Don’t Focus on Short-Term Relief at Long-Term Cost. Another common mistake is acting to relieve psychological tension in the short term at the cost of creating a worse situation in the future.
Janet learned this the hard way. With twenty years of experience in nonprofit financial management, she never thought she’d be brought to tears by a board member questioning her competence. But here she was. Finally, sick of feeling attacked each time she presented the budget numbers, she decided to confront the board member, a woman named Sylvie. It did not go well. Janet explains:
Looking back, although I was saying some of the right things — taking responsibility for my contribution and so forth — I think what I really wanted to do was tell her off. I wanted her to feel as small as I had. And I wanted to let her know that she couldn’t treat me this way.
Oh, I let her have it. And I walked out of the meeting feeling great . . . for about fifteen minutes. Then I started to regret some of the things I’d said, and realized that I’d just made the situation worse by feeding the antagonism between us. The fact was, she could treat me this way, and I’d just made it more likely that she would.
If your purpose is to change the other person or their behavior, to vent or tell them off, then having this conversation is quite likely to produce many of the negative consequences you fear. Saying “You are insensitive/unreliable/unacceptable” will jeopardize the relationship. You will probably hurt the other person’s feelings, provoke a defensive reaction, or get yourself fired.
This is not to say that Janet is stuck being mistreated by Sylvie without any way to address the situation. Janet might have a constructive conversation with Sylvie if she can shift her purposes a bit. If Janet can negotiate herself into a place of curiosity about why Sylvie reacts as she does, this could be a worthwhile conversation. Janet can see it as an opportunity to learn Sylvie’s story, share her own, and then figure out how they might work together better. Is it something Janet is doing? Is Sylvie aware of the impact she’s having on Janet? Is this the way Sylvie has gotten results in the past? What advice can Janet offer Sylvie on how to get a better reaction from her?
If Janet can come into the conversation with this kind of curiosity stance toward Sylvie’s view, the conversation is much less likely to provoke a bad reaction or to damage the relationship. Janet would be investing in the relationship by trying to work with Sylvie in figuring out why things have been so difficult.
Negotiating with yourself to shift your purposes can lower the threshold of how risky the conversation is likely to be and improve the odds of a constructive outcome.
Don’t Hit-and-Run. Often, when we have something important to say, we say it now because now is when it’s causing us frustration. Most of us are thoughtful enough to avoid the most egregious errors of bad timing. If someone tells us they’ve just returned from the doctor’s office and are going to have to have that operation after all, few of us would say, “I’m sorry to hear that. Oh, by the way, you still owe me $500.”
However, there’s another error around timing that we do make. It’s the hit-and-run. An employee wanders into work late, something you’ve been meaning to talk to them about, so you say, “Late again, eh?” and leave it at that. Or you visit your son for the weekend, notice the empty beer bottles in the garbage, and say, “I see you’re still drinking up a storm.”
These comments are intended to help. You hope your employee or your son will take the message to heart. But while your comments may help you feel a bit better (“At least I’ve said something”), they make the other person defensive and frustrated, which is unlikely to produce the kind of change you had in mind.
A good rule to follow is: If you’re going to talk, talk. Really talk. And if you’re really going to talk, you can’t do it on the fly. You have to plan a time to talk. You have to be explicit about wanting ten minutes or an hour to discuss something that is important to you. You can’t have a real conversation in thirty seconds, and anything less than a real conversation isn’t going to help. If hit-and-run is all you can muster, it’s better not to raise the issue at all.
Letting Go
The approach in this book can help you accomplish a number of astonishing results. You’ll make better decisions about when bringing something up just doesn’t make sense, at least until you’ve sorted through some of your own issues or tried changing your own contribution. And when you choose to engage, you’ll slowly get better at staying out of your own way — spotting and side-stepping the ways you used to trip yourself up. Over time, you’ll lessen your own anxiety and deepen your most important relationships.
But this approach is not magic. Sometimes — despite our very best efforts — nothing helps. You can’t force the other person to want to invest in the relationship or work things out. No matter how many times you explain to your son how worried you are when he doesn’t call, he may not call. Your boss may continue to lose his temper. Your mother may never come to understand how emotionally abandoned you felt when you were young.
Sometimes you consider your purposes and some possible strategies, and decide not to have the conversation. Holding onto the issues inside the relationship becomes too painful or too exhausting, so you move on. You are able to let go.
Other times, it’s not that easy. For one reason or another, even though you think it’s the better choice not to engage with the issue, the situation has you by the throat. The story inside your head still carries emotional punch; you experience a flood of emotions every time you think about it. You’ve decided to move on, but your emotions have dug in their heels.
Some people say letting go is a choice. Others think it happens only when the conditions are right — after contrition has been shown, after you’ve found a new relationship, or after you’ve been forgiven. What does it take to be able truly to let go? To open your palm and let the bitterness and exasperation and hurt and shame sift through your fingers?
We don’t presume to know. And we’re suspicious of anyone who thinks there’s an easy formula. Probably, it is something different for each of us.
What we do know is that letting go usually takes time, and that it is rarely a simple journey. It’s not easy to find a place where you can set free the pain, or shame, you carry from your experiences. A place where you can tell the story differently in your head — where you can relinquish the role of victim or villain, and give yourself and the other person roles that are more complex and liberating. A place where you can accept yourself for who you’ve been and who you are.
If someone tells you that you should have gotten over something or someone by now, don’t believe it. Believing there’s some appropriate time frame for getting over something is just one more way to keep yourself stuck. But neither should you believe that there’s nothing you can do to enable yourself to let go, or that it just takes time. There’s plenty you can do to help yourself down that road.
Adopt Some Liberating Assumptions
A good place to start is in the Identity Conversation, challenging some of the common assumptions that can get in the way of letting go and being at peace with our choices. Four liberating assumptions are presented below.
It’s Not My Responsibility to Make Things Better; It’s My Responsibility to Do My Best. For Karenna, the key to closure was letting go of the fantasy that things could be better:
I’ve failed at relationships before, and I so wanted this one to work. But I didn’t just want it to work. Somewhere along the way, I decided it had to work, no matter what, and that it was my job to make it happen. I tried everything, and maybe I should have gotten out of the relationship sooner. But it was hard to let go of the idea that things between Paul and me might have worked out, if only I’d been a better person, or said the right thing at the right time, or worked harder at it, or something.
In Karenna’s situation, part of the process of letting go of the guilt and sadness she carried was accepting that sometimes there are limits — you cannot always make a re
lationship more comfortable or more nourishing or more intimate or more durable. The best you can do is try.
They Have Limitations Too. Sometimes you’ll tell the other person about your feelings and perspectives, or about the impact they are having on you, and they say they understand, and you each agree to change your behavior. Then they do whatever annoys you yet again, and you think, “Well, now they know that this aggravates me. So what’s the story? Am I not important enough to them? Are they trying to drive me nuts? What am I to make of this?”
One thing you can make of it is that they are as imperfect as you are. No matter how clearly you share how much their drinking hurts you, their forgetfulness aggravates you, or their unresponsiveness saddens you, they may not have the capacity to be different, at least not right now.
After a lifetime of being a big sister, Alison couldn’t change being bossy overnight even if she wanted to. At some point, her younger brother may find it easier to accept her as her imperfect, bossy self than to continue to fight with her. He can work through the identity issues that make it easy for Alison to get to him, and love her for the things about her that he likes and admires.
This Conflict Is Not Who I Am. An important barrier to letting go occurs when we integrate the conflict into our sense of who we are. In our mind’s eye, we are the least favorite son, the long-suffering wife, part of the oppressed group. We define ourselves in relation to our conflict with others.
Over the last four years the leadership in Rob’s firm has split over several key strategic questions. Part of the “losing” faction, Rob’s professional identity has been all but consumed by being one of the few still holding out, standing up to management. Now in the wake of a sudden merger, Rob’s faction has been handed control, and the satisfaction he feels is mingled with uneasiness. No longer playing the opposition, Rob is not sure how to see himself. Rob’s sense of self was perhaps too aligned with his role in the conflict.
Such dynamics play an important part in ethnic conflict. Our sense of who we are as a community is often defined in terms of who we are not, who we are against, and what hardships we’ve endured. Tragically, we can feel threatened by the prospect of reconciliation, because it can rob us not only of our role, but also of our communal identity.
These kinds of situations are notoriously difficult to manage because we don’t want to give up who we are unless there is something better to replace it. If you find yourself being swallowed up by a conflict, if you begin to see your very identity as tied to the fight, try to take a step back and remember why you are fighting. You are fighting for what is right and fair, not because you need the conflict to survive.
Letting Go Doesn’t Mean I No Longer Care. Often we are unable to let go because we fear that if we do, it will mean we no longer care. If you and your sister weren’t at odds, how would you show how important she is to you, or know that you’re just as significant in her life? Is it possible to let go and still care enormously?
David has wrestled with this issue more deeply than most:
When my brother was murdered, I didn’t think I could ever forgive the man who shot him — over something as stupid as a drink in a poker game. And I have to admit that I was also angry with my brother for being there.
I didn’t attend the trial. I couldn’t. For years every time I would be reminded of my brother, the fury and pain of the injustice of his death would surge through me. In my mind, I would have conversations with my brother in which I’d tell him not only how sad I was, but how angry I was at him for being so foolish, and for abandoning me.
It’s only recently that I’ve begun to see the power in forgiving each of them — my brother and the man who murdered him. Letting go of my rage and indignation doesn’t mean I have to let go of my love for my brother or my sense of loss. There’s nothing I can do about it, and I’ve finally accepted that. I’ll never get over losing my brother. I still talk to him. But the conversations aren’t so hard. I can miss him terribly without the clutter of so many other feelings.
David’s story shows us the power of being able to let go of anger while still holding on to love and memories. David can’t and doesn’t want to forget what happened. He’s learned a great deal from the experience, painful as it was, that he applies to his relationships with his children and others. And yet in letting go and forgiving, some of the emotional burden he’s carried since the tragedy has eased.
Even in situations much more mundane than David’s, letting go of the emotions and identity issues wrapped up in a difficult conversation can be one of the most challenging things you do. Difficult conversations operate at the core of our being — where the people and the principles we care about most intersect with our self-image and self-esteem. Letting go, at heart, is about how to handle with skill and grace not having a difficult conversation.
Of course, the better you become at engaging difficult conversations, the less there will be for you to let go of. One key to improving is having sound purposes.
If You Raise It: Three Purposes That Work
We’ve talked about purposes that will get you into trouble. But how about purposes that make sense? The gold standard here is working for mutual understanding. Not mutual agreement, necessarily, but a better understanding of each of your stories, so that you can make informed decisions (alone or together) about what to do next.
Anytime you think a conversation might be difficult, keep the following three purposes front and center in your consciousness.
1. Learning Their Story
Exploring the other person’s perspective takes us into each of the Three Conversations. What information do they see that we missed or don’t have access to? What past experiences influence them? What is their reasoning for why they did what they did? What were their intentions? How did our actions impact them? What do they think we are contributing to the problem? What are they feeling? What does this situation mean to them? How does it affect their identity? What’s at stake?
2. Expressing Your Views and Feelings
Your goal should be to express your views and feelings to your own satisfaction. You hope that the other person will understand what you are saying, and perhaps be moved by it, but you can’t count on that. What you can do is say, as well as you can, what is important for you to say about your views, intentions, contributions, feelings, and identity issues. You can share your story.
3. Problem-Solving Together
Given what you and the other person have each learned, what would improve the situation going forward? Can you brainstorm creative ways to satisfy both of your needs? Where your needs conflict, can you use equitable standards to ensure a fair and workable way to resolve the conflict?
Stance and Purpose Go Hand in Hand
These three purposes accommodate the fact that you and the other person see the world differently, that you each have powerful feelings about what is going on, and that you each have your own identity issues to work through. Each of you, in short, has your own story. You need purposes that can reckon with this reality.
These are the purposes that emerge from a learning stance, from working through the Three Conversations and shifting your internal orientation from certainty to curiosity, from debate to exploration, from simplicity to complexity, from “either/or” to “and.” They may seem simple — perhaps even simplistic. But their straightforwardness masks both the difficulty involved in doing them well and the power they have to transform the way you handle your conversations.
Working from a learning stance with these purposes in mind, the rest of this book explores in detail how to conduct a learning conversation, from getting started to getting unstuck.
8
Getting Started: Begin from the Third Story
The most stressful moment of a difficult conversation is often the beginning. We may learn in the first few seconds that the news for us is not good, that the other person sees things very differently, that we aren’t likely to get what we want. They may become angr
y or distraught or we may discover that they don’t want to talk to us at all.
But while the beginning is fraught with peril, it is also an opportunity. It’s when you have the greatest leverage to influence the entire direction of the conversation. Sure, you can begin in a way that sends things careening into a brick wall; we’ve all done that. But it doesn’t have to go that way. What you say at the outset can put you squarely on the road toward understanding and problem-solving. There are techniques you can learn for how to take advantage of the opportunity the beginning presents, and simple principles for understanding why your usual approaches so often go awry.
How to begin a conversation? Let’s first consider how not to.
Why Our Typical Openings Don’t Help
One way or another, if we are going to have a conversation, we have to start by saying something. So, perhaps recalling advice from a childhood swimming coach, we close our eyes, take a deep breath, and jump in:
If you contest Dad’s will, it’s going to tear the family apart.
I was very upset by what you said in front of our supervisor.
Your son Nathan can be difficult in class — disruptive and argumentative. You’ve said in the past that things at home are fine, but something must be troubling him.
Before we know it, we’re in over our heads. The other person becomes hurt or angry, we feel defensive, our preparation goes out the window, and we wonder why we thought having this conversation was a good idea in the first place.
Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Page 15