Learning to Have Tough Conversations

I hope this article helps:

"The next time you find yourself embroiled in an argument with someone that’s contentious and uncomfortable, say, institute the following rule: you don’t get to respond to the person’s claims until they’ve exhausted that particular claim and […] until you have recapitulated their viewpoint and summarized it in a manner they find acceptable."

https://moviewise.substack.com/p/communication-insights-from...

Some good books to get started:

Difficult Conversations by Stone, Patton and Heen

Crucial Conversaions by Patterson et al.

Difficult Conversations is about why difficult conversations are difficult. It's based on research done in the Harvard Negotiation project.

Crucial Conversations is an approach where you learn to recognize early when conversations become difficult, and teaches some techniques to use when they do.

It sounds like you are a people-pleaser. This is a common problem that I shared. The thing to learn is to have, state, and enforce boundaries. Otherwise some people pick up on a lack of boundaries and will do what they wish with you.

Something that may help is to recognize that you are allowed to disappoint someone. You are not the sole cause of a situation. In a problematic situation, sometimes the best we can do is to have boundaries and see whether people want to adjust their behavior or leave. Simply having articulated boundaries will often cause people to be less bothersome (with you, anyway).

https://youtu.be/tUOvY6Lfm1A

https://youtu.be/NqAJrWFzLp8

Write down what you plan to say. Review the draft with your HR and peers for feedback. At the meeting, read what is written down and nothing else. End the meeting.

In general, you want to criticize the BEHAVIOR; do not criticize the person. Usually the conversation is like this: believes is nonnegotiable. This rule was broken when

. If you continue to break , you are forcing me to take further action. To stress how important this is, I want you to take the rest of the day off. In the morning, I want you to sign and acknowledge that you have understood what we discussed today.

I can give an anecdotal answer to this. One thing I despise is pushing people into "boxes" but for this answer I will have to do that. My older brother and I throughout our lives have always gotten into many fights (as children do) and one thing that I noticed as that he never apologizes, and never feels bad for me after our fight is over. I on the other hand immediately feel horrible, and apologize immediately. Similarly this has translated throughout much of my life. Whenever it comes to having tough conversations, by brother would always be able to and not feel sympathy and in the end get what he wants. Me on the other hand, always ends up compromising for the goal of the other person being happy.

Throughout my life the thing that I have learned, is that you have to be able to either feel that the thing you are saying will help the other person hence the need for no sympathy, or embrace the fact that you are difficult at being unsympathetic and cultivate an environment around you that appreciates sympathy, but also understands the requirement for understanding.

Try going outdoor and convince a stranger to borrow you $100. If somebody really borrowed you something then convince him that you return only half.