Difficult conversations

[Desti]

Disclaimer: to any sentence below you can safely add "..., at least that's how I see it" and only then it might appear sensible.

I am quite subjective towards any conversational guides, doesn't matter if it's a book, video or a blog post, because I think that any conversation itself is a dynamic process with enormous amount of influential factors. One simply cannot handle this burst of emotions, words, events and other non-verbal examples of communication without breaking some "smart rules" provided by authors of such tutorials. If this is really an important conversation for you - you might be simply overwhelmed with emotions and everything will go to ruin in a split of a second. If it's not that important? Well, then you can probably handle it OK just based on your live experience (some parts of it might from books, but not major parts).

Still, for this particular book (complete title for it sounds "Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most") I had a good recommendation and fictional, but driving motivation from public announcement that I would actually read it, so here are my thoughts I'd like to share.

Three key takeaways you might get from this books would probably be as following:
- In difficult conversations you need to really decrease your ego or otherwise you'll trigger defensive or counter-attacking behaviour from opponent;
- While keeping touch with point above, you also need to find a way to express your emotions, because if you're just going to try to suffer silently - defensive behaviour will be triggered by your own subconscious and then "good luck" trying to fight it;
- Most likely, in difficult conversation both sides are wrong with something. You might have less or wrong information, you might have different interpretation of same knowledge, sometimes even your inaction might be more damaging than actionable failure of another human being. Acknowledge it, accept it, but don't let it shake you. Now arm with curiosity and follow your way to the ground truth (or some near approximation). Btw, this is not a citation from book

The problem is, you'll have to read 300 pages to get this concepts from above. You'll not going to get a lot more from actually reading it. Don't get me wrong, those are important and might be even live-changing for me, quite selfish person, but if somebody would manage to put those concepts in 20 pages or 20 minutes YouTube video - I'd be more effective with my time. I haven't really passed through the feeling of fiction for most of the example dialogues in this book. It looks like general assumption from Harvard negotiation project is that everyone is sensible, not blinded by emotions even in the time of their failures. In reality sometimes you just can't break through that wall of arrogance and self defense and even if you do - not likely that it will take like 10 replicas.

P.S. This book actually contains suppressed version of itself in chapter 12. Pity, that I've found out about that only when I've reached chapter 12.
P.P.S. Goodreads editor is awful. After you submit the first, you might be asked to fill captcha, but your text would be cleared from text area.