Or at least we paint ourselves as victims. We tend to speak of others who we’re having a disagreement with as villains.If you’re in a situation where you’ve gone to the bad mode - either violence or silence.Try to get back to a mutual purpose: try to agree with the group on what the purpose of the convo isĪ key element in your dealing with the conversation is your understanding of other’s motives and the stories you tell about them. ![]() ![]() Use contrasting: explicitly state what you don’t mean or what you won’t want to happen.Establish that the others know you care about them and about the mutual purpose of the conversation.Stop talking about the particular topic, and talk about the conversation itself. You need to step out of the conversation.If you’ve noticed the conversation has turned unsafe, how to turn it back to a safe one? Here are some tips and tricks: It’s important to be holistic, because it’s rarely the case that a crucial conversation is the single interaction you’re having with someone. You should focus on what you want for yourself, for the others, and for the relationship as a whole. Not winning the conversation, but the goals you have, of which the conversation is a part of. Know what you want to achieve in the whole conversation. Still, that’s enough to unblock many crucial conversations. Unfortunately in any conversation, you can only work on yourself, not the other. The book then focuses on various ways of doing this. A good first step is to try to make this set as large as possible via properly handling the conversation. This is the totality of understandings, opinions, choices, etc all participants agree on could be used. This is a result of not having a big enough pool of meaning in the conversation. It’s important to avoid the Fool’s Choice : the initial set of choices presented, with various bad outcomes, from these conversations. Acknowledge that the solution is to bring the discussion back on track, establish safety, and focus on shared goals, rather than arguing for the sake of arguing or just “winning”Īuthors claim that many ills in families, work groups, societies stem from badly handling these things.The bad outcome occurs when you’re not talking about the issue at hand and how to solve it, but rather start arguing and either go down the aggressive path (fights, shouts, etc) or down the silence path (no communication, avoiding the topic, etc.).Recognise when the conversation is going off the rails, and spirits are high, and you are headed towards a bad outcome.You can either think of it in advance or realise it in the moment Recognise you’re in a crucial conversation.But there’s an art and a skill to getting better here, which will increase the chances of the conversation going well, with very good life outcomes. ![]() This is what differentiates these from a regular negotiation. Makes it easier to write both at the same time.įirst, crucial conversations are tricky conversations that happen between people, where the stakes are high, there is a difference of opinions, and emotions run strong. I’ll roughly do the same here, but I’ll rather organise the thoughts in the form I’ve synthesised them for my own reference materials. In these reviews I usually go chapter by chapter. Only after that I’ll revisit and try something new. My plan, and the one the authors also recommend, is to acknowledge the big outline of there being crucial conversations and they being important, and then practicing one or two techniques ‘till I’m comfortable with them. Each chapter is jam packed with a lot of ideas and tools, and practicing and mastering them takes a lot of time. On the other hand, this is what makes the book quite hard to apply in real life. ![]() Whereas many other books just recycle the message chapter after chapter, or at most bring small additions, I felt each chapter here brought something valuable. However, I also found it packed with information. I found the book easy to read, like these things tend to be. It’s a nice read for managers, hence it got on my reading list. It’s a relationships book with a lot of applicability in the workplace. This is my review of Crucial Conversations.
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