Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most

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.

You can establish an evaluation-free zone by respecting the following guidelines: share pure feelings (without judgments, attributions, or blame); save problem-solving until later; and don’t monopolize.

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.

Talking successfully about feelings requires you to be scrupulous about taking the judgments, attributions, and statements of blame out of what you are saying, and putting the statement of feeling in.

Describing feelings is an important first step along the road toward getting things resolved, but you can’t leap from there directly into problem-solving. Each side must have their feelings acknowledged before you can even start down that road. Acknowledgment is a step that simply cannot be skipped.

There’s only one way to come to understand the other person’s story, and that’s by being curious. Instead of asking yourself, “How can they think that?!” ask yourself, “I wonder what information they have that I don’t?” Instead of asking, “How can they be so irrational?” ask, “How might they see the world such that their view makes sense?” Certaint

Pick up the phone or talk in person. Bottom line: You can’t resolve an e-mail conflict with e-mail. For all practical purposes there are no exceptions to this rule.

It means letting the other person know that what they have said has made an impression on you, that their feelings matter to you, and that you are working to understand them.

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.