Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most

by Douglas Stone

  The problem is this: you are taught what to say and how to sit, but the heart of good listening is authenticity. People “read” not only your words and posture, but what’s going on inside of you. If your “stance” isn’t genuine, the words won’t matter. What will be communicated almost invariably is whether you are genuinely curious, whether you genuinely care about the other person. If your intentions are false, no amount of careful wording or good posture will help. If your intentions are good, even clumsy language won’t hinder you.

  Listening is only powerful and effective if it is authentic. Authenticity means that you are listening because you are curious and because you care, not just because you are supposed to. The issue, then, is this: Are you curious? Do you care?

  The Commentator in Your Head: Become More Aware of Your Internal Voice

  You can tell what’s going on inside of you by listening to yourself. Finding and paying attention to your own internal voice — what you’re thinking but not saying — is the crucial first step in overcoming the biggest barrier to inauthentic listening. Left unattended, that voice blocks good listening; to the extent you’re listening to your own internal voice, you’re at best only half listening to the other person.

  Take a moment to locate the commentator in your head. It’s saying something like “Hmm, this internal voice is an interesting concept” or “What are they talking about? I don’t have an internal voice” (that’s the voice).

  Don’t Turn It Off, Turn It Up

  Perhaps surprisingly, our advice is not to turn off your internal voice, or even to turn it down. You can’t. Instead, we urge you to do the opposite — turn up your internal voice, at least for the time being, and get to know the kinds of things it says. In other words, listen to it. Only when you’re fully aware of your own thoughts can you begin to manage them and focus on the other person.

  There are endless thoughts and feelings you might have while you’re listening, but by now you know the patterns: your voice will be chattering away in each of the Three Conversations. In the “What Happened?” Conversation, you’ll find yourself thinking things like “I’m right,” “I did not intend to hurt you,” and “This isn’t my fault.” You’ll also notice plenty of feelings (“I can’t believe she thinks that about me! I’m so furious!”) and identity issues (“Was I really that thoughtless? I couldn’t have been”). Or not uncommonly, you may simply be daydreaming (“I wonder if there’s enough meatloaf for the in-laws”) or beginning to prepare your response (“When it’s my turn to talk, there are four points I’m going to make”).

  No wonder the person you’re listening to doesn’t feel they have your full attention.

  Managing Your Internal Voice

  How then can you give the other person your full attention and listen with curiosity when your internal commentator is chattering away? You can try two things. First, see if you can negotiate your way to curiosity. See if you can get your internal voice into a learning mode. If this doesn’t work, and sometimes it won’t, you may first have to express your internal voice before trying to listen to the other person.

  Negotiate Your Way to Curiosity. It’s a mistake to think your internal voice can’t change. If you find your curiosity failing, you can work to rev it up. Remind yourself that the task of understanding the other person’s world is always harder than it seems. Remind yourself that if you think you already understand how someone else feels or what they are trying to say, it is a delusion. Remember a time when you were sure you were right and then discovered one little fact that changed everything. There is always more to learn. Remind yourself of the depth, complexities, contradictions, and nuances that make up the stories of each of our lives.

  Audrey’s six-year-old daughter, Jocie, woke her up in the middle of the night. Jocie was scared because of a movie they’d seen about a puppy’s mother who ran away and never came back. Audrey assumed Jocie was worried about being abandoned herself, and she explained to Jocie that “I would never run away and leave you by yourself.”

  But it turned out that that wasn’t what Jocie was worried about at all. She was anxious about her new turtle. The movie had caused her to wonder whether her turtle might be someone’s mother, and whether there was a baby turtle somewhere that needed its mother back. In fact, Jocie’s turtle was itself a baby, but Jocie didn’t know that and was consumed with fear and guilt. Audrey had fallen into the trap of listening to her internal voice rather than to her daughter. Her internal voice was saying, “I know what this is all about,” and that was the end of her curiosity.

  Another way to rekindle your curiosity is to keep focused on your purpose in the conversation. If your purpose is to persuade or win or get the other person to do something, your internal voice will be saying things in line with those purposes, such as, “Why don’t you just do this — it’s obviously the best answer.” If, instead, you hold as one of your primary purposes understanding the other person, it motivates your internal voice to ask questions, such as “What else do I need to know for that to make more sense?” or “I wonder how I can understand the world in such a way that that would make sense?”

  Don’t Listen: Talk. Sometimes you’ll find that your internal voice is just too strong to take on. You try to negotiate your way to curiosity, but you just can’t get there. If you’re sitting on feelings of pain or outrage or betrayal, or, conversely, if you’re overcome with joy or love, then listening may be a hopeless task.

  Listening certainly feels out of reach for Dalila as she learns that Heather, her roommate of six months, is bisexual. As Heather talks, Dalila sits feeling confused, embarrassed, even a little angry. Rather than pretending to listen, Dalila needs to do the opposite. To remain authentic in the conversation she needs first to be honest about what she is thinking and feeling: “I’m glad you trust me enough to tell me this, and I really want to listen. At the same time, this is very upsetting for me. I’m feeling awkward, like I’m not sure how to act around you right now, and I’m just overwhelmed about what this means.”

  Dalila and Heather have a tough conversation ahead. Not only will each of them have strong feelings to sort through and share, but they have very different views about sexuality. As they talk about their friendship and how to handle their ongoing rooming situation, it will be critically important that each has the ability to listen to the other. At times, to be able to listen they’ll need first to speak.

  When you find yourself in this situation, let the other person know that you want to listen and that you care about what they have to say, but that you can’t listen right now. Often it’s enough to give a headline of what you’re thinking: “I’m surprised to hear you say that. I think I disagree, but say more about how you see it,” or “I have to admit that as much as I want to hear what you have to say, I’m feeling a little defensive right now.” With that on the table, you can get back to listening, knowing that you’ve signaled your difference and will get back to your view in time.

  In some cases, you may decide that you can neither listen nor talk. This may be because you’re too upset or confused, or simply because you need to be doing something else. Rather than give the other person half your attention, it’s better to say, “This is important to me, I want to find a time to talk about it, and right now I’m not able to.”

  Managing your internal voice is not easy, especially at first. But it is at the heart of good listening.

  Three Skills: Inquiry, Paraphrasing, and Acknowledgment

  While your internal stance is the key to good listening, there are some specific techniques we can pass along, some how-tos that people find helpful. In addition to the stance of curiosity, there are three primary skills that good listeners employ: inquiry, paraphrasing, and acknowledgment. Below are some dos and don’ts relating to each.

  Inquire to Learn

  The heading says it all: inquire to learn. And only to learn. You can tell whether a question will help the conversation or hurt it by thinking about why you asked it. T
he only good answer is “To learn.”

  Don’t Make Statements Disguised as Questions

  Anyone who has ever been a kid in a car has uttered the cranky words “Are we there yet?” You know you’re not there yet, and your parents know you know, and so they respond in a tone as cranky as yours. What you really meant was “I’m feeling restless” or “I wish we were there” or “This is a long trip for me.” Any of these would likely elicit a more productive response from Mom and Dad.

  This illustrates an important rule about inquiry: If you don’t have a question, don’t ask a question. Never dress up an assertion as a question. Doing so creates confusion and resentment, because such questions are inevitably heard as sarcastic and sometimes meanspirited. Consider some examples of assertions disguised as questions:

  “Are you going to leave the refrigerator door open like that?” (Instead of “Please close the refrigerator door” or “I feel frustrated when you leave the refrigerator door open.”)

  “Is it impossible for you to focus on me just once?” (Instead of “I feel ignored” or “I’d like you to pay more attention to me.”)

  “Do you have to drive so fast?” (Instead of “I’m feeling nervous” or “It’s hard for me to relax when I’m not in control.”)

  Notice that these examples of disguised assertions are either about feelings or about requests. This should not be surprising. Sharing our feelings and making requests are two things that many of us have difficulty doing directly. They can make us feel vulnerable. Turning what we have to say into an attack — a sarcastic question — can feel safer. But this safety is an illusion, and we lose more than we gain. Saying “I’d like you to pay more attention to me” is more likely to produce a conversation (and a satisfying outcome) than “Is it impossible for you to focus on me just once?”

  Why? Because instead of hearing the underlying feeling or request, the other person focuses on the sarcasm and the attack. Instead of hearing that you feel lonely, they hear that you think they are thoughtless. The real message doesn’t get through, because they are distracted by the need to defend themselves. In fact, they are likely to respond in kind: “Well, sure, I can focus on you just once.” And things deteriorate from there.

  Don’t Use Questions to Cross-Examine

  A second error that gets us into trouble is using questions to shoot holes in the other person’s argument. For example:

  “You seem to think this is my fault. But surely you’d agree that you made more mistakes than I did, wouldn’t you?”

  “If it’s true that you did everything you could have done to make the sale, how do you explain the fact that Kate was able to make the sale so soon after you gave up?”

  These questions are wrong-footed from the start. They emerge from a purpose of trying to persuade the other person that you are right and they are wrong, rather than trying to learn.

  To use the ideas in these questions constructively, pull out the statements embedded in the questions and express them — but not as facts. Rather than asserting them as true, share them as open questions or perceptions, and ask for the other person’s reaction. Rather than assuming that this is an argument they have ignored, assume that they have thought about it and have reason to tell a different story. You might say, for example, “I understand that you feel you did everything you could to make the sale. To me, that seems inconsistent with the fact that Kate made the sale right after you gave up. What’s your thinking about that?”

  Ask Open-Ended Questions

  Open-ended questions are questions that give the other person broad latitude in how to answer. They elicit more information than yes/no questions or offering menus, such as, “Were you trying to do A or B?” Instead ask “What were you trying to do?” This way you don’t bias the answer or distract the other person’s thinking by the need to process your ideas. It lets them direct their response toward what is important to them. Typical open-ended questions are variations on “Tell me more” and “Help me understand better . . . .”

  Ask for More Concrete Information

  To understand where the other person’s conclusions came from and enrich your understanding of what they envision going forward, it helps to ask them to be more explicit about their reasoning and their vision. “What leads you to say that?” “Can you give me an example?” “What would that look like?” “How would that work?” “How would we test that hypothesis?”

  Consider the situation Ross ran into with his boss. He received a flyer for a professional seminar he wanted to take. It would help him in his job as a product manager, so he figured the conversation with his boss about getting the time off and the course paid for would be a cinch.

  He was wrong. The conversation went like this:

  BOSS: For me even to consider having the company pay for you to go to that seminar I’d need more evidence that you’re dedicated to working here for the long term, and right now I just don’t see it.

  ROSS: What? I’m totally dedicated to the company. I’ve told you that. That’s the whole point of me wanting to take this seminar.

  BOSS: I don’t see it that way. I get the sense you view this job as a stepping stone to something else.

  ROSS: Well, I don’t know what else I can say, except that I love it here and plan to stay. And the seminar would be very helpful for the work I do. . . .

  It’s not hard to see why this is an unproductive exchange. There’s virtually no information being transferred back and forth except “Am so!” and “Are not!” In essence, Ross’s boss is saying, “I don’t think you’re dedicated, but I’m not going to tell you why.” And unfortunately, Ross isn’t asking.

  After some coaching, Ross took up the issue again, but this time asked for more concrete information:

  ROSS: Say more about how you judge dedication, and what you’ve observed in me that suggests to you that I’m not as dedicated as you’d like me to be.

  BOSS: Well, obviously it’s a lot of things. One piece of it is that you seem uninterested in the social events here. In my experience that has always been a pretty good indicator of dedication. People who are in this for the long haul know the importance of building and maintaining good relationships with their coworkers, and they make sure to get to as many social events as possible.

  ROSS: Huh. I’m totally surprised to hear you say that. I was assuming you measured dedication based on things like working late and doing a lot of assignments well.

  BOSS: That’s very important too. But sometimes people do that to build a good record for when they decide to move on to the next job. In my experience the socializing aspect is the most tightly correlated to long-term interest. . . .

  Finally, Ross and his boss were getting somewhere. By the end of the conversation, they had a much deeper understanding of why they each reached a different conclusion about Ross’s commitment to the company, important information for Ross to know.

  Ask Questions About the Three Conversations

  Each of the Three Conversations provides fertile ground for curiosity:

  Can you say a little more about how you see things?

  What information might you have that I don’t?

  How do you see it differently?

  What impact have my actions had on you?

  Can you say a little more about why you think this is my fault?

  Were you reacting to something I did?

  How are you feeling about all of this?

  Say more about why this is important to you.

  What would it mean to you if that happened?

  If the answers aren’t entirely clear, keep digging. If necessary, say what’s still unclear or inconsistent to you, and ask for clarification: “Okay, so your view is that Kate made the sale because she could offer a reduced price on the service contract. I can see how that would make a difference. What I’m still not clear on, though, is why you couldn’t offer that or get permission to offer that. Can you say more about that?”

  Make It Safe for Them N
ot to Answer

  Sometimes even the most skillful question provokes defensiveness. You ask a question out of genuine caring toward the other person and a genuine desire to learn, and still they react by shutting down, defending, counterattacking, accusing you of bad intentions, or changing the subject.

  One response is to say that you are trying to help and that there is no need to be defensive, and then continue to press for an answer. But this can be experienced as an attempt to control them, provoking further resistance. It’s better to make your question an invitation rather than a demand, and to make that clear. The difference is that an invitation can be declined without penalty. This offers a greater sense of safety and, especially if the other person declines to respond and your reaction makes that okay, it builds trust between you.

  Whether you are talking with your boss or your eight-year-old daughter, giving them the choice of whether to answer increases the chance that they will respond and respond honestly. Even if they don’t answer now, they may later, after they think about it. Knowing that it’s their choice underscores your caring intent and frees them to think about the question.

  Paraphrase for Clarity

  The second skill a good listener brings to the conversation is paraphrasing. Paraphrasing is when you express to the other person, in your own words, your understanding of what they are saying. There are two significant benefits to paraphrasing.