Have you ever wondered if you're even having the right conversation?
Hi, I'm J. D. Taylor. I'm the Principal Consultant and Coach at Crucial Transformations and the Author of Taylored Tips.
I just got off phone talking to a client who was having this problem. They say every time they start talking about a tough issue with a certain person in their life it seems like the conversation really doesn't go anywhere. They don't make any progress, nothing changes or other times they seem to get sidetracked somehow and the conversation goes in a lot of different directions.
You know, I live in Salt Lake City, Utah in the United States. It's a wintry place during the winter, we've hosted the Winter Olympics if that gives you an idea of how wintery it might be and every season without fail, I will lose control of my car. It'll slide off the icy road over the curb, down the embankment and land in the bottom of the ditch and I'll be stuck. Maybe this has happened to you but it's been at the shore or in a traffic jam and you know how disappointing and frustrating and discouraging that could be. So I'll get out and I'll put all my effort and energy and leverage and strength into one part of the car. I'll push with all my might only to find the car slides a little bit sideways and sinks in, it is more stuck than it was before. This same thing happens to us in our important conversations because we make the same mistake. We push in the wrong place and then the conversation goes a little bit sideways on us as well. In order to overcome this, every once in a while I'll think, “Well since I'm not sure where is the right place to push, how about I just push everywhere at once?” And so I'll put my hand here and another hand here and my hip here and my knee here and on the count of three I'll try and push and I can't create any friction. I lose my traction and I go sliding down into the bottom of the ditch, the snow spitting up in my face.
The same thing happens to us in our conversations because we can't decide what's important, what we need to talk about. We try talking about everything and the conversation doesn't go anywhere.
Here's the Taylored Tip: when you're in a tough conversation, remember the 3Ps.
Every conversation is one of three types. It's either a conversation about a PROBLEM, that's the first P. I want to just talk to you about a single occurrence of something that just happened or the most recent incident, but I want to limit the conversation to a single topic. "You said you’d check with me before you made the final decision, that didn't happen. Can we discuss that?". The second P is for PATTERN. Sometimes the conversation we need to have addresses the multiple occurrences. What happened, the problem has happened on more than one occasion. "You said you'd check with me before you made the final decision, that didn't happen and that's the third time that's happened on the last five decisions that we've faced." There's a couple of interesting things that we need to keep in mind when we're thinking about our pattern conversations. The first one is that most people, if we're talking to them, may not even agree with us that it's a pattern. You've had this experience. You've said to someone in your life, "Hey eight times over the last three weeks you've been late. And I think it's becoming a pattern". And they look at you with shock and surprise on their face, "What do you mean? The first time my alarm didn't go off, the second time the dog escaped, the third time the babysitter called in sick, the fourth time I couldn't find my keys". They haven't connected all of those dots of information and plotted them on the same trajectory we have. We think it's going to happen a ninth or tenth time and that's the reason to have the conversation. The other thing that sometimes happens is we feel guilty because we didn't have the problem conversation. You've probably said to yourself or you’ve heard someone else say "Well, I don't want to bring it up now. They're just going to say ‘why didn't you mention this to me the first time, when it happened a week ago’." And so we talk ourselves out of having the pattern conversation. Then the third P is what we call PEOPLE or PERSON. This is a conversation about the way we're relating to the other person. That has changed, we're treating them differently. We treat them differently than other people in our family. We treat them differently than other people in our organization. This conversation is about our relationship, about character, about competence, about trust, about dependability, whatever it may be. "You said you'd check with me before you made the final decision. Three times in the last five projects we've worked on that hasn't happened. What I'd like to talk about today (the place I'd like to push is what we're saying), is that I'm beginning to feel like you don't trust me. You don't respect my ideas and decisions. I'm finding that disengaging and demoralizing and it's making me question my role and responsibility on the team and wondering if I ought to go work somewhere else where my contributions would be even greater and of more value.”
So remember, anytime you're in a conversation and you're not sure you're having the right conversation, think of the 3Ps. What's the right place to push? Do I want to have a conversation about the problem? Do I want to have a conversation about the pattern? Or do I want to have a conversation about the person? The benefit of the 3Ps is two-fold. The first one is it helps us unbundle the issue, deconstruct it and identify all of the component parts. “What are the problem issues? What are the pattern problems? What are the personal challenges that I'm facing?” That's the scientific part of the process. The artistic part of the process is then being able to say, "Now that I've unbundled it and identified all of the candidate conversations I can have, how can I prioritize what's the right conversation to have?” One of the conversations will do a better job of getting us unstuck, up the hill and back on the road to where we want to go.
So I hope next time you're stuck, you’re feeling frustrated, you're feeling discouraged, you'll be able to remember the 3Ps.
I hope this Taylored Tip will help you be able to leave conflict behind. Good luck!
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