Dreading A Conversation? Tips On How To Handle It

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You don’t have to look far to see that public discourse has become a virtual war zone.

Verbal assaults that would have been rare just a few years ago seem to be the new norm. And the nastiness is not confined to politicians or talk show pontificators. Around Thanksgiving, expect to see articles and blog posts urging families to carve the holiday turkey rather than each other.

For anyone interested in civility and good relationships, including relationships with people who hold disparate views on hypersensitive issues, there are many helpful resources. One of the best is Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, now available in a revised and updated edition. It’s an excellent guide to effective communication in the public square, in your workplace, or at your kitchen table. The authors are Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen of the Harvard Negotiation Project.

Each difficult conversation, the authors say, is actually three conversations.

Bruce Patton explains: “On the surface, a difficult conversation is about the substance—who did what and why, who is responsible,” he says. “But at the deepest level, most difficult conversations are difficult because of the threatening things they seem to be saying about you (and the other person)—’You’re mean!’ ‘You’re incompetent!’ And these threats to our identity inevitably spark strong feelings that rile us up, fog our brain, and demand how to handle them. We call these three levels or ‘conversations’ the What Happened? Conversation, the Feelings Conversation, and the Identity Conversation.”

So, how does this “three conversations” paradigm help us navigate a misunderstanding or disagreement?

“It allows us to prepare for the conversation in a systematic way,” says Douglas Stone. “By considering all three levels of the conversation, we can get a better sense for why it feels hard, complicated, or threatening, and we can identify and avoid common errors.”

For example, he says, “when we think about the Identity Conversation, we should consider not only how the conversation might impact how we see ourselves, but also how the conversation might impact how the other person sees themselves. The better we understand not only our own perspective, but also the other person’s, the more confident and grounded we’ll feel during the conversation.”

Of course, people’s personal stories play a role in the way they deal with difficult conversations? Patton offers advice for managing such stories.

“Our unique experiences and stories teach us what is important, what to notice and pay attention to, and how to make sense of interactions and motivations,” he says. “We develop favorite themes that we look for: selfishness, oppression. And these insights are useful and make sense. But they are not the whole story. Other people focus on different aspects of a complex world. They have different favorite themes: kindness, complexity. And their insights are also helpful and have validity. Our advice is simply to accept that it’s not either/or. It’s almost always to some extent both/and. The world is just too complex for any one person to see the whole story on their own.”

In today’s highly polarized world, we see endless examples of grenade-throwers masquerading as “communicators.” In the public arena, where can we find some models of “good” conversations?

“Look for those who go beyond either/or,” Patton says. “Rep. Richard Hanna was a Republican Congressman from upstate New York. He was rated by some as the most liberal Republican in Congress, but he handily fought off a conservative tea party challenger from 2010 until he retired. He would do 70 town halls a year and said his favorite moments were when he could say, ‘So what I hear you saying is … and why that makes sense. But here’s why I think you’re wrong … ” Deval Patrick had a similar approach as a dark horse candidate who became Governor of Massachusetts over seven better-known rivals.”

Stone says curiosity help us in our conversations.

“If we’re curious about how the person we’re talking to sees the world,” he says, “that will lead us to interact with them in a certain way: we’ll ask questions, we’ll test our own assumptions. If we’re not curious, we won’t. But here’s the rub: we should always be curious—not just because it makes us better communicators, but because we actually know less about how other people see the world than we imagine we do. There are aspects of their internal world that we don’t know—concerns, fears, traumas, hopes, successes, and failures—and we’ll learn them only if we’re curious.”

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What seem to be the most common misconceptions about how to handle difficult conversations?

“We too often assume that we do best when we ‘control’ the conversation,” Stone says. “We want to focus on what we care about, on what our agenda is. That’s fine, of course, but with difficult conversations, you want to make sure that the other person is able to discuss what they care about as well.”

He offers an example: “If your employee is unhappy with a particular assignment you’ve given, you might assume that talking about that will only remind them how much they don’t like the assignment. But flip the roles and you’ll see why that doesn’t make sense. When you’re unhappy with an assignment, you’d likely appreciate a supervisor who takes the time to discuss that with you. You’ll feel heard and respected, even if your boss isn’t able or willing to change the assignment.”

Becoming consistently adept in handling difficult conversations obviously requires practice. So, how can a person use lower-risk conversations to ‘test drive’ these suggestions?

“Starting with lower stakes conversations to get some practice is a great idea,” Stone says. “Another low-risk strategy is even easier: prepare well. Even if we decide not to have the conversation, we’ve likely gained insight into the situation and now have a bit more experience thinking about these topics than we had before. Whether you spend five minutes or an hour, put in some prep time. Consider how you see things, and why you might see things differently from the other person. Make a list of the feelings you and the other person are likely to experience. Think through your own and the other person’s identity challenges. Regardless of whether and how you have the conversation, this kind of prep is all upside.”

The authors suggest that people should “listen from the inside out.”

Stone says advice about listening often focuses on the external behaviors that indicate good listening: engaged posture, eye contact, inquiry, acknowledging, paraphrasing. “These are indeed consistent with good listening,” he says, “but we think it’s important that people start not with behaviors but with mindset. If your mindset is, ‘I already know what this person thinks and feels,’ you’re less likely to ask questions. If you do ask questions, they might be experienced by the other person as forced or tactical or manipulative. If you’re genuinely curious, then you’re listening from the inside out, and the external behaviors of inquiry will emerge naturally. If you aren’t curious, but want to be a good listener, don’t pretend to be curious. Instead, negotiate yourself to actual curiosity. There’s always something you can learn, so you shouldn’t have to pretend.”

What common misconception contributes to many unnecessary difficult conversations?

“Too many people see common conflicts as ‘zero-sum,” Patton says. “They assume there has to be a winner and a loser and anything good for their counterpart is bad for them, and vice versa. It’s just not true. Most importantly, because in the real world both sides can lose! And because of the zero-sum assumption, they often do. In the real world there are no zero-sum conflicts, precisely because we always have the shared interest of not ending up with everyone worse off. And on the other hand, the best analysts will tell you that if you make the effort to look for them, there are often creative solutions that can make both parties better off, often with the potential to create more value than you thought was in conflict.”