by Holly Weeks
Our lives are made of words. It’s simply a characteristic of our species. We chat, gossip, talk behind people's backs, and joke around. But sometimes – more often than we’d like – we have to face stressful conversations, those intense exchanges that can hurt or haunt us in ways unimaginable for other types of dialogue. Stressful conversations cannot be avoided in our personal lives, and at work, they can range from firing an employee to even receiving praise. However, regardless of the context, stressful conversations are different from others because of the emotional baggage they carry. In these dialogues, embarrassment, confusion, anxiety, anger, pain, and fear emerge – if not in ourselves, at least in our conversation partner. In fact, stressful conversations cause so much anxiety that many people simply do everything they can to avoid them, and it’s not necessarily true that this strategy is always wrong. One of the first rules of strategy, after all, is to choose your battles. Yet, sometimes avoiding a hassle, dealing with difficult people, or overlooking rivalries can be very costly simply because this behavior usually worsens problems and relationships.
Since stressful conversations are so frequent and so annoying, why not make an effort to improve them? The reason is precisely because our feelings are deeply involved. When we are not emotionally invested in an issue, we know well that conflict is normal, that it can be resolved, or at least addressed, but when feelings come into play, many of us become destabilized, and like a quarterback caught in a particularly tight defense, we all lose hope of reaching the goal line.
In the last 20 years, I have taught courses and workshops at some of the leading companies and universities in the United States on communication during stressful conversations, and by using the classrooms as true laboratories, I have learned that most people do not feel capable of addressing topics that emotionally involve them. It’s as if all our abilities disappear, and we can no longer think clearly about what is happening and how to achieve a good outcome.
Yet stressful conversations don’t have to go this way. I’ve noticed that managers can, on their part, handle difficult conversations better if they approach them with greater self-awareness, if they prepare in advance, and apply three simple, proven communication techniques. Don’t get me wrong: there will never be a simple, one-size-fits-all solution to stressful conversations. There are too many variables, too much tension, and interactions between people in difficult situations are always a story unto themselves. However, it is possible to consider each stressful conversation as a combination of a limited number of core conversations, each with its own specific set of issues. In the pages that follow, we will explore how to anticipate and manage these issues, but first, we need to examine three basic stressful conversations that we often encounter in the workplace.
"I have some bad news for you"
Delivering bad news is usually difficult from both sides: the speaker is often nervous, and the listener is tense because they don’t know where things are headed. Let’s take the example of David, the director of a non-profit organization, who found himself in the uncomfortable position of having to speak to an ambitious researcher, Jeremy, who had a much higher opinion of his work than the other members of the organization. To make matters worse, Jeremy had previously received exaggeratedly positive evaluations, for a variety of reasons. First, the philosophy of the organization: the non-profit sector is not a competitive environment. Additionally, Jeremy had an inflated sense of both his personal abilities and the value of his academic background. All of this, combined with his tendency to get defensive even at the slightest criticism, had led his colleagues, including David, to avoid discussions about certain weaknesses that were affecting Jeremy’s ability to deliver excellent work. For example, Jeremy had a caustic sense of humor that had offended some people both inside and outside his office. No one had told him anything directly, but over time, more and more people had become reluctant to work with him. Having received practically no criticism over the years, Jeremy’s biting style had become deeply ingrained, and the staff was growing impatient.
In conversations like these, the main challenge is to start off on the right foot: if the exchange begins in a reasonably positive way, the rest is likely to proceed just as well, but if the start goes badly, it risks ruining the rest of the conversation. In an attempt to be kind, many people begin these conversations with a light tone, as David did, starting with: "What do you think of the Red Sox this year?"
Naturally, Jeremy got the wrong idea about David’s intentions and maintained his arrogant superiority. When David realized this, he thought he needed to take off the velvet gloves and suddenly spoke brutally honestly, practically delivering a monologue, at the end of which Jeremy had a cold stare fixed on the floor. He stood up in complete silence and left, much to David’s relief. From his point of view, the exchange had been painful, but quick. He sarcastically observed that there wasn’t much blood on the floor. However, two days later, Jeremy resigned, taking with him a large chunk of the company’s institutional memory and talent.
"What’s going on here?"
We often feel stressful conversations looming over us, however, some of the worst conversations, especially for those who want to avoid conflict, are the unexpected ones that erupt like a summer storm. Suddenly, the conversation becomes intensely charged with emotions, and the electricity is palpable in the air. The worst part is that nothing seems to make sense: it’s as if we are immersed in a black cloud made of distorted logic and altered sensitivity.
Let’s take the case of Elizabeth and Rafael, two team leaders who were working together on a project for a major consulting company. It seemed that everything that could have gone wrong in the project had gone wrong, and the work had become heavily bogged down. The two consultants were meeting to review the planning, due to the accumulated delays, and to divide the more unpleasant tasks for the upcoming weeks. As they were talking, Elizabeth was writing and erasing on the whiteboard, and when she was finished, she looked at Rafael and said, in a conclusive tone, “So, right?”
Rafael gritted his teeth in frustration and said coldly, “If you say so…”. Elizabeth paused to reflect, mentally retracing the previous conversation, but she couldn’t understand what had upset Rafael, and his reaction seemed completely inconsistent with what she had said. The most common reaction for someone in Elizabeth’s position is to defensively deny Rafael's implied accusation, but she didn’t feel comfortable with conflict, so she sought a resolution by stammering, “I’m sorry, Rafael, did I say something wrong?”
"Who gave you the command?" he replied. "Who told you that you could tell me what to do?"
Clearly, Rafael and Elizabeth had encountered a difficult conversation: something went wrong, but Elizabeth doesn't know exactly what. She feels caught off guard because her attempt to speed up the work was completely misunderstood. Rafael feels put in an inferior position by what he interprets as a directive behavior from Elizabeth. Inexplicably, it seems like there are more than two people involved in this conversation, and these invisible participants are creating significant disruption. What childhood experience, we might ask, gave Elizabeth the preconceived notion that Rafael’s discomfort must be her fault? And who is influencing Rafael’s perception that he’s being overpowered by Elizabeth? Perhaps his father? His wife? It’s impossible to say. At the same time, it’s hard for us to shake the feeling that Rafael overreacted when he accused Elizabeth of wanting to take control.
Rafael’s resentment hit Elizabeth like a wave, and she apologized again: “Sorry. How would you like us to divide the work?” By deferring to Rafael’s decision in this way, she eased the tension in the atmosphere in the moment, but she also set a precedent for an imbalance of power between the two that neither Elizabeth nor the company’s management thought was right. Worse still, since Rafael and Elizabeth remained in the same team after this uncomfortable episode, she became frustrated with the power imbalance and, three months later, left the project.
"You’re attacking me!"
Let’s now turn our attention to aggressive stressful conversations, those in which people use every psychological and rhetorical tool to destabilize the counterpart, undermine their statements, and even go as far as ridiculing and belittling them. These "saboteur tactics" take many different forms – vulgarity, manipulation, shouting – and not all of us are provoked or disoriented by the same ones. The critical point is never reached solely by using a saboteur tactic, but rather by its association with the vulnerability of the listener.
Let’s consider the case of Nick and Karen, two senior managers working at the same level in an IT company. Karen was giving a presentation to a client, and the information was weak and poorly organized. She and her team couldn’t even answer very simple questions, and the client had first been patient, then silent, and finally clearly irritated. When the presentation really started to fall apart, the client delivered the final blow with a series of questions that highlighted the entire team’s inadequacy.
On that occasion, Nick was not part of the team giving the presentation, but was simply there as an observer and was just as shocked by Karen’s blunder as the client. After the client left, he asked Karen what had happened. She reacted nervously, becoming defensive: "You're not my boss, so don’t preach to me. You belittle everything I do!" Karen continued shouting in Nick's face with palpable anger, and every time he tried to speak, she interrupted him with accusations and threats: "I can’t wait to see your face when people leave you floundering without doing anything!" Nick tried to remain reasonable, but Karen didn’t calm down in any way: “Karen,” he said, “calm down, you’re distorting everything I’m saying.”
In this case, Nick’s problem wasn’t that Karen was using a series of saboteur tactics, but that all her tactics – accusation, distortion of reality, and digression – were aggressive, which raised the stakes considerably. Many of us are vulnerable to aggressive tactics because we don’t know how far the aggressor will go. Nick wanted to avoid Karen’s aggression, but his reliance on reason rather than her emotionality didn’t work. His reasonable approach was overwhelmed by Karen's aggressive one, and so Nick found himself trapped where Karen wanted him. Specifically, he couldn’t say whether her threats of revenge when a client put him in difficulty were credible. He decided to turn to the general manager, who became increasingly impatient and then decidedly irritated with Nick and Karen and their inability to resolve their issues.
In conclusion, their inability to manage their difficult conversations cost them dearly. Neither of them received a promotion because the company identified the cause of the lost clients in their persistent inability to communicate.
Preparing for a stressful conversation
So how can we prepare for these three types of stressful conversations before they take place? A good start is to be aware of our own vulnerabilities in relation to certain people and situations. David, Elizabeth, and Nick were unable to control their counterparts, but their stressful conversations would have gone much better if they had been more aware of their vulnerabilities. It’s important, for example, for someone who is vulnerable to others' hostility to know how they usually react in this situation. Do they prefer to withdraw or escalate the confrontation? To calm down or counterattack? While one reaction is not necessarily better than another, knowing how you typically respond in a stressful situation can teach you a lot about your vulnerabilities and help you manage these types of events.
Let’s return to Nick’s problem. If he had been more self-aware, he would have known that he tends to react in an overly rational way in the face of aggressive outbursts like Karen’s. Nick’s choice of a low-key approach gave Karen control over the conversation, but he should never have allowed Karen, or anyone else, to exploit his vulnerability. By taking a moment for calm self-reflection, when not engaged in a live stressful conversation, Nick could have taken time to reflect on his inability to tolerate aggressive and irrational verbal excesses. This level of self-awareness would have allowed him to prepare, not for Karen’s unexpected accusations, but for his own predictable vulnerability to any violent assault like hers.
Although it may seem like it, building self-awareness doesn't mean engaging in endless self-analysis. It simply means, for the most part, making our tacit knowledge of ourselves more explicit. We all know from past experiences, for example, what kinds of conversations and people we handle poorly, so when you find yourself in a difficult conversation, ask yourself if this is one of those situations and if it involves one of those people. For example, do you start growling in front of an overbearing competitor? Do you shut down when you feel excluded? Once you know your weak points, you can anticipate your vulnerability and improve your response to certain situations and people.
Achieving a good level of self-awareness will often help you avoid getting entangled in a discussion driven only by your momentary feelings, but rather to focus on addressing your true needs. Let’s revisit David, the head of the non-profit organization, and Jeremy, his arrogant subordinate. Given Jeremy’s history, David’s conversational strategy – starting gently and then, seeing that no results were achieved, dropping a painful but quick bomb – was doomed from the start.
A better approach for David would have been to split the conversation into two parts. In the first meeting, he could have addressed the central issues of Jeremy’s biting humor and his disappointing performance. They could then have tackled the actual discussion of those issues in a second meeting. Managing the situation incrementally would have allowed both David and Jeremy to prepare for a real dialogue, rather than reducing it to a monologue from one of them. After all, this wasn’t an emergency, and David didn’t need to exhaust the topic immediately. In fact, if David had been more self-aware, he might have recognized that the approach he chose was driven less by Jeremy’s personality and more by his own need to avoid conflict.
An excellent way to address specific problems you might encounter in a stressful conversation is to practice with a neutral friend. Choose someone who doesn’t share your communication issues. Ideally, find a friend who is a good listener, honest but non-judgmental. Start with the content. Try to simply say to your friend what you want to say to your counterpart without worrying about tone or words. Be blunt, shy, sarcastically witty, use a roundabout way of saying things – just get it out. Now, reflect on what you’ve said and think about what you would say if the situation weren’t emotionally charged. Your friend can help because they’re not caught up in the emotions of the situation. Take some notes on what comes to mind, because if you don’t, you’ll forget it later.
Now, refine your choice of words. When you imagine speaking with your counterpart, your word choice tends to be very rigid, and you might think of only one way to say something. But when your friend says, "Tell me how you want to say it," something interesting happens: your choice of words is often much better, more thoughtful, and functional. Remember, you can always say what you want to say, it’s just that sometimes you can’t say it in the right way. in quel modo.
Also, work with your friend on your body language. You’ll soon find yourselves laughing at the expressions that come out: eyebrows bouncing up and down, legs tangled together like licorice twists, nervous giggles that will surely be misinterpreted. (For more information on how to prepare for stressful conversations, check out the box “The DNA of Conversation Management”).
Managing the conversation
Although it’s important to gain self-awareness and practice before a stressful conversation, these steps are not enough. Let’s take a moment to talk about what you can do while the conversation is happening. Let’s consider Elizabeth, the team leader accused by her colleague of trying to take over control. She couldn’t think clearly during unexpected confrontational situations, and she knew it, so she would have needed some ready-made phrases, phrases she could recall in the moment so she wouldn’t have to stay silent or come up with something in the heat of the moment. Although this solution seems simple, most of us don’t have a toolbox of conversational tactics readily available. Overcoming this lack is a crucial element in learning how to better manage stressful conversations. We need to learn communication skills just like we learn CPR: well in advance, knowing that when we need to use them, the situation will be critical and tense. I propose three foolproof conversational moves. The specific wording may not fit your style, and that's fine. The important thing, though, is to understand how the techniques work, and then choose the wording that suits you best.
Honor your partner
When David gave negative feedback to Jeremy, it would have been helpful if he had started with some regret and the acknowledgment of a certain responsibility for contributing to the problem they were facing. "Jeremy," he could have said, "the quality of your work has been below expectations, partly due to your colleagues' reluctance to address your caustic humor by discussing issues with you. I take part of the responsibility for this because I’ve been reluctant to speak openly about these difficulties with you, someone I like, respect, and have worked with for a long time." Acknowledging shared responsibility as a technique, particularly as an opening statement, can be effective because it immediately focuses attention, but without provocation, on the unpleasant things the speaker needs to say and that the listener inevitably has to hear.
Is it always a good technique to use in a difficult conversation? I would say no, especially because there is never a single good technique for every situation. But in this case, it would have truly set the right tone for David's discussion with Jeremy. It does justice to the issues, to Jeremy, to their relationship, and also to David's responsibilities. Any technique that expresses respect in a stressful conversation, especially in one that is likely to surprise our counterpart, should be highly regarded. In fact, the ability to speak with respect, to a greater or lesser extent, can fuel or dismantle a stressful conversation. But there’s a more important aspect: after Jeremy left the organization, he could still harm it by spreading gossip or using his insider knowledge against the organization. The more intolerable the conversation with David was, the more Jeremy will want to make the organization pay for it.
Disarm by reaffirming your intentions
Part of the difficulty in the conversation "What’s going on here?" between Rafael and Elizabeth is that Rafael’s misinterpretation of Elizabeth’s words and actions seems to be influenced by him reliving other stressful conversations he’s had in the past. Elizabeth certainly doesn’t want to psychoanalyze Rafael; in fact, exploring Rafael’s inner thoughts would only worsen this painful situation. So, what can Elizabeth do to unilaterally resolve the conflict?
Elizabeth needs a technique that doesn’t require her to understand the reasons behind Rafael’s overreaction, but helps her manage the situation effectively. “I see how you took what I said, Rafael. I didn’t mean that. Let’s go over this list again.” I call this approach “the clarification,” and it is a highly disarming technique. By using it, Elizabeth could have turned a confrontation into a moment of understanding on her own. Instead of arguing with Rafael about his feelings, she should have accepted his perceptions of reality – after all, they are his! – and without debating her intentions, she would have taken responsibility for recalibrating her words based on her true intentions, returning in the conversation to the point where they left off. (For a more detailed discussion on the disconnection between what we mean and what we say, see the box “The gap between communication and intent”).
This technique will work for Elizabeth regardless of Rafael's motivations. If Rafael has innocently misunderstood what she was saying, she is not attacking him: she accepts his opinion on what she said and did and corrects herself. If Rafael’s intentions are hostile, Elizabeth doesn’t just placate him, but accepts his perception and tries to clarify. No one loses face. No one scores points against the other. No one goes off on a tangent.
Fight the tactics, not the people
Rafael may have innocently bewildered Elizabeth, but Karen was behaving with extreme cunning towards Nick, getting upset after a disastrous meeting with the client. Nick certainly can't stop her from using the sabotage tactics with which she has had so much success in the past. But he can separate Karen the person from her behavior. For example, it is much more useful for him to think of Karen’s reactions as aggressive tactics rather than as personal traits. If he were to think of Karen as a deviant, hostile, threatening person, where would that lead him? What can anyone do about someone else’s personality? But if Nick sees Karen's behavior as a series of tactics she's using against him because they’ve worked in the past, he can think about using counterattack techniques to neutralize them.
The best way to neutralize a tactic is to give it a name. It’s much harder to use a tactic once it has been openly identified. If Nick, for example, had said: “Karen, we’ve worked together well for a long time. I’m not sure how to talk about what went wrong during the meeting since your opinion on what happened and what’s happening now is so different from mine,” he would have completely changed the game. He wouldn’t have attacked Karen, nor would he have remained a prisoner of her tactics, but he would have made the aggression Karen used in the conversation the central issue.
Openly identifying a tactic, especially an aggressive one, disarms it for another reason as well. We often think of an aggressive counterpart as someone who wants an ongoing or even endless argument, but that's not the case. People only have certain levels of aggression with which they feel comfortable and are reluctant to escalate further. As long as Nick doesn’t recognize and expose Karen’s tactics, she can use them almost unconsciously, at least to some extent. But if Nick brings it up, Karen would need to escalate her aggression to continue using the same tactics, and if she’s near her threshold, she won’t continue because it would make her uncomfortable. Nick might not be able to stop Karen, but she might be prompted to stop on her own.
People think stressful conversations are inevitable. And they are. But that doesn’t mean they have to have unpleasant outcomes. Let’s think about a client of mine, Jacqueline, the only woman on the board of a engineering company. She was sensitive to every small comment about women in business and considered one board member, Richard, deliberately insensitive. He would repeatedly reply to her by saying that she was a feminist and, on this particular occasion, telling a sexist joke.
It wasn’t the first time something like this had happened, and Jacqueline felt the usual internal cacophony of reactions. But since she knew this was a stressful situation for her, Jacqueline was prepared. First, she let the joke hang in the air for a few seconds and then returned to the issue they were discussing. When Richard didn’t let it go and tried to tease her again – “Come on, Jackie, it was a joke” – Jacqueline stood her ground. “Richard,” she said, “this kind of humor is funny and harmless to you, but it makes me feel sidelined.” Jacqueline didn’t need to add anything else. If Richard had insisted further, he would have lost face. In fact, he took a step back: “Well, I wouldn’t want my wife to find out about my bad behavior a second time,” he chuckled. Jacqueline stayed silent. She had achieved her result, and there was no need to embarrass him.
Stressful conversations are never easy, but we can all do better if, like Jacqueline, we prepare by developing greater awareness of our vulnerabilities and also some more effective techniques to manage ourselves. The advice and tools described in this article can be helpful in unilaterally reducing tension in stressful conversations. All you have to do is try them. If one technique doesn’t work, try another. Find phrases that feel natural to you. But keep practicing: you’ll find what works best for you.
Original published in 2001.
The idea in short
Stressful conversations are inevitable in life. In the business world, they can range from firing a subordinate to, curiously, receiving praise. But regardless of the context, stressful conversations carry a heavy emotional load. In fact, stressful conversations cause so much anxiety that most people simply avoid them. However, it can be extremely dangerous to dodge troubles, placate difficult people, or ease antagonisms: avoiding a hassle usually just worsens the problem or ruins a relationship. Using clear examples of three common types of stressful conversations people often encounter at work, the author explains how managers can unilaterally improve these interactions. To start, they should approach these situations with greater self-awareness. Building good self-awareness certainly doesn’t mean endless self-analysis, but largely means simply making one’s unspoken knowledge of oneself more explicit. Knowing how you react in a stressful situation will teach you a lot about your problematic areas and can help you master stressful situations. The author also recommends practicing difficult conversations in advance to fine-tune word choice and tone. From past experiences, we all know which types of conversations and people we handle poorly. The trick is to have conversational tactics ready to tackle those specific situations.
The idea in practice.
Types of stressful conversations
At work, stressful conversations take various forms:
- "I have bad news for you." – For example, you need to criticize an employee's performance.
- "What’s going on here?" – Unexpectedly, a conversation becomes intensely emotional.
- "You’re attacking me!" – Someone hits you with vulgarity, yelling, or other aggressive and accusatory moves.
Preparing for stressful conversations
- Identify your weak points towards particular people or situations. You will avoid succumbing to your feelings or ignoring your needs during a stressful conversation.
- Know how you react when you feel vulnerable. Do you growl at your overbearing counterpart? Do you shut down when you feel excluded? By knowing your weak points, you can anticipate your vulnerabilities and improve your responses.
- With an honest and non-judgmental friend, try clear, neutral, and balanced responses. Detach from everything you’re thinking (emotions and everything else), then refine your word choice until it expresses your message honestly, but not threateningly. Eliminate emotionally charged behaviors. Write down notes on your responses to remember them later.
Managing stressful conversations
Preparation is not enough. During a stressful conversation, use these moves:
| Stressful conversation | Move | Motivation behind the move | Example |
| "I have bad news for you." | Honor your partner: start by acknowledging your responsibility in the problem. | You will help your counterpart accept your difficult message without provoking them. | David needs to tell Jeremy that his cruel humor makes colleagues uncomfortable. David says, "I take my part of the blame, because I’ve been reluctant to speak openly with you about these difficulties." |
| "What’s going on here?" | Disarm your partner: acknowledge your partner’s perceptions and reaffirm your intentions. | You will turn the confrontation into an agreement without giving up on your reasoning. No one will lose face. | Elizabeth lists the tasks to be done in a project on a whiteboard and says: “Is this right?” Rafael sighs, “Who told you to assign work to me?” Elizabeth says: “I can understand why you took what I said that way. I didn’t mean that. Let’s go over this list again.” |
| "You’re attacking me!" | Fight the tactics, not the people: name the aggressive tactic your partner is using. | You will neutralize the tactic without becoming offensive or intimidated by it. | When Karen makes a mistake during a presentation and senses her colleague Nick’s disapproval, she attacks him aggressively. He says to her, “I don’t know how to talk about what went wrong. Your opinion on what happened is so different from mine.” |
The DNA of stressful conversations
THE TECHNIQUES I HAVE IDENTIFIED for managing stressful conversations all contain three seemingly simple ingredients that are necessary to ensure that stressful conversations end well. These are clarity, neutrality, and balance, and they are the building blocks of effective communication. Mastering them will increase your chances of responding well even during the most tense conversations. Let’s take a look at each of the components separately.
Clarity means letting the words do the work for us. Avoid euphemisms or circumlocution, and clearly explain to people what you mean: “Emily, from your family’s perspective, the Somerset Valley nursing home would be the best option for your father, but his pension doesn’t cover it.” Unfortunately, providing clear content when the news is bad is particularly difficult to do. In tense circumstances, we all tend to avoid clarity because we equate it with brutality. Instead, we often say things like: “So, Dan, we’re still not sure what will happen with this job, but we’ll keep an eye out in the future.” This is an evasive – and terribly misleading – way of informing someone that they didn’t get the promotion they were expecting. Yet, there is nothing inherently brutal in honesty. It’s not the content, but the way it is expressed that makes it brutal or human. Just ask a surgeon, a priest, or a police officer. If a message is delivered the right way, even if the news isn’t good, the content can still be endured. When a manager, for example, directly tells a subordinate that "the promotion went to someone else," the news is likely to be highly unpleasant, and the most probable reactions will be sadness, anger, or anxiety. But if the content is clear, the listener can begin to process the information. In fact, providing clarity in content lightens the burden for the counterpart rather than increasing it.
Tone is the non-verbal part of communication in stressful conversations. It includes intonation, facial expressions, and both conscious and unconscious body language. While it is difficult to maintain a neutral tone when we are feeling strong emotions, neutrality is the standard required in crisis communications, including stressful conversations. Consider the traditional communicative neutrality of NASA. No matter how terrible the message is, NASA communicates its content in sterile tones: “Houston, we have a problem.” It takes practice to achieve such neutrality. But a neutral tone is the best way to begin when a conversation turns stressful.
Balanced language is the final element of this triumvirate of skills. English is a very vast language, and there are many different ways to say what you need to say. Some of these expressions are balanced, while others provoke a reaction from your counterpart with the aim of deflecting your words and their content. In the United States, for example, some of the most destabilizing phrases revolve around threats of legal action: “If you don’t give me a check by April 23, I’ll be forced to call my lawyer.” Phrases like this ignite all conversations, particularly tense ones. But let’s always remember that we are not in stressful conversations to score points or make enemies. The goal is to move the conversation forward, listen and be listened to carefully, for a functional dialogue between two people. So, the next time you want to yell at someone, "Stop interrupting me!" try this instead: "Can you wait a minute? I’d like to finish before I lose my train of thought." Balanced language will help you get out of a stressful conversation.
The gap between communication and intent
ONE OF THE MOST COMMON SITUATIONS in stressful conversations is that we all begin to rely too much on our good intentions. When the mercury in the emotional thermometer rises, we assume that others automatically understand what we mean. We take it for granted, for example, that people know we have good intentions. In fact, research shows that in stressful conversations, most speakers assume that the listener believes in their good intentions, regardless of what they say. However, intentions can never be as powerful in communication, and certainly not in stressful conversations.
To understand what I mean, think about the last time someone told you not to take something the wrong way. This phrase may have been spoken quite sincerely by the speaker, however, most people automatically react by stiffening up and expecting something at least slightly offensive or aggressive. In fact, this is precisely the reaction that phrase will always provoke. Because the simplest rule for stressful conversations is that people don’t grasp intentions despite the words, but they understand intentions through the words. In stressful conversations, particularly, the emphasis is on what is actually said, not on what we mean or feel. This doesn’t mean that those involved in stressful conversations don’t have feelings or intentions that should be considered important and valuable. In fact, the participants do consider them as such. But when we talk about people in stressful communication, we are talking about communication between people, not their intentions.
Sure, in difficult conversations, we might all wish we didn’t have to be so explicit. We might wish the other person understood what we mean even if we don’t explain it. But this means blurring the roles, expecting the listener to interpret rather than the speaker making an effort to communicate. In all conversations, but especially in stressful ones, we are all responsible for communicating exactly what we want to say. In the end, it is much more dignified for a manager to clearly say to an employee: “Corey, I’ve prepared a new desk for you and six weeks of relocation services because you won’t be with us after the end of July.” Forcing someone to guess your intentions only prolongs their agony toward an inevitable outcome.
