Difficult Conversations  🔗 **Source:** [Difficult Conversations]() ## Highlights - people who are willing and able to “stick through the hard parts” emerge with a stronger sense of trust in each other and the relationship, because now they have a track record of having worked through something hard and seen that the relationship survived. - The ability to manage difficult conversations effectively is foundational, then, to achieving almost any significant change. - We need to understand what the people involved are thinking and feeling but not saying to each other. In a difficult conversation, this is usually where the real action is. - just saying what you’re thinking would probably not make the conversation any easier. - it’s more complicated than “being right” or “being wrong,” and in any event, arguing about it doesn’t get us very far. That’s because difficult conversations at their core are almost never about getting the facts right. They are about conflicting perceptions, interpretations, and values. They are not about what a contract states, they are about what a contract means. - In the “What Happened?” Conversation, moving away from the truth assumption frees us to shift our purpose from proving we are right to understanding the perceptions, interpretations, and values of both sides. It allows us to move away from delivering messages and toward asking questions, exploring how each person is making sense of the world. And to offer our views as perceptions, interpretations, and values — not as “the truth.” - What I think about your intentions will affect how I think about you and, ultimately, how our conversation goes. - But intentions are invisible. We assume them from other people’s behavior. In other words, we make them up, we invent them. - Most difficult conversations focus significant attention on who’s to blame for the mess we’re - When competent, sensible people make a mistake or do something stupid, the most useful move is to try to figure out, first, what kept them from seeing it coming and, second, how to prevent the problem from happening again. - The question is not whether strong feelings will arise, but how to handle them when they do. - difficult conversations do not just involve feelings, they are at their very core about feelings. Feelings are not some noisy byproduct of engaging in difficult talk, they are an integral part of the conflict. - The Identity Conversation looks inward: it’s all about who we are and how we see ourselves. How does what happened affect my self-esteem, my self-image, my sense of who I am in the world? What impact will it have on my future? What self-doubts do I harbor? In short: before, during, and after the difficult conversation, the Identity Conversation is about what I am saying to myself about me.