Do you every have those days/weeks where you have to have difficult conversations with people?
It made me consider – what is a difficult conversation? I feel that different people will have different definitions of what constitutes a tricky conversation. For example, I am very task driven by nature. I want to get the job done, above everything else and I despise politics. Sometimes however, the politics have to be played, and have to be played carefully. This means for me, difficult conversations.
I have experienced someone letting me down and someone causing issues by not being honest. I’ve also had to feedback on someone else’s failings to an important colleague, had an issue with someone I love accusing me of not doing something correctly and a teacher abusing power with my son. All of these have made me manifest physical reactions in the build up to the difficult conservation. I have felt sick, worried, stressed, angry, like crying, like screaming and questioning whether I was in fact in the wrong. None of these feelings feel nice at all.
So what would my advice be to other people needing to have these conversations?
There are a couple of tips I would like to share:
- Be timely – don’t leave it to fester, it gets a lot worse
- Be honest – share as much of the story as you can, lying or exaggerating your part in it; significant or otherwise, will come back and bite you
- Use a feedback model that you are comfortable with, one that you trust, to ensure that you have de-personalised the comments where possible (I do actually teach an excellent model on my courses and I use this when I need to)
- Be prepared to forgive the gap – this references my last blog. You might not be able to forgive what has actually happened, but you can forgive the gap between the expectation you had and the ability of the person to deliver to that expectation
- If you are right, be prepared to agree to disagree. There maybe opinions in this – and actually, we all know that opinions are just that – you might not be correct and if you don’t think that they are, you may need to be prepared to walk away
- Don’t hold a grudge, but… don’t forget and learn from this situation – perhaps trust is affected, so put measures in place to ensure that this cannot happen again
I feel ruffled today, as I have had 3 of these incidents today and I still have one to deal with – which I am about to do…. Going to use 1, 3 and 6 on this one. Big Girl Pants on… here we go….
If you want to know how Clarify Training can help read about our Behaviour Training Course here.