How to handle difficult conversations

This chapter was originally published in 'The Possibilities Project: A young person's guide to career success' - a free book packed full of useful insights for students, career starters and even the more seasoned among us... You can learn more and download your free copy here: https://thepossibilitiesproject.co/

 No matter who you are, where you come from, what job you do, where you go to school or work or how old you are, difficult conversations are… well, difficult. If you find it easy to tell a parent you disagree with them, a teacher that they’re wrong or a friend that their behaviour makes you uncomfortable in some way, then this chapter might not be for you. But if you want to get better at managing difficult conversations, read on…   

Speaking up effectively is hard, but it’s a skill that you can learn and improve on over time. It’s never going to be easy to tell somebody they smell bad, or hear that your presentation wasn’t the best ever made: if it were easy then everybody could do it. But you can make it easier. 

The first thing to do is to notice what you’re doing – being self-aware means noticing how you’re behaving and feeling in the moment. This is relatively easy most of the time, but you may have noticed that when you’re upset, worried or deliriously happy, you sometimes say and do things that aren’t what you mean to say or do. That’s why there’s more than one step!  

The second step is to ask yourself lots of questions about your behaviour – what did you notice in step one that can help you? Some of the most important questions are: 

Does it match what you want to achieve in the long run? This is important because our brains are set up to try to be lazy and focus on what feels good in the short-term. We need to work hard to stop that happening. One way to do that is to think about your long-term purpose.  

Does it match reality? Is your behaviour consistent with the reality of the situation? If you’re crying/shouting/throwing things, is this a reasonable reaction to the reality around you? What would a stranger say, if they were observing the situation? Is your reaction proportionate?  

Our brains are wonderful in many ways, but they don’t always work in our best interest in the modern world. Sometimes, we react in ways that were fine when we had to manage the threats of man-eating lions in small tribes or villages, but are less helpful when managing relationships on and off-line with a very diverse population.    

The trick in asking yourself lots of questions about your behaviour is to be honest in your answers – sounds obvious, doesn’t it? But I work with adults in the corporate world every day who struggle with this. If you can grasp this today, you’re setting yourself up for success.  

But only if you can really master the next step: listen to the answers and be ready to change. The chances are, your behaviour isn’t perfect, and that’s true of most people. Most people, no matter how old or important or rich they are, are human. So on occasion, they will say or do things they wish they hadn’t. That’s ok, as long as we’re aware and we apologise (sincerely) and change as necessary.  

Change, of course, is hard. It requires sustained effort over time and so many people won’t do it. But those who do have a magic power. If you do want to change, there are more resources than ever before which are freely available – this book is just one of them. But it doesn’t matter how much something costs if you don’t take advantage of it. Read books and articles, listen to podcasts, attend training sessions and learn from those you look up to. Apply what you’ve learned to your life.  

And remember step four: repeat. This is an iterative process. Nobody is perfect and nobody gets it right all the time, so we have to practise over time to improve and gain more control.  

Left to their own devices, our brains work against us in difficult conversations. So we need to spend time learning about this and about why human beings in general find it tough to speak up, or ask those difficult questions of ourselves.  

One of the reasons why is our tendency to assume the worst or convince ourselves of the most dramatic explanation or option. This means that when you think of telling your best friend that he or she talks too much or doesn’t notice that everybody is falling asleep by the end of his or her best story, you imagine that they will lose their minds with anger and never speak to you again. You’re not alone in ‘catastrophising’ like this. In the workplace, this translates into people not speaking up because they’re convinced their boss will fire them or their colleagues will ostracise them. So they say nothing at all (to the person or people who could actually change things) and instead suffer in silence, or gossip and complain to people who agree with them but are equally unable or unwilling to do anything to change things.  

Perhaps the most important thing to remember in any difficult conversation is the need to focus on the ‘truths’ – what we heard or saw – and not on our ‘potentials’ – which is what we thought about what we heard or saw. As an example, imagine you wanted to talk about a friend who you felt was being aggressive. You could start by saying something like: 

“When you get aggressive, I find it hard to speak with you.” 

But the problem there is that you haven’t explained what, exactly, the problem is. Maybe the person raises their voice, or stands up and looms over you? Both of these behaviours could certainly be seen as aggressive, but they could also be seen as passionate or assertive. And even if the person is really aggressive, starting the conversation with your perception (potential) rather than a fact (truth) is unlikely to make them want to listen to what you have to say next.  

Whether in school or another institution, fears are real but mostly unfounded. In reality, other people are just like us. So just as you’re unlikely to refuse to speak to somebody again who gives you bad news (assuming you believe they’re on your side and aren’t being malicious), they’re unlikely to do it to you. And you’d never behave like that, right? Right?!?  

That doesn’t mean it never happens though: sometimes we do get a bad response. On occasion, this is because the person we’re trying to talk with isn’t willing or able. More often than not, however, what happens is the Spiral of Doom.  

The Spiral of Doom works like this: we decide, for whatever reason, not to speak up about something that bothers us. As a result, that thing continues and we get more and more bothered. Eventually, having not said anything for quite some time, and giving no clue that we have had a problem until now, we finally speak up. Unfortunately, we speak up badly (because it’s all emotion and not using anything we’ve learned) – we shout, explode or make a derogatory comment. And guess what? We get a bad reaction from the other person. So now we’ve learned that speaking up is dangerous. So the next time we’re presented with something we don’t like, we go through the same process again. See why it’s called the Spiral of Doom? 

Another, maybe connected, example of how our brains work against us is the fact that human beings tend to be more scared of loss than they are of gain. For example, we are about two times happier to avoid a loss of money than we are happy to gain the same amount. This is clearly crazy, unless you think of it in evolutionary terms when it starts to make sense.  

In evolutionary terms, it makes sense for our brain to want to protect us at all costs: if we don’t continue to survive, then we can’t reproduce and that’s the whole point. It makes sense from a big picture point of view. Unfortunately, our lives are not about the big picture they’re personal and about what we perceive as success or failure. 

I call the way our brain works against us ‘BrainDrain’, but some people call it bias. I’ve avoided saying bias until now, because nobody likes to think of themselves as biased. However, we are all subject to biases and it’s not necessarily our fault. But something can be our problem without it being our fault. And biases certainly come under this category. Instead of thinking about biases, think about the fact that our brains are lazy and will always try to take the easy way out. One easy way out is to look for patterns and assume the future will always look like the past. This tendency leads to a large number of what are known as biases. (You can download a free resource outlining the many ways our brains work against us at https://hardtalk.info/resources/). 

Gaining self-awareness is the first step to gaining self-control and without these you can’t hope to lead others, or achieve all your goals. And you certainly can’t hope to manage difficult conversations more effectively. But self-awareness will only bring you so far. The real goal is self-control, because that’s when you really know how to respond and not just react.  

A word to the wise: to begin with, like any new skill, you’ll probably get it wrong more than you get it right, as you learn to apply the knowledge gained. Don’t worry too much about this: instead, spend your time on lessons learned and celebrate your successes, at least as much as you obsess over what you could have done better.