It’s late 2020, and many of us living in the United States find ourselves still wrestling with the greatest set of challenges our country has faced as a nation in a generation. Challenges, I suspect, we all knew were coming but hoped we’d be able to avoid. Or at least, delay.
This, sadly, turns out not to be the case. These challenges are here and need to be addressed. There are multitude of conversations to be had now.
There will be difficult conversations about police killing unarmed black people, injustice, racism, equity, justice, diversity and more. Other difficult conversations will take place on how to recover our national economy from this sunken place, how to get millions back to work so they can provide for themselves and their families again. And, we will have conversations on how we keep safe after watching 197,884 of our fellow citizens die from this novel coronavirus bug (as of 6 October 2020).
These events of 2020 make us want to reconnect with the other humans in a deeper, richer and more meaningful way.
In these difficult conversations, you will be required to be authentic, appropriate, vulnerable, honest and open. There is so much on the line. These are the conversations that will plot our individual and collective paths forward. This means learning how to create safety for yourself and others in these challenging and difficult conversations.
In other words, you have to elevate your interpersonal communication game.
First: Manage your brain
Stress impacts your brain, your thinking, your ability to be present and stay focused, your willingness to listen and understand others, your health and much more. If you don’t manage how stressed out your brain is, you won’t be able to participate in these emotionally charged conversations and keep everyone feeling safe. Doing daily breathwork to manage your stress level can help you stay present in these powerful conversations. If you find yourself drifting during a conversation, just take 2-3 deep breaths and feel yourself become more present and engaged again.
Second: Think through your response
There are times when others are trying to have important conversations with us about ‘stuff’ that really matters to them, and we consciously or unconsciously do what I like to call ‘stupid stuff’ that shuts down meaningful dialogue. Here’s a short list of stupid stuff to avoid: interrupting people, offering unsolicited advice, trivializing or minimizing people’s experiences, being sarcastic, making it all about yourself, listening to be “right,” cheerleading, one-upping, arguing about minutia in the data, or trying to create an equivalency between your experience and those of people of color who have been living under centuries of oppressive systems that continue to operate.
Third: Make “I” statements a lot
In life-changing conversations, it’s very important that you make ‘I’ statements when you are talking about your own reality. I feel … I think … I want … I need … I believe. Often, when we are talking about our own lives, choices, or reality, we can unconsciously slip into saying, ‘You know how it is when you want what’s best for your kids and you want them to have great lives … ,’ when we are talking about ourselves and what we want. This is a way to disassociate from, to not fully own, our own behaviors, choices, our feelings, and the creation of our lives. Making ‘I’ statements is about claiming our own lives, choices, feelings, reality.
Fourth: Use real feeling words
When we talk about our feelings and emotions, we are telling ourselves and others how life’s events are impacting us. This is crucial to vulnerable and intimate exchange with folks who matter to us. It’s essential. It’s the good stuff! If the difficult conversations and the issues at hand really matter to you, start with your feelings. I find these real feelings words cut straight to the bone, to our truth, our authenticity and our vulnerability: joy/happy, sad/pain, fear, anger, guilt and shame.
— Jim Mitchell, Founder of Leadership Magic share
Fifth: Have compassion for others as well as yourself
Compassion is about you understanding that what the other is talking about, that gap, is creating a certain amount of suffering for them, and a variety of feelings and impacts. The way for you to understand, to ‘get’ their suffering, is to remember your own. To remember in those moments the places where you have gaps between ‘what you want’ in various places of your life and ‘what you got.’ Even if you don’t have a similar event in your life to the one they’re talking about, you can still have compassion.
Sixth: Understanding goes beyond words
You want those people you are having conversations with to delve deeper and deeper into the underlying truths they’ve come up with based on their lives and choices. Understanding others is based in hearing their deeper truths, not the topical ones.
Seventh: Bring a fierce curiosity to the conversation
Most of us aren’t nearly curious enough about whoever is speaking to us and what they are saying. We quickly draw conclusions about them and their words, fit them into some box or label. We stop listening. Instead, let them see in your eyes and hear in your voice your deep desire to get to know them. Let them feel that you know there is so much to them, their lives, their experiences, and you would be honored and privileged if you could make it safe enough for them to share more and more the story of how they ‘built’ themselves over their lifetimes. Stop thinking you know them and get about the business of knowing them.
Now’s the time for difficult conversations
Being in big, difficult conversations where there is lots of embedded history and feelings takes a very deliberate and conscious approach. Let go of whatever you think about the subject, and instead make it your job to make it as safe as possible for them to tell you, truthfully and deeply, what’s going on with them and the feelings they’re having as a result of those events.
It takes lots of practice. The reward: richer, deeper, and more abiding relationships with people you care about as well as more trust, truth, openness, authenticity, vulnerability and intimacy. In other words, the good stuff of life and relationships.
Get yours!
YPO is the community where we can safely and productively discuss important, difficult and uncomfortable issues. The goal never is to divide us, but instead bring us together in trust and respect in our learning journeys. Recently racial injustice events have prompted many conversations among our YPO peers, families, communities and businesses worldwide about racial injustice. Equity and injustice are global issues that surface in the lives of all YPO members. Members from around the globe have been working to create learning opportunities to help guide YPO members and other leaders to be agents of change.
