When done effectively, these honest conversations have a… There’s a very predictable flow of how they go. And the flow goes something like this. And a lot of times, when you discover something, it seems so obvious, honestly. But all good conversations start with a good frame. I People need to talk about what they’d like to talk about and why the other person should care. That makes sense. Particularly when you’re talking about something that has the potential to be upsetting, provocative, may create difficult, may create conflict, whatever the reason is. When you look at all these conversations that people have, most of the time people just simply don’t and they simply don’t even think about doing it. And so that’s almost always the first step. Let’s talk about what we’re going to talk about and why it’s actually worth talking about. And then after that, you’ve actually got to get other people’s views. I know it’s obvious, but the tendency is saying, okay, now let me tell you my view on it all. Well, you’ve already done a good job of framing up the topic. You’ve probably activated people’s minds. It’s probably not time for you to talk now, right?
Because you’ve activated their minds. So let it come out, whatever you have provoked now, and really hear it out and bottom out their thinking. Because a lot of times when we’re listening to what other people are saying. I mean, listening is what we do while we wait to talk, right? I’m seeing his mouth move. I’m already decided what I’m going to say next, and half of what they’re saying, I’m not even hearing. It’s just going over my head. So there’s this intense listening that’s required. In fact, listening is the quiet skill of effective conversations. It’s the foundation of everything. You got to be very tuned in to what people are saying. So you have to listen out there, but you also have to listen in here because there’s a small voice in all of our heads that is giving us guidance about where to go in the conversation next. And so as you’re listening to what people are saying, You’re going to have an internal reaction, which could be, I actually don’t see it that way, or I don’t understand that well enough. Can you say more? And so you got to hook into that small voice inside of your head.
Then at some point, you got to express the truth of what you think about the situation. The key thing here is not to treat the conversation as an opportunity to win the argument, to be right, not wrong. This is what most people do. If we’re not avoiding, we want to get what we want. The key mentality is to treat this interaction between us as a collaborative search for the truth on behalf of trying to make things better. And so when you come from this mindset, so if you frame the conversation properly, if you’re truly listening to people properly, if you’re expressing addressing yourself in order to figure out with other people what’s actually true, and therefore what we can do about it, then that almost always makes these difficult conversations much easier and go much better than they otherwise could.
