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CRUCIAL CONVERSATIONS(R) REMINDER
July 28, 2004
Volume 2, Issue 29
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IN THIS ISSUE

1. Quote of the Week
2. A New Book from the Authors of “Crucial Conversations”
3. Q&A: Not Sorry
4. Send Your Questions
5. Where Can I Learn More?

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1. Quote of the Week
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"How much more grievous are the consequences of anger than the causes of it."

- Marcus Aurelius

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2. A New Book from the Authors of “Crucial Conversations”
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It’s coming! Our new book “Crucial Confrontations: Tools for Resolving Broken Promises, Violated Expectations, and Bad Behavior.”

Behind the problems that routinely plague organizations and families, you’ll find individuals who are either unwilling or unable to deal with failed promises. Others have broken rules, missed deadlines, failed to live up to commitments, or just plain behaved badly--and nobody steps up to the issue. Accountability suffers and new problems spring up. For example:

- An employee speaks to you in an insulting tone that crosses the line between sarcasm and insubordination. Now what?

- Your son walks through the door sporting colorful new body art that raises your blood pressure by forty points. Speak now, pay later.

- An accountant wonders how to step up to a client who is violating the law. Can you spell unemployment?

- A nurse worries about what to say to an abusive physician. She quickly remembers “how things work around here” and decides not to say anything.

“Crucial Confrontations” teaches you how to deal with violated expectations in a way that solves the problem at hand and doesn’t harm the relationship--and in fact, even strengthens it.

Check your e-mail for a special offer for saving up to 36% off the cover price of Crucial Confrontations.

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3. Q&A: Not Sorry
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Dear Crucial Conversations,

What if you know you blew it in a crucial conversation, know you should go back and clean up the mess, but you don’t want to? What if you are too angry/hurt to say you’re sorry without feeling like a hypocrite for saying it because how you really feel is angry and hurt--and that's what you'd really like to express?

Signed,

Not Sorry

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Answer by Joseph Grenny, coauthor of "Crucial Conversations."

Dear Not Sorry,

I love honest people. Thanks for the disarming genuineness of your question.

I’ve got a couple of thoughts that I hope are helpful to you. The first may help change the “story” that is causing you to feel angry/hurt. The second is a modest suggestion that can sometimes help you improve a crucial conversation even when you do feel upset. Here goes.

First, my personal experience is that the more invested I am in convincing myself that my feelings of anger or hurt are “right,” the more likely it is that I am wrong. Here’s a trivial example of the important point I’m trying to make. Perhaps you’ve been in the situation I was in the other day. I was attempting to merge into the right hand lane so I could make it to a freeway on-ramp. There was a car in my blind spot that honked to let me know of his existence when I began to make the merge. I quickly steered back into my lane and slowed down to get behind him. But he slowed down, too--just enough that he was still in my blind spot. So I attempted to accelerate. He accelerated and stayed in the same spot. So I tried slowing again. Finally, he punched his accelerator, roared past me and flashed me a one-finger salute as he sped away.

Now, here’s the interesting part. Can you imagine what was going on in my head when he drove off? Without conscious effort on my part, I immediately began describing to myself all the things I had done to try to be considerate of this goon. In addition, I created an image of him in my mind that was wonderfully despicable. Trust me, it went way beyond “goon.” Why did I do that? Why did I care so much that I had to both find a way to make myself out as innocent and cast him as a creep? I’d never see him again. He was gone. And yet for more of the ride to a distant city than I’d like to admit, he was still on my mind. I was vigorously shaping a story about him and me and what had happened.

Then it all changed. At one point many miles later I changed my story. The new one acknowledged my fault--and even helped explain some of the dingbat’s behavior as a reaction to my own. Here it is: “I’ll bet he thinks I was trying to cut him off, then was slowing down and speeding up in sync with him just to spite him.” In an instant I felt embarrassed rather than self-righteous. When my story changed, my emotions did, too.

So, here’s comment number one. Master your story. If you’re feeling angry or hurt, it could be that you are so invested in being right and not admitting fault that you are exaggerating the other person’s weaknesses while covering up or minimizing your own.

Second suggestion: Sometimes even after examining and revising your story, you still feel hurt or upset. But you don’t want to feel that way. You want the relationship to be better. You want things to improve--but you don’t want to fake good feelings in order to get there. If so, you’re in luck. If your motives are right, you can actually build safety and open up a crucial conversation even though you’re still upset. Rather than pretending to have good feelings, you can show your positive intentions by sharing your desire for good feelings. For example:

“You know, I left our last conversation kind of upset. And I haven’t been able to resolve it in my mind since we talked. I really don’t want to feel this way. I’d like to have good and positive feelings between us, and wonder if we could talk about what happened as a way of figuring things out. I’m hoping not just to tell you what’s not working for me, but to find out what I’m doing that’s not working for you.”

Can you see how this might work? People can feel okay about you having less that positive feelings toward them so long as they know you are committed enough to the relationship to want to get back to those feelings.

I hope these suggestions are helpful. The emotional honesty I read in your question makes me optimistic that you’ll know how to make use of these ideas.

Warm regards,

Joseph

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As a thought starter for examining your own stories and sorting out possible exaggerations or omissions, read of Chapter 6 (Master My Stories) “Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High.”

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4. Send Your Questions
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Send a question to the authors of "Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High" at questions@vitalsmarts.com. We do our best to answer those questions that reflect the interests of our readers. For more about the authors of "Crucial Conversations," visit www.crucialconversations.com.

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5. Where Can I Learn More?
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Web Seminars
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Join the authors of "Crucial Conversations" in a free web seminar as follows:

- Aug 10, 3-4 p.m. (Eastern) (general overview of Crucial Conversations)
- Aug 18, 3-4 p.m. (Eastern) (Crucial Conversations in Children’s Health Care)
- Sept 7, 1-2 p.m. (Eastern) (general overview of Crucial Conversations)

Register today by contacting your VitalSmarts representative or visiting www.crucialconversations.com/TrainingResources/Services/ConferenceCall.asp

Mastery Course Training
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The Crucial Conversations Mastery Course offers intensive skills training in our principles and methods. For in-house training conducted by your staff or one of our professional facilitators, contact your VitalSmarts representative. Open enrollment courses are also available as follows:

- August 3-4, Denver, CO*
- August 17-18, Irvine, CA*
- August 24-25, Chicago, IL*
- September 14-15, Salt Lake City, UT*
- September 21-22, Dallas, TX*
- September 28-29, New York, NY*

Additional course dates for 2004 are available at www.crucialconversations.com.

*Trainer certification is also offered directly following most Mastery Courses. For more information or to sign up, contact your VitalSmarts representative or visit www.crucialconversations.com/TrainingResources/Services/PublicTraining.asp.

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