Communication is often identified as the key point of failure between parties experiencing problems in their relationships. This issue is common across all types of relationships to include friends, spouses, siblings, extended families, workplace, sports teams, and many more. Communication comes in all forms and is conducted effectively in relationships on a very regular basis without issue. It is those times that the conversations become “crucial” that pose the biggest risk to relationships and/or progress toward a common or shared goal. Being able to navigate crucial conversations is a skill that eludes most of us and we often undermine ourselves in the process without even realizing what we have done. Recognizing when conversations become crucial and mastering dialogue throughout the conversation are keys to success.
The book, Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking when Stakes are High, published in 2002 by McGraw-Hill, has received 1 recognition as a New York Times Best Seller and as a business classic. Stephen Covey, the author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, described this book as a “breakthrough book” in his foreword of the second edition. The book describes crucial conversations as those which involve opposing opinions, high stakes, and strong emotions. It provides methods for maintaining dialogue throughout crucial conversations in a way that creates a safe environment while attempting to add facts to the shared pool of meaning as the basis for the resulting decision. This book made a profound effect on me personally when encountering crucial conversations because it has helped me better understand my natural responses under these circumstances and how to resist those that aren’t productive. I wish I had read this book before I got married, before I had kids, and before I accepted my first management position. I truly believe that if you read this book and focus on how you can apply it to improve your skills when encountering crucial conversations that you will have a similar experience.
The Importance of Crucial Conversations
When we have time to prepare for anticipated crucial conversations, we have a better opportunity to perform well but, quite often, conversations become crucial very unexpectedly. Whether we have prepared for the conversation to be crucial or not, our bodies are involuntarily working against us. Our emotions create physical responses such as hair standing up on our neck, flush feeling in our face, palms sweating, and adrenaline pumping. As this is happening our body redirects the blood from our brain to other parts in preparation for fight or flight. This is a situation that everyone has experienced at least once and if we are honest with ourselves, we experience it often across all our relationships. How in the world can we ever expect to be successful under these circumstances?
When conversations are crucial, we need to be at our best but, more often than not, we are at our worst. Recognizing that a conversation is becoming crucial for you or for others is the first step to success. When our bodies tell us the conversation is becoming crucial for us personally, we must refocus our brains to be able to return to dialogue. The fight-or-flight response can be observed in others through acts of silence or violence when a conversation becomes crucial for them. When this occurs, we need to stop and return to a safe environment for the conversation which will invite others to return to productive dialogue. With the end goal of adding facts to the pool of meaning to facilitate productive and effective decisions, returning to and maintaining open dialogue is imperative.
Master My Stories
The chapter titled Master My Stories: How to Stay in Dialogue when You are Angry, Scared, or Hurt really spoke to me personally. Emotions don’t just happen, there is a step between what other people do and how we feel about that action. This chapter of the book describes the intermediate step in the following excerpt.
Just after we observe what others do and just before we feel some emotion about it, we tell ourselves a story. We add meaning to the action we observed. We make a guess at the motive driving the behavior. Why were they doing that? We also add judgment – is that good or bad? And then, based on these thoughts or stories, our body responds with an emotion.
This concept of telling yourself a story to draw a conclusion really stood out to me. I tried to examine myself because I don’t think about telling myself a story when I observe certain behavior. I realized that when someone cuts me off on the interstate I immediately think, “what a jerk.” How did I come to that conclusion about that person? Well, I told myself a story that the person cut me off on purpose making it a personal attack and therefore they are a jerk. What about when someone doesn’t share information with me that I feel was an important piece of information required for making a key decision? I might conclude “they wanted me to make the wrong decision” and if I did make that conclusion it would result from a story that I told myself about that person’s motive. The observation provides the facts and the story I tell myself leads to a conclusion. The models associated with this behavior begins with the information that we see and hear (fact gathering), then we tell a story which results in how we feel about the facts, and finally we act based on our emotions and not necessarily based on the facts.
The answer to this dilemma is to gain control of our emotions by telling ourselves a different story. We can take any set of facts and develop an unlimited number of stories from which we can draw conclusions. We can gain control of our emotions by controlling the stories we tell ourselves. We must step out of our emotions, figure out how we reached this point (what story we told ourselves), and avoid confusing our story with the facts. The book explains three types of clever stories we like to tell ourselves which are:
Victim Stories – “It’s not my fault.”
Villian Stories – “It’s all your fault.”
Helpless Stories – “There is nothing else I can do.”
We like to use these clever stories to redirect the blame and justify our actions and we often do so without even realizing what we are doing.
As I started paying more attention to my personal reactions in all conversations, I often ask myself, "What story are you telling, and could there be a different story?" I find that exercise freeing for me because it allows me to remove myself from the emotion of the moment, reengage my brain, and exhibit better control over my emotions. I am far from mastering even this one small chapter, much less the entire book, but by understanding myself better and how I react in these situations has helped me when I have encountered crucial conversations in all aspects of my life.
Summary
Crucial conversations are very common in all our relationships at work and at home. The more crucial the conversation, the greater potential for damage when bad performance is exhibited. We should not be satisfied with poor personal performance observed in our crucial conversations because we can learn how to navigate them better if we are willing to put in the time and effort required to build the right skills. Success never comes without work and discipline rarely comes without some sort of inconvenience. If you desire to improve in the area of crucial conversations, read this book from the perspective of self-improvement and start putting it into practice. I truly believe that you will be glad that you took the time to invest in yourself and your relationships.