Bring clarity to your conversations

A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to attend an excellent four-day training with The Thought Collective, led by Tong Yee in Singapore. He is a brilliant workshop leader and facilitator and really pushed the participants to grow. He was able to "read the room" and to develop interventions that led participants to questions themselves and to support others in having breakthroughs.

The training focused on facilitating powerful conversations, and I felt inspired by the workshop, the honesty of my fellow participants, and the simple yet effective techniques taught in the course. I would like to share one of the ideas which resonated most with me.

Tong Yee explained that we can only intervene on what we can see, so in order to facilitate powerful conversations we have to get to what is really on people’s minds as without those distinctions it is impossible to see, and therefore to intervene. This means that we need to develop trust in the relationship, and use questions to draw out distinctions.

He developed this simple model (above) to illustrate that stress and anxiety can be created when our perception as to how a situation should or can be differs from how the situation actually is. A simple yet brilliant model which I have embraced and since put to use in my coaching practice.

To give you an example. If I believe that my teenage child should tidy their room, but the reality is they do not, there is going to be stress for me as my expectations in the situation are not being met. Maybe I’m going to be arguing with my child about the messy room, so therefore my child is also going to have stress, as they feel that it’s their room, it’s not that messy (according to their criteria), and I’m always going on at them about it.

To resolve this situation, there needs to be a conversation (rather than an argument, or a telling off). Both parties need to be able to distinguish what the other person is feeling in order to resolve the situation. It may be that there is no permanent solution to the messy room (teenagers are teens after all) but the quality of the conversation has changed.

I have practiced this with colleagues I supervise at work, as well as with coachees in my practice. So far, all have found it useful tool to focus on defining what is causing their "stress/anxiety" and helping them to articulate to me how they can close the gap between their two lines. When we have powerful conversations, where we can be authentic to our values and true self, we can grow and move forward. Try this model out on yourself to see if it brings you clarity in a stressful situation.