focus on blame.