when I least want to listen and when I am most frustrated I need to actually lean into the conflict to understand it better and understand their perspective better first even though they still don't get my perspective [Music] hello and welcome i'm shane parish and this is another episode of the knowledge
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guests on this show so be sure to check it out on the show today it's Sheila keen and oh man this conversation is going to blow you away and it's all about difficult conversations Sheila literally wrote the book on how to talk to people about difficult things we're gonna geek over over what makes for a
difficult conversation how to deal with them how to think about them how to avoid them how to teach your kids about them and so much more if you deal with humans you don't want to miss this episode it's time to listen and learn before we get started here's a quick word from our sponsor Farnum Street is
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when you get in touch tell them Shane sent you Sheila I'm so glad to be sitting down with you and talking to you well thank you for coming all the way here because it's really fun to have this conversation in person it's much better yeah yeah how did you end up studying conversations yeah I definitely was not 7 years old with people saying
what do you want to do with your life and thinking I want to talk to people about how we talk to each other like I didn't really know that that was even a thing right so I grew up in Iowa and Nebraska and went to college in California and I really didn't know what I wanted to do with my life of course and so but law school always
felt like well that's logical my dad's a lawyer I always got the impression from him that he really enjoyed practicing law so I thought well I don't know what else to do so I'm like many people you got a law school so what'd you do your undergrad in I was a public policy major which was sort of politics philosophy
and economics and I came out of that thinking I don't think I want to go into politics but the understanding why people do what they do and unintended consequences was really interesting to me so and also the first year of law school is very intellectually stimulating it's really interesting it's very absorbing
and we had one elective and the one elective that I heard I should try to get into his negotiation so I was lucky enough to get into the class I take it the spring of my first year and I just totally fell in love like immediately I thought I could do this every day for the rest of my life and learn something
new every day what was the text the reasoning back then is that that getting to yes and it was taught by Roger Fisher and Roger Fisher who founded the negotiation project the Harvard negotiation project and who wrote getting to yes he fought in World War two and in both the Atlantic and Pacific theatres and when he came home from the
war he found that of the six college roommates who started college together at the end of that first year they stopped out it was called to go to war he was the only one who came home and it sort of motivated the rest of his life and to try to find better ways to help people manage conflict and so he was a
really inspirational person and a really wonderful teacher because part of his philosophy was that you you have to walk your talk and you have to demonstrate what you are teaching and how you teach it because teaching itself is a negotiation you are negotiating for people's engagement and willing to take
risks and to admit mistakes and to see what they have to learn which is not easy with Harvard Law School students right like failure muscles not so well developed in that population I'm so owning up to screwing something up is a big negotiation right in the learning process with each other and so he was
such an amazing teacher and negotiation in itself is such an interdisciplinary field that I just felt like this touches on everything in life and I want to learn it all okay you were instantly like smitten with negotiations but also like compared to torts and Civil Procedure like maybe
there was a problem with the comparison set that I was thinking do I want to do Civil Procedure do I want to do negotiation with Pia so yeah I right away I got involved I started doing independent projects I interned at the nonprofit consulting group that operates on the side I became a teaching assistant I met my husband
teaching negotiation and he teaches at MIT ray he teaches the MIT Sloan School yep so we both teach negotiation one that Harvard wanted MIT what's that rival to rival okay we both think it's no contest okay exactly but I have to say the best negotiators in the house are the kids I mean kids as you probably know our amazing
negotiators what makes kids so effective at negotiation like if an adult tried the technique of kids it wouldn't work but for some reason adults are using kid technique so really not notice this no they did not learn any new strategies kids are amazingly intuitive negotiators because whether it's conscious or
unconscious they're really paying attention to what works mm-hm and as the adult in their relationship sometimes you're just not paying attention to what you're rewarding right so if they ask the fourth and the fifth time and you're just like enough fine go you've just taught them to pester four or five times
or throw the tantrum because then they get something out of it right and so they actually just repeat the behavior that works and it takes you a while to realize what you are accidentally rewarding and teaching them to do that's successful with you and the other thing about kids is that you as the parent are
relatively stable meaning stuck in your ways but kids are evolving all the time so every time you think you've figured them out they change so it's a really mismatched competition and they're always poking to see you like always poking yeah they're always wanting to see where the edges are so how do you balance teaching your kids how to
negotiate which is a super effective life skill and then realizing you're also a parent and not everything is in negotiation not everything is a negotiation for sure but what I think I have come to appreciate is that what I want my kids to understand is if you want something what is it that I as a parent care about what
are my interests right that you need to satisfy to get me to say yes to what you want and that may not be possible like you are wearing your seat belt because my interest in you not being maimed or killed or whatever there's just nothing you could offer me but about delaying your homework or something but but doing
your homework well all right what are my concerns what do you think my concerns are about delaying your homeworks you're getting him to take your perspective yeah you're trying to teach them what we would call second position skills can you step into someone else's shoes and imagine what the world looks like to
them and what they care about what their priorities are and not that you're supposed to guess accurately but ask them questions learn as much as you can because that's what's going to help you craft an option that means your own interests as well as the other person's so partly I part of the problem is I
have a very low tolerance for them fighting okay right because it just drives me crazy I might just knock it off but I actually also need to give them space to figure out how to negotiate with each other because it's negotiating with your siblings and your parents where you learn a lot of those
life skills right and for better and appreciating with your parents and your sibling as well yes yes all your kids so my kids are now 18 16 and 12 so I've got a college student a high school junior and a middle school student and they are it's funny because they don't think they've learned anything well yeah and
but and they're actually really good at different things around negotiation so that's been really fun to watch and it's also taught me a huge amount about myself of course what sort of things have you learned about yourself well one of is how little patience I have sometimes right and when I get frustrated I
can get dictatorial like we're done this is not a negotiation just do it and that's not necessarily helping in some cases right but it's where I go when I get frustrated so realizing that for myself helps me be like okay this is the strategy isn't helping it's just escalating the conflict I've got a take a break walk away come back
and do something more productive here yeah yeah that's a good for sure good place - what is - tell me about your kids and negotiating with them it feels like a losing battle I mean like every time it's just it's like they will relentlessly try one technique try another try another try another and it's
their ability I admire it yes I mean their ability their resilience in the face of like constant nose and then I'm also conscious at some point like I want to say yes just to like reward the tenacity it's been a like Fester so I started trying to get them to be more persuasive and so there ain't no I know
and so like if they want to download a new iPad app the rule is I have to get a sheet of paper and they have to write down like what it is why they want to download it and like what are the benefits to me oh nice so it's trying to take my perspective and average that yeah it's hilarious to see the things
they come up with it's like we won't bug you for 20 minutes like you nailed it and that yeah that's right and so it's trying to get them to do a little bit of research on the OP - and start thinking about like how do we persuade people because that has a huge skill and a huge skill in life and you know it's
interesting because on the first day of class when we teach negotiation at Harvard Law School what I do is I have students actually draw a self-portrait of what they learned was effective as a kid negotiator oh and so they introduced themselves by telling a story I said whatever age comes to mind doesn't matter negotiate with your parents your
siblings your friends your teachers I don't care but what jumps to mind and what strategies did you learn that we're successful and there's hilarious stories are these recurring like do you hear the same things every year some of the same themes that you'll hear so first of all if you think about the population of Harvard Law Students some
of them their strategy was just to be so good and get such good grades and not to ask for much so that when they did ask it was hard for their parents to say no that would work for my kids if you ever listen to this right others of them their parents ask them to do presentations like they had to make the
pitch right others of them are building coalitions right either splitting their parents Oh to like go to one whose the easier one to kind of persuade them get them on their side and then go to the other to say well dad says this'll be fine or teaming up with other siblings and saying like you asked because you're
always more successful at this so interesting so they're really smart about it and then later in the course when they're getting frustrated the cases are getting more complex as we're building skills and advanced skills when they under frustration or threat a lot of us just revert pretty early
strategies that were successful and so it's funny how many times we pause and be like okay are you doing that thing you know that you did with your parents that's not really not working for you here and yeah often and they see it attach it yeah you don't in the first and I mean that was interesting that's
another fun thing about negotiation which is that all of us have been negotiating since we were kids so everybody is an experienced negotiator but you're not necessarily a good negotiator because you'll tend to just repeat the strategies that are successful for you mmm even into adulthood right and so your strengths
get stronger and your your capabilities get deeper but they don't necessarily get broader okay and then the strategies that work for you you bump start bumping into situations where that's really not working but you don't have something else to work with you don't see what else is possible in terms of how to approach it and so
that's a lot of what we doing we teach negotiation is you're trying to help people see what your go to strategies are see where they're serving you well and then see where you actually need to build a broader repertoire of skills and tools and then pull it the tool that makes sense what are the what are the
most common tools that people are missing or the feedback that they're not getting that would help them yeah okay this is an honest answer but it's sort of a boring answer this isn't about my pitch for you to come on the podcast no no you hardly even had to ask it's like absolutely its lack of listening skills
and partly it's because when we get frustrated first of all I think that in life we often treat listening a sort of a strategy of last resort I'm sorry would you say if nothing else works I suppose I'll listen or I'll pretend I'm listening while I'm trying to figure out what to say well that I find that that's
what most people do right legee and it's not even a conscious thing you just sort of like oh I can't wait for you to shut up so I can say this thing and the whole time you're talking I'm just thinking about like how am I gonna phrase this or am I gonna word it exactly and we assume that persuasion is about talking when
actually the most persuasive strategy that you can take is a listening strategy be for a couple of reasons really good listening means you're learning a ton about not just what is under people's positions you know their interests concerns priorities worries anxieties that is meaning that they're saying no so far but also you're
changing the relationship and then the third thing is that there is this dynamic called reciprocity I'm sure you're familiar with it right like one of the strongest social dynamics is that you'll mirror back whatever you get so if you attack me I'm going to attack you back but if you really listen to me I'm
much more likely to then be willing to really listen to you and so you're enlisting that as a reciprocal sort of of set of expectations of each other in how we're going to approach this problem how do you teach somebody to listen like we all think that that oh look we just have to paraphrase what this other
person is saying like what is listening yeah so you think listening is like paraphrasing back I'm not saying that comment sort of I feel like this is a trap yeah so other people think that listening is like paraphrasing back see how annoying this is yeah and and so um I do think that listening that's why I
said this is a boring answer because it's kind of the answer that everybody knows theoretically we're supposed to listen more and then we think of sort of the parody of active listening you know could you please pass the salt so it sounds like you like some salt tell me more about that um listening really matters when were
stuck because and that's the time was actually hardest to listen mm-hmm because when were stuck like you are not listening to me I keep repeating myself we're not getting anywhere that's the place where shifting the dynamic to be willing to hear like what is getting in the way I don't understand what's going
on is probably the very best thing you could do to unlock what's going on and to change the dynamic but it's the time I'm least curious and when I'm frustrated I've got so much noise in my internal voice that I don't really have space to be curious about what's going on in your head because I'm
coping with my frustration with what's wrong with you and so it's never your first instinct in that moment to listen and it has to be a trained response so my husband in addition to teaching negotiation is a volunteer fireman an EMT and we have an all-volunteer force in our little town so you know he's come
to this a little bit later in his 40s and so he gets sent to the Fire Academy well first of all the people at the fire academy are like in their 20s right they're gonna be professional firefighters so he's the oldest person there they call him Pappy but what he learned what you learn at the Fire Academy is to overcome your natural
instinct to run toward the fire when everything in your body is saying run away from the fire and so it's become this image for me of when I least want to listen and when I am most frustrated I need to actually lean into the conflict mmm to understand it better and understand their perspective better first even though
they still don't get my perspective and if I can train myself to do that which is counter instinctual then I'm going to be effective in the moments where it's matters most and that's not easy it's just like repeatedly over time you sort of like catch yourself catch exactly it's making the mistake realizing I did
it again or in your case your husband sounds like he could actually be like hey you're doing that thing like what happens if you have two people who teach difficult conversations and negotiations having a conflict yeah you just have more ammunition like Oh miss difficult conversations let's dive into difficult
conversations yeah okay that book was phenomenal it's still impactful it's still sort of like a go-to when people give to people that are going through relationship problems that are going through struggles at work yeah let's start like at the ground floor what is a conversation yeah great question what is the conversation it was
a difficult conversation yeah that was my next question yeah yeah so so what's funny to me is obviously a conversation of the two people are talking to each other but I also think it's sometimes when we're not talking to each other like we are estranged or we are specifically enduring each other or you
might be talking to me and there's a whole lot that I am NOT saying to you but I am saying it to you in in my head yeah I was thinking about this as I was doing research and I came up this the iceberg of conversation so you have what's above the surface which is a very small fraction of the iceberg which is
like the words that people say yeah and then you have below which is sort of like your unexplored or unsaid thoughts and feelings and it's totally oceans totally yeah so as we were trying to understand these conversations so so we had been teaching negotiation at the negotiation project I joined in the early 90s and you know we were
teaching getting to yes and interest based negotiation and people were taking our courses and going out in the world periodically they come back and be like this is great let me tell you how I'm using it out in the world but every once in a while people would come back and be like this is great in a lot of
situations but there are actually some conversations I'm in where it's really not helping hmm and in fact when I use your approach I think it might be making things worse Arlie yeah so that was a little bit of upsetting feedback to get and I don't know Harvard being Harvard we had typical reaction like oh well
clearly you're not doing it right waiting for you if there's something wrong with you clearly I think eventually we kind of came to our senses and we're like okay maybe there's something here that we need to learn maybe there's something different about particularly challenging conversations and they often happen in ongoing
relationships where there's history going on there's often a lot of uncertainty or disagreement strong disagreement and then alongside that there's a bunch of strong feelings so what's going on with that and and we kind of define a difficult conversation as whatever feels difficult to you okay right it could be difficult for one
person not for the other and not for the other although what's interesting is that that quickly changes like I may be worried about the conversation and ahead of time I'm thinking this is going to be difficult you may not anticipate this is gonna be difficult but as soon as I put something on the table that you didn't
foresee her expect and you realize how much disagreement there is or how frustrated I am with you that I haven't told you all these years or whatever then it becomes a little more difficult for the other person in most cases also even if they feel misunderstood or whatever right that's not fun so it's a little bit of a
contagious dynamic in the north direction would a fight be a difficult conversation sure is that a different type oh no no that's included keep going what else persuasions conversation is almost everything how does medium affect conversation I mean like just email yeah media yeah yeah we first of all when you're in this
field you just think everything is in your field so you're gonna colonize the whole world so we would say that you are communicating with the other side even when you're not speaking to them right because maybe they're hearing it through the grapevine so and you may or may not realize they hear it through the
grapevine but your silence also is communicating something it's hard for them to interpret and what they get may not be what you intend but there's some message coming through now you asked about the channel of communication or the medium huge difference I mean what would you say is for you is the most
likely to escalate what channel of communication depends on who I'm talking to yeah so say more yeah I think like if I'm there's some people were if I'm texting mm-hmm that's more likely to escalate or result in a miscommunication yep then if we hop on the phone yeah and there's some people where I know if I
hop on the phone they're instantly agitated cuz they hate talking on the phone yes so testing would make much more sense yes in those cases yeah that also depends on what you I'm guessing here I don't like what you sort of like we want to communicate like what you want to understand what you want to learn or
what you want to get out of the conversation yeah I think that that's right so I think that there are a couple of axes to think about and you put one on my radar screen that I think is exactly right that I hadn't been thinking about which is just preferences mm-hmm right so so my husband hates talking on the phone like hates it and
so even though the phone would be a much more efficient way for us to figure this plan out when he answers the phone he answers the phone saying hello but he basically says why are you bothering me like that's that's the message behind hello he's already annoyed to start out with the conversation so although it
would be a more efficient medium yeah it ends up being a less effective medium because he comes in already all right unhappy and I'm always trying for effectiveness first and efficiency sort of a second exactly so that's one axis which is do we have a preference and a reaction to some channels right
that then ends up being part of the conflict between us but the other axis I think has to do with to what extent it's really dialogue versus serial monologue hmm so in-person communication hopefully but should be the easiest to be dialogue not just because we can talk back and forth but also you're just getting so
much more information right body language facial expressions etc like you're reading a lot more than just the words on the tone the phone remove some information but it's still a back and forth in real time when you move to email email isn't really dialogue email is serial monologue so I'm having reactions to your email like by the
second paragraph and I'm reading the rest of your email through that set of reactions which makes me suspect you have bad motives and you know sort of reads a tone into it which may or may not actually be there right and then I write back well I'm in that triggered state and also over time if we're
frustrated with each other like just seeing your name in my inbox I'm pre triggered right yeah already anxious I feel like being in my inbox I'm already pre trick so for some people texting falls somewhere in between it's a little more dialog because it tends to be shorter but of course it's cryptic right
it's not a right so partly it's just matching the task what kind what are we trying to accomplish in this conversation to the right medium right for that email tends to be the one that people default - because like I want to craft the perfect email to give me the monies of my mind and it feels safer but email is
actually the one that escalates the fastest and typically if a conflict starts on email it's really hard to solve on email so I tend to tell people just pick up the phone why does it escalate the fastest I think because although there's no emotion officially in email of course there's a motion
behind email and so we're reading all these clues like how do you know whether there's a motion behind an email you don't have facial expression or tone of voice well I I think like thinking about this it's different if I know the person or not because then I'm projecting sort of like what I know about them into that
email and I don't know them I'm less likely to predict emotion but I'm more likely to skin yes yeah so when you and I know that yeah we got tons of negative mail to like hate mail and all of that yeah years I've developed like a thicker skin to some of this stuff so I read less emotion into and respond less of
myself yeah but if I start it was like oh my god somebody unsubscribe like what did I do wrong yeah what's wrong with me exactly right like what did I do yeah I let me take it all so personally yeah yeah that was so interesting I forgot we were talking about absolute you know like why email escalates more well why email
escalates well I do think that when you know the person okay well actually let start at the other end I think that like the spam and the hate mail that you get I think that people it's easier particularly when they are emailing strangers or leaving comments online for strangers it's easier for them to forget
that there's a real human being on the other side and so they're sort of venting their frustration with the world and their life sometimes etc at someone else frame who is more about them it says more sometimes about them and where they're at how they're feeling treated by the world then it says about you and they're not
thinking that it's going to impact you right there like Shane's not gonna care Shane's famous Shane has this amazing you know followership so he's not gonna listen to me and they don't understand that actually if you read them you lie awake sometimes especially in the early days where you were taking them as if
they really were about you yeah and they're a little bit I suppose about you but if you hear themes across them but mostly they're about people forgetting that they're talking to human being now let's go to the other end of the spectrum where it's someone you know well and you can tell that they're upset
because something changes well your spidey sense kind of goes off yeah literally like they usually have a greeting and there's suddenly no greeting right right or and sometimes you can't even like articulate why ya feel that way but you're just like hey something's up like I see yeah some are you okay like yeah it's okay and you
could be wrong yeah right but they've either gotten more informal or more Curt mmm their language choices changed there's no punctuation all the sudden nothing something has changed maybe they've gotten more formal and you're just like whoa did I offend you or just time lags like I haven't heard from you
or I you immediately get something backs like no okay sorry so anyway I think what happens is when we feel frustrated on email it leaks through right in the words that we choose or at the tone etc and then the other person reacts to that and because we're each reacting beef and reading the emails back and forth from
the other person kind of through a triggered reaction right it can escalate and then don't forget that it's often true that people are cc'd on that email so now there's an audience which adds to the reaction yeah and the identity quake aspect and it can be forwarded to anyone and it lives forever and it
forever um and so it's just hard to turn that around on that medium it's almost like you can't in a conversation you can make mistakes yeah he's engaged like how the oh I didn't mean it the way that you interpreted it that's right instantly sort of like correct them yeah email can be like twisted and you know
what imagine me this is starting to be more prevalent and legal cases for oh yeah yeah it'll certain coming up yes taking their to context or don't explain a conversation that happened at the water cooler right afterwards where they clarified yeah yeah exactly and and one of the mistakes we make is that we get an email that's upsetting and we write
back right away mmm-hmm instead of taking time in a sort of liking time to wait until the adrenaline has gone down we reread it and we think about what we want to respond with rather than how we want to react how we will react with because we're not thinking about it one of the things that Roger taught that has stuck
with me all these years is the idea of being purposive in the next thing you choose to do so the easiest way to understand is right when your kids are fighting you have boys or girls two boys two boys right so you say to one of your boys why did you hit your brother and what's he gonna say guess he did this
yeah it's like a boy yeah exactly he hit me he called me and he deserved that he's early exactly and sometimes he does that's true and exactly and so what Roger was saying is I I'm sorry when I asked you why did you get your brother I don't mean what caused you to hit your brother right I mean for what purpose
did you hit your brother what is it that you were trying to accomplish yeah and so the idea being purposive that's interested not just reacting to what they just did to you but thinking how do I want this next thing to go and what do I need to do what choice do I want to make in how I respond rather than react
that will get us closer to something useful that's sort of the conversation that we try to have we don't always succeed it it's like well when you did that what means you lost control of your emotions yourself yeah and you responded in a way that if you were thinking or in control you probably wouldn't choose to respond
it's got nothing to do with what your brother did because that's all on you I'm gonna talk to him separately and that's a different conversation yeah but it's like what do you control and what don't you control yeah and and it's hard because kids are so good at seeing that it's not all their fault oh yeah and
they hear the blame patent in it and so they're gonna argue about why really he started it yeah and so I was just defending myself and this is something that we've done with our kids too which is what did you contribute to the problem yeah right before he hit you what were you doing right and one of my
boys that doesn't mean it's equal contraband it's equal coinage and that's important about joint contribution when we shift from blame to joint contribution doesn't mean it's 50/50 it just means that there were choices we each made that got us here and figuring out what those were tells us what to change and to fix so one of my boys
caught on to joint contribution really quickly at a pretty young age so they would have something that would escalate and I would say to Pete all right what did you contribute to the problem and he could turn on a dime emotion just be like okay well I called him a name I pression it on that okay yeah that's
fair my other son Jess we get it's totally stuck emotionally and he'd be like he called me a name mom I'm like I understand that we're dealing with that separately that was his contribution from what was your contribution the problem he called me a name right so I learned that I actually just needed to
give him more recovery time to go to anything out of the reactionary period and then come back and now let's talk about it that's interesting yeah so I think people's ability to like move emotionally to a place of being more constructive really is just wired differently depending on who you are so
we're talking a lot about conversations I want to give people the framework that you had later in the book which is the three different types of conversation so yeah I'm feeling and yeah it's um what happened so this lot it's kind of like your iceberg idea that that any difficult conversation really has three things going on they're sort
of layers to the conversation so the first is the what happened conversation which include which is really our story about what has happened what is happening now and what should happen okay and that that story has three key components it answers the question who's right by the way me always I be right because if I'm right then you're not
right yeah whose fault is it so that's the blame piece okay and why are they acting this way like what are their motivations or intentions or character like why are they being such a jerk or such an idiot or so lazy or incompetent or mean so those three pieces are answers to those three questions kind of
make up the key pieces of this our story about what's happening because we think the way that we see the world is the way that everybody sees the world it's not the way everybody swirl that's the way everybody should see the world okay but do we even recognize that there's an alternative way like in the moment do we
every conscious to be like there's a different vantage point to this problem I don't know what's your experience I don't know sometimes and also it's easy to say alright there are two sides to every story but mine is actually the good side right like we know theoretically that there are multiple
perspectives but we've thought about it a lot right and art just seems like it's the most reasonable one even though there are other ones they're not as reasonable or as right as ours but but I should maybe put a caveat on that which is it's not easier actually when you think you were wrong or that you think
you were to blame because the answering those same questions the other way doesn't make the conversation easier and that can often be a difficult conversation when I realize I was totally wrong about this and it's my fault but that's still one way to look at it right so the first piece is that what happened conversation and part of
the challenge is that from inside that story you're not going to have a better conversation so you have to actually shift your internal voice meaning that's what you're thinking and feeling in the conversation you have to shift it first so that your first negotiation is really with yourself hmm to move from being focused
on what I'm right about to being starting to be a little bit curious about why we see this so differently because it seems so obvious to me that I'm right so I'm not getting why you don't see that or what is it that I'm missing here and to move from blame to joint contribution what do we each do or
fail to do that got us here which doesn't mean we did something wrong necessarily and it's not necessarily 50/50 but that'll help us figure it out and then from being sure I know why you're acting like such a jerk to I don't know your intentions but I can describe the impact that it's out of me
so that's all inside our story where we're shifting our internal voice and our story and from that second place of like I wonder why we see this differently and we probably both contributed like that's such a healthier place to have a conversation it's gonna be a totally different kind of conversation at the end of the day I can
still decide I'm right but I have a better sense of why you don't think so so still the relationships in a better place for us to solve the problem if we need to it's just understanding you doesn't mean that I agree right exactly okay so but I might have a better understand why we don't agree right
because we have different we place different priority on or value on something and so you think this isn't that important and I think it's quite important but now I at least get why you don't see I think it's important right so that's all the what happened conversation you asked about the framework the framework has two deeper
things going on because underneath that the second thing going on is that in difficult conversations we usually have a whole bunch of feelings going on and they're often a complicated tangle of fear and trepidation and disappointment and mistrust and betrayal and frustration and anger and hurt in any combination and appreciation and
really satisfaction who knows hopefulness despair so part of what's hard is we're trying to figure out what do I do with all those feelings and particularly in the business world I think it's easy to think like well we just need to keep them out like just be objective and stick to business and keep
those feelings out of the way because they just get in the way and the challenge is that often if we're having a difficult conversation by the time it's become a difficult conversation we really have two problems one is whatever the surface problem is like we don't agree on the strategy mm or we don't
agree whether you know we should handle this parenting decision the same way so we've got a surface problem that we need to solve that we disagree about but underneath that we've got a second problem which is how we each feel treated by the other right like you always dismiss my parenting approach
right or you just don't get why this strategy is gonna cause us to actually lose customers over the long term or clients over the long term but you never listen right so if we don't talk about the feelings going on and how we each feel treated in the working relationship or the personal relationship we're not
actually addressing the deeper problem but that's weird can we explore this for a second because and I'm saying it's weird not in the sense that we shouldn't talk about our emotions or feelings I'm saying it's weird in the sense that the meta message that's given in school is how do we become how do we override our
evolutionary sort of programming depth feelings emotions and strive towards this and I'm not agreeing with rations arrived yes rationality yes we're effectively like AI BOTS walking around you know not having any future feelings or yeah and so how do we reconcile that view or you know that this overarching
message is one thing and then you're saying it's really difficult to actually get to the root of the problem if we don't surface our feelings and our emotions and not only do we have to surface them internally like to ourselves because often we suppress them we have to service them to the person we're having this difficult conversation
with yeah and be vulnerable and open ourself up which is like almost the antithesis of sort of like rationality right and then we have to be heard right right and and riskily feel that were were sort of acknowledged I guess and Joseph I know it's scary right so I guess like the rational argument for
that is like this gets you to a better outcome so if you're willing to put your yeah and I think the other rational response is that's just reality hmm so I think we have and this is changing a lot actually recently but there's sort of a traditional story that there's rationality and there's irrationality
right there's being objective and then there's being emotional and that those are you know totally separate spirits fears and never the twain shall meet mmm and I think what we're learning over time and neuroscience is learning is that these two things are just really intertwined mm-hmm that how you feel
changes how you think and how you think changes how you feel yeah and that objective decision-making does not exist actually and that feelings are actually really important information right so if you look at system 1 and system 2 thinking right your intuition and feelings are telling you things faster then your rational
brain can figure out logically but they're also they're clues but you don't want to rely on them mm-hmm right because they can also lead you astray there are full of biases and misinformation but if you don't pay attention to them you're going to really miss the boat on what's really going on
so when when we teach negotiators it's like interests our feelings mm-hmm what people care about what people worry about if we're gonna get this deal done you've got to respond to what people worry about care about can get excited about can get on board with how much risk they're willing to tolerate those are all related to
emotion and relationships so and if they're gonna make a decision they have to know what their interests are so I'm sure you're familiar with Antonio Damasio x' work so he's at the University of Iowa and he wrote a book called des cartes error okay I think I've heard of the book I don't think I've read it there yeah so he is one of
the researchers that took a look at what are called split brain patients okay so there are people who either fully rational or fully emotional a congenital defect or an accident right an injury it means that the part of the brain that processes emotion is actually physically separated from okay severed from the
prefrontal cortex which is your executive function thinking what we think of as the rational decision-making brain and he and other researchers are like well there are is a population of people who can't access their feelings actually just physiologically so these split brain patients are the perfect population so that we can learn how to
make objective decisions because they must be the perfect decision-makers and what they found is that these people can't make decisions at all at all I mean just asking them when would you like to come into the lab they have no idea like they'll recite their schedule but they have no instincts about well
it's kind of a busy day but that's gonna be a little tight or inconvenient or I kind of prefer to come in on a Friday like they have no preferences they don't know what their preferences are and that you have to access feelings to know what you care about and what worries you it's a signal it's a it's a signal and so
interests are feelings so part of the challenge in difficult conversations is that we have both of those things activated and both are really important and so I want to also be clear I'm not talking about like in the middle of the workday you know I should be saying things like you know I'm just feeling
really sad today I can't really make any copies but if we could process my feelings for seven hours that'd be really helpful right like we got work to get done but I am saying that if how we feel treated our collaborative working relationship isn't working it's going to get in the way of us being able to get done what we
need to get done and solve problems as they come up mm-hmm so I don't think it's usually good advice to be emotional mmm but I do think it's usually good advice to if there is emotion involved if you can name it and put it on the table you can do it in a super professional way I mean if we're having an argument going
around in circles in a meeting if I can just say okay so hang on guys I'm frustrated I don't think that we're getting anywhere and I'm confused as to why that's a perfectly reasonable thing to say it doesn't sound like I'm being emotional but what I'm doing is just naming the emotions in the room right
right and that's gonna cut to the heart of the issue much faster then continue to argue about the rational arguments what does it mean to be emotional great question I think of emotional as sort of exuding leaking the emotion all over right so you know in that meeting it might be like this is ridiculous you guys like
it's so obvious now I am expressing frustration mm-hmm but I'm not actually very effectively saying guys I'm frustrated because this feels obvious to me right so describing emotion feels to me effective and putting it on the table for discussion that's different than being emotional demonstrating emotion or
often we translate emotion into blame or accusations not often in even intentionally but that's how it comes out when we're frustrated and that is often not as helpful now I say often I'm hedging because I think there are some situations where it's useful to show how frustrated you are and there's there's a
funny contribution system sometimes it happens in some relationships where the more upset someone becomes the more calm the other person gets because their coping strategy in the face of upset is calmness mm-hmm so and the more calm they get the more upset the other person goes right yeah you know people with this
and so the person who is so calm doesn't know what to do because they're like I don't know what else I can do and the other person is like why are you reacting like there's no reaction whatsoever to it I'm right the converse is like will you stop being so hysterical and the person who is getting more and more upset is like okay you're
not getting either you're not getting how important this is or you don't care right and both of those are even more upsetting right so there's this funny way in which their coping strategies are actually making the problem worse totally unintentionally and so in that case what I tell the person who tends to
go to calm and they're wondering like what I don't understand why this isn't working I'm like you need to tell them or show them that this does matter to you that you find this actually quite frustrating or upsetting and just if you tell them that I think that that will help I think that will start to reverse
that cycle and so that's why I'm hedging my answer because I actually think showing emotion sometimes actually is helpful because it breaks a cycle because people are reading you're calm right that's not caring subjugating there's one thing I was when I was doing research for this that I was thinking
about this feelings thing that struck me is did a lot of work talking about my feelings in marriage counseling yeah whatever reason and then for whatever reason for whatever reason I don't know a marriage just for context no I like it keep going keeping away personal information here I don't tend to do that and then I noticed
that in relationships that I started after that mm-hmm I was more apt to bring up feelings very early in our relationship yeah almost like as a not even a test but as a like the cost of failure would be really low right whereas I am still feels still reluctant in some cases to talk about these unserviceable Asian ships that are
long-standing it feels so much harder like there's so much more baggage there's so much more complexity to them but it's really easy with some of the people that brought up feelings with early on or I can bring it up like the craziest things now and it feels safe and it feels like it's not going to
impact our relationship it feels like it makes us stronger hmm and there's tons of benefits to it but even realizing that I still have a hard time with people I've known for like 20 years and you did this thing where 18 it really bothered me right like am I the only one that holds on to this no of course not yeah I mean I love
what you're describing because I do think in any relationship you start to wear a groove pretty early about what we do and don't talk about mmm and about how we handle feelings and whether we talk about them or not and which feelings we talk about and so once we've worn that groove that feels pretty
comfortable and expected from each other anything you're doing that tries to step out of that feels really awkward yeah and they're not sure what to do with it sometimes yeah whereas when you're establishing new relationships you don't have a very deep groove yet so the stakes are lower because if they don't
take the invitation okay that's fine it's not that big deal but you're actually broadening what we can talk about right so changing the habit with an old friend or family member skerin ah'd it is and just more awkward I think that's really interesting I find it like it's also a signal for the type of relationship we're going to have if I
yeah if I put myself out there and I feel like I'm talking about something that I want to be comfortable talking to you about yeah and it's not sort of like it's not super vulnerable or anything like that it's just like I want to be able to have these conversations with you mm-hmm engaging the response is indicative not
perfectly right but I mean it's sort of indicative of where that relationship will go yeah and whether they are game to change that and be in a different kind of relationship with you right and if it's an older longer standing relationship it's like you really want to go there right now how do you bring
that up in a relationship or like say you're married and yeah you want to bring up feelings but you've never really talked about Wow how do you go about getting out of that pattern that you yeah bit oh it's a great question um good luck yeah one of the things we talk about in the book is
this idea that we each have an emotional footprint mm-hmm and the idea behind that is that we all grow up learning which feelings are ok to talk about and which you've learned quickly are better left alone mmm so because every family has signals that are sent about what we do talk about and what you don't talk about and then you
know you go to school you have friends you have early professional relationships etc so all of our individual relationships have footprints but also we're bringing a set of sort of lessons with us from early experiences right about what's ok to talk about and so now you're married to somebody who also has all this early stuff at a
particular footprint and then together you've co-constructed something hmm and so part of it is maybe noticing which feelings they seem more comfortable with whether that's with you or with other people in their life and also noticing which feelings end up getting translated into something else because if if we
don't feel comfortable talking about a feeling often we'll translate it into an argument or blame or anger is often a secondary feeling so how can you say more about that yeah anger is often when I say secondary I mean initially what we feel is something else maybe it's hurt so you hurt me and I don't feel totally
comfortable saying like hey you hurt me um but it's very clear to me I should not have been hurt and you should not have hurt me so now I'm mad at you angry at you for underlining angry at you right and it might not even occur to me that under that anger is actually hurt or disappointment or confusion or
loneliness what I actually experienced it as anger or frustration and so sometimes it actually takes a little bit of work on my part to think I am really pissed Oh like what's that about let me just unpack that a little bit because I'm not gonna let go of angry or pissed but there's probably more in that bundle
that I should do some thinking about first before I know what I want to talk about or what I want to share and then I'm much better off sharing the more complete set of feelings like let's talk about marriage I love you and you're driving me crazy like I hate you right now ready both of those are true bull
those are actually true in this moment um a little more on the hate side than the left side right now but uh I'm sure it'll course correct I hope soon as soon as you apologize but like actually it's an easier conversation to have if it's a more complete conversation right like on the one hand I'm really grateful to you
and I really appreciate you know the following things that you did and I felt really frustrated and disappointed when you didn't do this other thing that's easier than just walking in the door and saying like what the hell like why didn't you do what you said you were gonna do so actually interestingly
sometimes putting more feelings into the conversation lowers the stakes that's really interesting if you're in a conversation what are the things that you can do to uncover these sort of like hidden feelings that people are feeling but not necessarily telling you about because you want to get to a better
place in the conversation yeah like that's something you control you might not control how they frame the conversation or how they started or what they're saying but you can you can recognize oh maybe there's more going on here mm-hmm and then what do I do uncover to look below yeah it's a great question so let's circle back to that
listening thing that we were talking about because I often think that it's not just am i listening well or listening poorly it's also what am i listening for mm-hmm and I can listen for why you think that you're right or what you think I contributed to the problem those are important things to listen for
but I can also listen for how you're feeling about what's happened between us and I need to be able to move between those between facts and feelings because you might be in one more than the other at any given point in time but so one of the choices I can make is to listen beyond the accusations or the blame etc
or the arguments that you're giving me for the feelings and just respond to the feelings as if that's what you told me that's interesting so you know you're yelling at me because I said I'd pick up the kids and I was late and I can just listen for the feelings behind it which is so I can imagine that was pretty
frustrating and particularly because you suspected I was going to be late so yeah if I were you I would be frustrated right so you're just and by the way you're not telling them how they feel you might say I'm not frustrated right you know I'm just exasperated it's like right okay I'm Christ and corrected look
I'm not great with you about what your feelings are but now we're actually talking about them because that's the emotions are what's fueling the energy of that conversation and so actually we can cut to that we're actually getting to the heart of it faster than continuing the argument about what the
schedule wasn't whether at the traffic was bad and whose fault it was mm-hmm so partly what the way to introduce feelings you can do two things one is listen for what is the feeling that they're expressing maybe through being emotional or translating it into blame and accusations and just name that and acknowledge it and ask them about it
the second thing that you can do is you can share a little bit about how you're feeling by describing it like you don't have to take huge risks just say like yeah I'm disappointed in myself mmm frustrated myself or whatever freshly with you that reciprocity thing right means if I'm going there I'm
inviting you to reciprocate right can't guarantee you're going to take the invitation and I may need to be persistent about it but if I share my feelings you can't really argue with that right you're not frustrated let me check yeah no I am now I'm angry no yeah I'm frustrated even more often I found that feeling sort of I don't
know maybe for it's just me here but for other people I would imagine it's very similar like they sort of like caused some sort of anxiety in me around the conversation yeah of to varying degrees and I wouldn't sometimes it might prevent me from having the conversation yeah what are the what are ways that we
can deal with that sort of like internal yeah well so we should we talk about the third layer identity identity because we haven't talked about that we probably shouldn't it's totally related to what you just asked so so part of what we found is that when we talk to people about their most difficult conversations
and we started pay attention to what they're thinking and feeling and often not saying in the conversation there was a very consistent structure so what people are preoccupied with in their internal voice is a story about what happened as we've talked about a whole bunch of feelings that they're trying to
figure out how to handle and then the deepest level the third level is what we call the identity conversation which is kind of the conversation I'm having with myself about myself what does this situation suggest about me that I'm not a good spouse that I'm not a good person that I'm not competent that I'm not
worthy of love in some way you know sometimes people say one things I have our time with is saying no and that's often related to identity that there's a story you tell about yourself like you're a good friend and you're a team player and if you never abandon someone in need and if that's your story anytime
someone asks you for help what you're not just saying the word no you're doing something that feels like it's in conflict with who you want to be in the world right like quitting a job like this loyal how can you be disloyal or how can you hurt someone else so much by breaking up with them and so if a conversation feels difficult there's
often something about identity something the situation's suggest about you that raises the stakes on the whole conversation and so that's part of the anxiety that then drives the intensity of the feelings and those feelings color our story about what happened and what should happen in the future and so these
three actually work together but it's often identity at the deepest level that is the hardest part which is where we're being forced to confront our identity with ourselves and acknowledge that maybe we are a quitter and we don't want to see ourselves at a quitter but we're in a job that we know is not gonna work
for us or we're in a relationship that's not gonna yeah and and identity is complicated right and life is complicated so it's not as simple as our identity stories are which tend to be black and white like I'm not a quitter and I hate this job right and I'm not the kind of person who wants to waste
their life doing something that they hate so now I've got two identities that are in conflict with each other and I can't figure out how to be the right kind of person given that I have two values about Who I am that are in conflict what do we do exactly this is one of the reasons why often the conversation with yourself that you have
to have first walk me through that conversation though what does that look like it seems just doing an example you have an example of a difficult conversation that you hide like I'm just wondering like how do we walk ourself through identity complex or even just like when we have multiple identities
and that's one angle to it and they're in conflict with each other and we didn't really realize we had multiple identities and they comply or they're in conflict but another one is like we just have this we've you know been taught as a kid that we never quit or and now we're doing something that is very clearly
someday you should quit but it is something that we're sort of like we should quit but that makes us a quitter and we were been told that we're not quitter right don't quit right exactly well so one thing to do is to stop holding our identity as either or black or white because if you think about it logically you can't go through life
never quitting anything because you can't do everything forever all the time right so you have been quitting things so it's shifting that - okay a quitter is someone who quits because it gets too hard or they're not committed enough or they're not willing to stick it out through the hard parts hmm but a person
who makes a good decision for themselves that actually putting more of my energy toward this doesn't make sense mm-hmm that's actually someone who's making good decisions for themselves so maybe that's different than being a quitter or it's a reframing affirming it right and and realizing actually this is
a simplistic story this quitter story that I have right on myself of what I can't be because it's getting in the way of something I need to be also mm-hmm let's talk about like work life work and family conflicts because on the one hand I think of myself as someone who's very responsive to clients but I also think
of myself as someone who pays attention to their kids right so now I've got a client who you know needs help they're texting me on the weekend etc etc is who you are and by the way they're always responsive to me right and like can I play at this level if I can't be on and give them the help they need when they
need it if I'm coaching them or helping them through a conflict or whatever it would be maybe I shouldn't not maybe I'm not cut out for doing this level of work right but in the meantime my kids are like mom I was talking to you hello hello right so I think of myself as a good parent who listens to and is there
for their kids so now I've got two parts of myself or two stories about Who I am that are you conflict well I'm standing there on the lawn with the phone in my hand right and I'm supposed to be doing something with my kids or I'm on vacation doing email yeah the whole time all my kids are like let's go to the
ocean come on let's go so so part of it is just having the conversation with yourself about how what are the limits to this story I have about Who I am or want to be because it's too black and white and how do I be honest with myself that I can't be a hundred percent that all the time and that's okay and that's
okay that's actually human we sometimes do an exercise where we ask people just finish the following sentence if I know nothing else about myself I know I am a blank person so pick a couple of adjectives what would go in those bikes for you kind mm-hmm but not always exactly that's somebody off the other day that wasn't your kind
at all thoughtful yeah giving I mean we tend to think of positive things right yeah it's not negative yes so I'm guessing those are true if you generally look at your face well and also because if they came to mind quickly they're important to you yeah like they're a big piece of who you want
to be in the world and what you value and I also know that they're not always true of you right as you quickly yeah mention it it's easy to think of examples where you may not been this thing not been those things and by the way those can sometimes be your hardest conversations because it's where I'm
disappointed in myself yeah especially maybe for high achievers because we hold ourselves to a really high standard yeah like I should have known better I should have seen that coming I can't believe I did that and so whatever those sort of characteristics that you hold most tightly are they are sometimes also a key to the kinds of
conversations that are hardest for you because you let yourself down and you're disappointing yourself on that note I are running up to time here I want to cover two things before we sort of end this conversation one is like what are the things that parents should instill in their kids about
conversations like what is it you wish all parents knew about having conversations with their kids not necessarily teaching their kids but having better more meaningful conversations used to build and strengthen relationships with your children mmm oh that's such an important question so I have teenagers right and
one of the things that I've been thinking about a lot in the last few years is what is it that I want my kids to be able to do hmm I want my kids to be able to see someone else's point of view even when they feel strongly the other way I want them to take responsibility and for what they contribute to the problem right to own
their part and to apologize and work to fix it but also I want them to stick up for themselves and speak up for themselves when they feel like they're not being treated well mm-hmm and so if that's what I want them to learn they have to have a model for learning that which also means I have to be willing
for them to speak up to me right when they don't feel like I've handled something well they have to see me apologizing to them when I handle something Forli yeah even though I hate that and I'm so disappointed in myself wouldn't happen alive who hasn't yelled that they're good yeah and you know it's like I'm supposed to
be good at this I do this full-time and I just really blew it right and so I'm so disappointed in myself but I need to actually say that out loud to them so I have to actually walk the talk and model what I want them to be which means that I have to apologize to them sometimes etc right and as they get older to shift
more responsibility to them and let them make their own mistakes which is really to sit back and watch it make a mistake okay and but I mean within the bounds of safety obviously you just have to walk alongside them right usually when I see my kids doing that and they haven't quite caught on yet I'm like do you want
a recommendation yeah so I might try not to make a decision for them but also trying to offer them valuable also great valuable information and just to come back to apologizing to your kids I think that that is modeling that is super important I remember the first time I did that I was like oh my god like this
I was like walking myself through this only what am i doing right and I apologized to my kids and it was like I'm sorry like I I responded disproportionately to what happened and had lost my patience and lost control of my emotions and reacted in a way that I don't want you to react yeah and my
youngest just put his hand on my shoulder and was like it's okay done I bet that he remembers that too yeah so yeah it was a powerful sort of like but it became easier than I thought it was like so much easier because you're wearing a New Groove between my where like that's normal yeah hopefully doesn't happen too often
but when it does happen they expect it from you right and vice versa and then we had a conversation about it yeah what'd they say what would be really helpful for us cuz I'm like well you know like how do we some super patient and then I'm not yeah like this super patient and then all of a sudden oh yeah the most patient person in the
world but there's a switch like you cross that switch and so now I'm like we're getting to the line like I'm gonna feel it right and like I give them warning warning what you used to do with this information is up to you but that was what they wanted they wanted more of a like a transition where cuz they're
kids they want to push their boundaries and they want to push it to the berry max and then they'll back off so it's like okay we're getting there and just that information given to them super helpful for them to realize like what's happened because it's not always visible with me yeah because I am like very
patient but then not patient at all right and and it's hard for you to actually be self aware as you're approaching that line but once you actually get better at it yourself and you can feel it when you notice the feeling that's part of the like pay listen for the emotions in yourself not joined in the other person too
the other thing I want to cover quickly just before we and this is sort of like marriage conversation yeah we're what are the like most common ways that people derail those conversations and what would make the biggest sort of difference in having better again with the the goal of understanding and
connecting and having a more meaningful relationship with your spouse yeah well have you read any john gottman yet a little bit yeah yeah so I think his research just for understanding what goes wrong is really powerful can you explain that just so yeah absolutely so John Gottman he's up in Seattle he spent
his career researching marriage he has all these all this data and observations which I think resonate with anyone who's been in a long-term partnership or relationship things like two thirds of the things you're fighting about today you're gonna be fighting about in five years and you were fighting about them
five years ago right those recurring recurring theme issues because about two-thirds of what you fight about are not solvable they just reflect differences between you right who's Messier and his less messy and drives them crazy who spends the money and who gets anxious and wants to save the money all of that stuff those preferences
aren't going to change those are the friction points between you know is just how do you handle them and about a third of the things you're fighting about are transitory like we decided to take the job or not move or not right and sometimes it's not over because somebody resents the way the decision was made
you made any move here right right so now that's gonna live on at a deeper level in terms of ongoing resentment and it's gonna rear itself in ways that don't come out as like you made me do this it's gonna come out as something else yeah exactly cuz you're horrible and so hard to get back to the laws yeah so so
the other thing that he talks about is the fact that he in his research he invites couples into his love lab and he hooks them up to heart monitors and he videotapes audiotapes them and then he invites them to talk about an issue that's stressful mm-hmm so in our language to have a difficult conversation right and his claim to fame
is that he can watch a couple for five minutes and predict with ninety well it's two percent yeah it's crazy whether or not they're gonna divorce within years five years with that um it's like uncanny yeah I haven't volunteered to go to see how about you haha but what's interesting is what he's
looking for as the clues that he's picking up and it's things like eye rolling which is sort of leaking out of contempt or dismissal like I've heard this like a million times I'm not listening I'm already formulating my counter-argument right so that's an indicia of not actually listening right or feeling hurt
right so we have a no eye rolling rule at our house I saw that I think you were eye rolling there like that's because you're being ridiculous so he's looking for contempt or dismissal hmm on the positive side one of the positive corollary or clues that he looks for is as things escalate that they have an escape hatch and which
often involves humor so it's an affiliation move to reconnect and to break the cycle of escalating conflict so you know it's an old joke or it's a something that just gets people out of the escalating frustration to be able to self observe and be like okay well we're having the same argument again and to
shift the dynamic and so I really think his research is terrific to help understand the the key places where it's not just that people have difficult conversations in their relationships in important ways those conversations are the relationship and if we handled them well the relationship will strengthen and thrive
and if we don't handle them well the relationship starts to deteriorate and so for me that difficult conversation skills are the prescriptive side of his descriptive research and I find it fascinating how they how they line up and how much I've learned from his research that gets me thinking about what are we missing on our side of the
fence to understand what helps so what would those be well it'd be things like this you name your contribution yeah the same thing with the listening for the feelings actually trying to understand the other person's point of view even though you already know that they're wrong exactly let them speak try not to
roll your eyes or just be transparent about okay we have talked about this a hundred times like I don't think this is getting anywhere so what do you want to do mmm right it's like just name it yeah and put it on the table as a joint problem like I don't think we're ever gonna agree about this so now we have to
figure out what to do given that right but then you're into like okay now it's a joint problem to solve right to see whether we can come up with any options yep yeah yeah and you know I think part of learning in life is seeing those difficult conversations and those relationships the strong ones and also
the hard ones where there's friction in the relationship in your life whatever those relationships are worker or family and friends and getting curious about what you can learn from them what you can learn about people and what you can learn about yourself and to me that's like a lifelong journey which is why I
just keep learning more every day and wishing I knew it like five years ago cuz that working really helpful yeah I think that it's really interesting because as I observe friends and sort of colleagues mhm and try to ascertain sort of like the health of their relationship with their partners one of the things that sort of
correlates to a negative place is their inability to talk so somebody will bury thing that I want to talk about it for whatever reason be it anxiety they don't want to talk about the feelings they don't want to have a recurring conversation that they bury it but the more they bury the more like the farther
apart people get in a relationship yep and so they're not coming back and they're not connecting and the people that have the strongest relationships will bring up stuff that they know is going to be a difficult conversation but they sort of feel safe that they're going to be understood or listened to
and they're going to get to a better place even though it's going to be a struggle to get there yeah and and your description I think of the people who feel like I tried to bring it up it was not well-received mmm I learned it's not worth bringing up right or I won't get heard or will even get yelled at they stopped speaking to
me whatever like it just escalates and doesn't go anywhere and so I just have to bury it yeah and that resentment ends up festering and their relationship is slowly eroding right the connection that they have is eroding when you feel like you're holding back but actually you're just building it up right right you're
shoving it under the rug and pretty soon your happiness goes out the window because out the window so this is another this is a connection also to that Gottman work because he talks about positive and negative interactions mm-hmm and they're tiny little bids my cousin micro bids right so and you can get a
positive reaction as as simple as you know it was cold today and then you actually say yeah freezing but you responded to me in some way that heard I read it altered and acknowledged you could also ignore me I get no response or you could respond negatively like it wasn't that cold you know you're just a wimp and so a couple of things
I'm like you know this research I find it really interesting the optimum is what is it five to one I think so yeah five to one positive interactions - negative interactions and it's not better to have a big ratio of positive and negative like ten to one is not better because of what you're describing if it's ten positive
interactions or 50 positive interactions before any negative one typically one of the partners is holding back right and they're not raising things that they should raise to say like well I was disappointed that you didn't pick that up when you said that you would on the way home and so like five years later
they're more likely to be divorced because they're not actually talking about some things that they need to talk about yeah the other thing I find interesting is a negative response is actually better than no response book has no response just signals that you just don't care right you're just totally being ignored and so it's
actually better in the relationship if you say wasn't that called you're just a wimp because at least we're still in relationship right and and also people have different models of relationships so for some people that friction like tells us that you care right so there are couples who fight more and fight
less but the fighting more couples aren't necessarily less happy mmm depends on how they quote-unquote fight and whether that feels normal to them and connected to them right because it tells me that you care about it yeah and I think people also sweep things under the rug because it feels
too threatening to bring it up like it's gonna threaten the relationship or they try to bring it up and the other person feels that they are threatening the relationship and so they respond by shutting it down I plays on our insecurities plays on our insecurities and then of course the sad fact is then that actually dooms the
relationship because we can't talk about anything so this is anybody listening go home tonight know like try to have a difficult conversation something that's been lingering or ongoing and try to reframe it from a point of understanding yeah and from a point of expressing these feelings and yeah exploring your identity and what is
challenging in that yeah and if your purpose if you shift your purpose from I need to go home and just get them to see it my way right you wanna let them know that I need to change right honey I love you and I would love it if you would just be a different person right and I have some specific requests
about what kind of person I would like if I shift my purpose in the conversation from getting them to change or getting them to apologize see that I'm right whatever to just understanding better what's going on like why is it that we have such a hard time with this that conversation is much more likely to
be fruitful because we don't have to agree at the end of it I just have to go in wanting to learn something about and I'll have to give up my view to do I have to pretend I don't have a view I'm actually much better saying we really disagree with this and we're stuck I don't get it what is so hard why is it
so important to you drop wanting to resolve it don't even go in without agenda just go in with sort of understanding yeah yeah that's Henry and then you're gonna have a better conversation it's gonna be lower stakes right because not figuring out a solution isn't failing and failing is not learning anything new about the
other person that's a great place to leave this this was an amazing conversation thank you it was really fun I really appreciate it and we'll have to come back for part two and we'll do it on the bonus we'll do it on feedback which has everything to do with marriage marriage is one long feedback
conversation thank you so much hey guys this is Shane again just a few more things before we wrap up you can find show notes at Furnham street vlog comm slash podcast that's f AR n a.m. st AR ee t BL o g comm slash podcast you can also find information that are on how to get a transcript and if you'd
like to receive a weekly email from me filled with all sorts of brain food go to Furnham street blog comm slash newsletter this is all the good stuff I found on the web that week that I've read and shared with close friends books I'm reading and so much more thank you for listening [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you