Crucial Conversations during Uncertain Times 🗣

notes and reflections

Photo by Evelyn Semenyuk on Unsplash

Here are my notes from reading Crucial Conversations by Kerry Paterson and his co-authors.

What is a crucial conversation?

A crucial conversation is a discussion with two or more people where there are differing views, high stakes, and strong emotions.

What should you prioritize in a crucial conversation?

• A feeling of safety during a conversation allows you to listen and take feedback. Fight or flight is triggered during many crucial conversations. Pull yourself out of the content of the argument and watch for fear during the conversation. Recode the stimulus.
• Pay attention to your own behavior. Self monitoring is vital during a crucial conversation. Monitor your impact on safety during the conversation.
• Maintain mutual respect. Ask yourself — Do others believe I respect them? Look for ways you are similar to the people you are talking to. This will generate or help maintain empathy.
• Ask yourself what you want, what you don’t want, and how you can accomplish both.
• Rebuild mutual purpose due to misunderstanding via contrasting. Show the person what you don't intend followed by what you actually do intend to say.
• Understand what people’s real purposes are. Take a step back. Ask them why. Get clarity and invent a mutual purpose. Sometimes you can’t just discover the mutual purpose and have to invent it together.
• Take control of your stories that you tell. Don't let them control you during crucial conversations. Change the stories you tell yourself.
• Get in touch with your feelings. Identify your own emotions accurately. Knowing what you’re really feeling helps you take an accurate look at what’s actually going on. Do you talk others about how you feel? Is your emotional vocabulary limited?
• Turn villains into humans. Work on yourself first. Reflect on alternative motives.
• Soften the message with stories. Use tentative language with uncertain or controversial ideas.
• Encourage others to challenge your opinion as vigorously and legitimately as you are in sharing your opinion. Pay devils advocate if no one speaks up.
• Paraphrase to acknowledge the story. Don’t parrot back what was said, but put it in your own words. Remain calm and collected.
• Start with areas of agreement.
• Who does what? By when? Who will follow-up?
• Clarify on the deliverables. Don’t talk in abstract. Talk about what you want and don’t want.
• Built an expectation of follow-up into every assignment.
• When something bothers you, catch it early. Don’t wait for the consequences.
• Don’t aim for perfection; aim for progress.

What are some things that you should avoid?

• Avoid violence (labeling and name calling) and avoid silence (masking, avoiding, withdrawal)
• Avoid assigning a malicious intent toward the other person(s). Instead try belief in a mutual purpose or a shared goal. This goes both ways. Commit to this idea.
• Avoid looking critical and selfish. Instead focusing on the mutual purpose during the conversation.
• Don’t confuse stories with facts. Get back to the source of your emotions. Identify and evaluate the true source.
• Avoid clever stories that justify behaving badly.

Other Notes

• Define your objective during a conversation
• It’s not about winning. Focus on healthy dialog.
• Examine what and why during a conversation. Watch for when a conversation starts to become unhealthy.
• Stay alert for the moment a conversation turns crucial.

Book Link

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Second Edition