“A great conversation is between two people who think the other is wrong. A bad conversation is between those who think something is wrong with you.” -Micah Goodman, Professor at Hebrew University
1: The person sitting across from us is angry.
We are debating a new marketing strategy. At first, both of our intentions are clear. We both want what’s best for the firm.
But as the conversation unfolds, a shift occurs. We both want to win the argument.
They want to show they “are smarter, more powerful,” David Brooks writes in his book How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen.
What trap do we often fall into?
“To try to yank the conversation back to our frame,” David notes: “Here’s how the situation looks to me. Here’s what I’m doing to alleviate that problem. Here are all the other problems I have you might not be aware of.”
The temptation is to bring the conversation back to what we know. To our perspective. To what we know is true.
“It’s best to avoid this temptation,” David writes. Especially when the other person starts talking “about times when they felt excluded, betrayed, or wronged,”
In these instances, we are wise to stop and listen.
Because “when somebody is talking to you about pain in their life,” David observes, “even in those cases when you may think their pain is performative or exaggerated, it’s best not to try to yank the conversations back to our frame.”
Instead, we encourage them to elaborate. We ask questions. We say: “I want to understand your point of view as much as possible. What am I missing here?”
David defines curiosity as “the ability to explore something even in stressful and difficult circumstances.”
Doing so is a way to show respect.
2: Because each time a comment is made, the conversation is getting a little more safe or a little more threatening.
It is the back-and-forth of the emotional content that will ultimately determine the success of the conversation.
“The authors of Crucial Conversations remind us that every conversation exists within a frame,” David notes: “What is the purpose here? What are our goals? A frame is the stage on which the conversation takes place.”
“Hard conversations are hard because different life circumstances construct very different realities,” he writes. “It’s not only that they have different opinions about the same world; they literally see different worlds.”
So, when we stay in the other person’s frame a little longer, we show respect.
“Respect is like air,” the Crucial Conversations authors observe, “When it’s present nobody notices, but when it’s absent it’s all anybody can think about.”
When we choose to understand the other person’s perspective, then all parties contribute to what the Crucial Conversations authors call “a shared pool of knowledge.”
The problem? “Very often in hard conversations, there is no shared pool of knowledge. One person describes their set of wrongs. The other person describes their own different set of wrongs.
“As the conversation goes on, they each go into deeper detail about their particular wrongs, but there’s no shared pool. Pretty soon nobody is listening. It doesn’t take much to create an us/them dynamic. This is a surefire way to do it.”
What happens next? Things devolve. Which is often when we start labeling each other.
“Labeling is when we try to discredit another person by tossing them into some disreputable category: You’re a reactionary. You’re the old establishment. You’re woke.
“Slapping a label on someone is a great way to render them invisible and destroy a hard conversation.”
3: David suggests that when a hard conversation takes a turn for the worse, there are ways to redeem it.
“First, we step back from the conflict, and we try to figure out together what’s gone wrong. We break the momentum by asking the other person, ‘How did we get to this tense place?’
Next, we do something called “splitting.”
“Splitting is when we clarify our own motives by first saying what they are not and then saying what they are.
We might say: “I certainly wasn’t trying to silence your voice. I was trying to include your point of view with the many other points of view on this topic. But I went too fast. I should have paused to try to hear your voice fully, so we could build from that reality. That was not respectful to you.”
Next, we attempt to identify the mutual purpose of the conversation. Which we do by “enlarging the purpose so that both people are encompassed by it,” David recommends.
Example: “You and I have very different ideas of what marketing plan this company should pursue. But we both believe in the product we are selling. We both want to get it before as many people as possible. I think we are both trying to take this company to the next level.”
Lastly, we attempt to create a deeper bond because of the fracture.
David suggests saying something like: “You and I have expressed some strong emotions. Unfortunately, against each other. But at least our hearts are out on the table and we’ve both been exposed. Weirdly, we have a chance to understand each other better because of the mistakes we’ve made and the emotions we’ve aroused.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: Think back on a conversation that went sideways. What happened? What might I have done differently? What lessons can I apply from David’s suggestions?
Action: Experiment with “splitting.”