Managing Difficult Conversations

Every difficult conversation is really three conversations:

1. There's the conversation about what happened: the substance, the facts. Each of us has a story about what happened. 
2. There's also what they call the feeling conversation, the emotional level.
3. There's also the identity conversation, which asks “what does this say about me?” Is something in my self-image implicated in what's going on here? What's making the conversation difficult for me? 

I've spent a lot of time working with executives, teaching, working in companies, and working in some government situations, and I noticed that people had this difficulty trying to deal with the three conversations - they got the concept, but in real time they found it very difficult to use this concept.

I became extremely interested in this gap, what I later called the Performance Gap, between people's potential to negotiate effectively, which might be very high, and their ability to practice it. In looking at this gap and trying to figure out how you help people in real time bring forward their skillful means and higher nature, I simply asked the question: What if I'm the problem?

Asking yourself if I’m the problem isn’t the same as self-blame. If you think about your levers of change, where you can influence - it’s not easy to change other people, particularly when you're talking about long-standing habits and mindsets. But you actually do have a quality of autonomy that enables you to grow as a human being. You set that intention, you learn skills, and you shift your mindset. It’s extremely empowering to notice that one of the ways to improve your interactions with other people is to get better at how you interact with yourself."

- Daniel Goleman