Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most

by Bruce Patton

There’s nothing wrong with having these rules. In fact, we need them to order our lives. But when you find yourself in conflict, it helps to make your rules explicit and to encourage the other person to do the same.

Focusing on blame is a bad idea because it inhibits our ability to learn what’s really causing the problem and to do anything meaningful to correct it.

The two hardest (and most important) communication tasks in difficult conversations are expressing feelings and listening.

first, you need to sort out just what your feelings are; second, you need to negotiate with your feelings; and third, you need to share your actual feelings, not attributions or judgments about the other person.

“Don’t knock down a wall until you know why it was put up.”

The implicit rule you are following is that you should put other people’s happiness before your own.

It isn’t the shark that’s changed; it’s the story you tell yourself about what’s happening. In any given situation our feelings follow our thoughts.

If you don’t have a question, don’t ask a question. Never dress up an assertion as a question. Doing so creates confusion and resentment, because such questions are inevitably heard as sarcastic and sometimes mean-spirited.

It is a fundamental rule: feelings crave acknowledgment.

Self-knowledge and the belief that what you want to share is important will take you significantly further than eloquence and wit.

For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

Whether or not some truths are absolute, as human beings our ability to perceive such truths is limited

Whatever category you choose, make sure to communicate to others what you expect from them.