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Delivering a difficult message is like throwing a hand grenade. Coated with sugar, thrown hard or soft, a hand grenade is still going to do damage. Try as you may, there’s no way to throw a hand grenade with tact or to outrun the consequences. And keeping it to yourself is no better. Choosing not to deliver a difficult message is like hanging on to a hand grenade once you’ve pulled the pin.
the problem isn’t in your actions, it’s in your thinking. So long as you focus only on what to do differently in difficult conversations, you will fail to break new ground.
So it is best to keep your goals realistic. Eliminating fear and anxiety is an unrealistic goal. Reducing fear and anxiety and learning how to manage that which remains are more obtainable. Achieving perfect results with no risk will not happen. Getting better results in the face of tolerable odds might.
The first insight, then, is a simple one: there’s an awful lot going on between Jack and Michael that is not being spoken.
the gap between what you’re really thinking and what you’re saying is part of what makes a conversation difficult. You’re distracted by all that’s going on inside. You’re uncertain about what’s okay to share, and what’s better left unsaid. And you know that just saying what you’re thinking would probably not make the conversation any easier.
no matter what the subject, our thoughts and feelings fall into the same three categories, or “conversations.” And in each of these conversations we make predictable errors that distort our thoughts and feelings, and get us into trouble.
1. The “What Happened?” Conversation. Most difficult conversations involve disagreement about what has happened or what should happen. Who said what and who did what? Who’s right, who meant what, and who’s to blame? Jack and Michael tussle over these issues, both out loud and internally. Does the chart need to be redone ? Is Michael trying to intimidate Jack? Who should have caught the error? 2. The Feelings Conversation. Every difficult conversation also asks and answers questions about feelings. Are my feelings valid? Appropriate? Should I acknowledge or deny them, put them on the table or
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We will each have information the other person is unaware of, and raising each other’s awareness is not easy. And we will still face emotionally charged situations that feel threatening because they put important aspects of our identity at risk. What we can change is the way we respond to each of these challenges. Typically, instead of exploring what information the other person might have that we don’t, we assume we know all we need to know to understand and explain things. Instead of working to manage our feelings constructively, we either try to hide them or let loose in ways that we later
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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. Straightening out each of these assumptions is essential to improving our ability to handle difficult conversations well.
The point is this: difficult conversations are almost never about getting the facts right. They are about conflicting perceptions, interpretations, and values. They are not about what a contract states, they are about what a contract means.
They are not about what is true, they are about what is important.
These are not questions of right and wrong, but questions of interpretation and judgment. Interpretations and judgments are important to explore. In contrast, the quest to determine who is right and who is wrong is a dead end.
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.”
What I think about your intentions will affect how I think about you and, ultimately, how our conversation goes. 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.
The truth is, intentions are invisible. We assume them from other people’s behavior. In other words, we make them up, we invent them. But our invented stories about other people’s intentions are accurate much less often than we think.
But talking about fault is similar to talking about truth — it produces disagreement, denial, and little learning. It evokes fears of punishment and insists on an either/or answer. 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.
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. When competent, sensible people do something stupid, the smartest move is to try to figure out, first, what kept them from seeing it coming and, second, how to prevent the problem from happening again. Talking about blame distracts us from exploring why things went wrong and how we might correct them going forward. Focusing instead on understanding the contribution system allows us to learn about the real causes of the problem, and to work on
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The question is not whether strong feelings will arise, but how to handle them when they do.
The problem with this reasoning is that it fails to take account of one simple fact: difficult conversations do not just involve feelings, they are at their very core about feelings.
Engaging in a difficult conversation without talking about feelings is like staging an opera without the music. You’ll get the plot but miss the point.
what I am saying to myself about me.
anytime a conversation feels difficult, it is in part precisely because it is about You, with a capital Y. Something beyond the apparent substance of the conversation is at stake for you.
The prospect of telling the people involved makes you anxious, even if you aren’t responsible for the decision. In part, it’s because you fear how the conversation will make you feel about yourself: “I’m not the kind of person who lets people down and crushes enthusiasm. I’m the person people respect for finding a way to do it, not for shutting the door.” Your self-image as a person who helps others get things done butts up against the reality that you are going to be saying no. If you’re no longer the hero, will people see you as the villain?
Despite what we sometimes pretend, our initial purpose for having a difficult conversation is often to prove a point, to give them a piece of our mind, or to get them to do or be what we want. In other words, to deliver a message.
Changing our stance means inviting the other person into the conversation with us, to help us figure things out. If we’re going to achieve our purposes, we have lots we need to learn from them and lots they need to learn from us. We need to have a learning conversation.
When she complains, it’s not because she wants answers, it’s because she likes the connection she feels when she keeps people current on her daily comings and goings.
In the normal course of things, we don’t notice the ways in which our story of the world is different from other people’s. But difficult conversations arise at precisely those points where important parts of our story collide with another person’s story. We assume the collision is because of how the other person is; they assume it’s because of how we are. But really the collision is a result of our stories simply being different, with neither of us realizing it. It’s as if Princess Leia were trying to talk to Huck Finn. No wonder we end up arguing.
But arguing is not only a result of our failure to see that we and the other person are in different stories – it is also part of the cause. Arguing inhibits our ability to learn how the other person sees the world.
But neither conclusion makes sense in the other person’s story. So we each dismiss the other’s argument. Rather than helping us understand our different views, arguing results in a battle of messages. Rather than drawing us together, arguing pulls us apart.
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.
each has learned something, and the stage for meaningful change is set. To get anywhere in a disagreement, we need to understand the other person’s story well enough to see how their conclusions make sense within it. And we need to help them understand the story in which our conclusions make sense. Understanding each other’s stories from the inside won’t necessarily “solve” the problem, but as with Karen and Trevor, it’s an essential first step.
Our stories don’t come out of nowhere. They aren’t random. Our stories are built in often unconscious but systematic ways. 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.
There are two reasons we all have different information about the world.
what we each choose to notice and ignore will be different.
Second, we each have access to different information.
what we notice has to do with who we are and what we care about.
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.
rather than assuming we already know everything we need to, we should assume that there is important information we don’t have access to.
even when we have the same information, we interpret it differently – we give it different meaning.
Two especially important factors in how we interpret what we see are (1) our past experiences and (2) the implicit rules we’ve learned about how things should and should not be done.
Every strong view you have is profoundly influenced by your past experiences.
Our past experiences often develop into “rules” by which we live our lives.
Our implicit rules often take the form of things people “should” or “shouldn’t” do:
when you find yourself in conflict, it helps to make your rules explicit and to encourage the other person to do the same.
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.
Certainty locks us out of their story; curiosity lets us in.
get curious about what you don’t know about yourself.
The point isn’t whose rule is better; the point is that they are different. But
Don’t choose between the stories; embrace both. That’s the And Stance.
