What is the difficult conversation you are avoiding and with whom – partner? friend? boss? self? No doubt, it wouldn’t be difficult if it didn’t matter, and you are postponing it because you want to get it right.
A recent trip to the dentist yielded a lot more than a new crown. He and I frequently converse before and after he attends to my teeth. In our most recent exchange we shared our mutual aversion with the current polarization in our country. As I left, he handed me a summary of a model based on the book Crucial Conversations.
Crucial conversations are those where stakes are high, opinions vary and emotions run strong. The key to handling them is to achieve and maintain dialogue. The hand out he gave me captured several key principles for guiding dialogue, but the following seem most applicable for the length of this post.
- Be honest and clear about what you really want as a result of the conversation.
- Help create and maintain a safe container for discourse. One tool in assessing safety is to be mindful of forms of silence (e.g. withdrawing or withholding meaning by understating or selectively sharing true opinions) and forms of violence (e.g. coercing the other to adopt your perspective and stereotyping something to dismiss it).
- Listen actively to each other’s “stories” and explore with genuine curiosity each narrative without blame or judgment. (e.g. “I wonder what that is all about?”). Revise the narratives as appropriate.
- Create a path of action forward based on mutually beneficial outcomes with specific benchmarks for accountability.
While there is a lot more to respectful dialogue than space here allows (click here for an outline of the book), we need not use that as an excuse for delaying important conversations.
sacredlead 
Thanks for the blog and book reference Bob …any of us who mediate for others need to be mindful of these for sure 😇
I think one of the key steps in building bridges across our divides is something you begin each of your sessions with, creating a safe container in which we can meet and hear each other’s truths. Thanks for your example to us all.
Spot on, Mac! Thanks, and thanks to your dentist.
Will pass this along to him, Barry. Thanks.