Crucial Conversations

Crucial Conversations focuses on how to handle disagreements and high stakes communication.  Crucial conversations are what is keeping you away from achieving your desired results. This book is written on the understanding that when you are stuck in any situation,  it is this crucial conversation that is keeping you away from achieving your best result. When you learn how to manage conversations effectively and efficiently, you can accomplish your desired outcome. This book also focuses on how to hold such a conversation in a positive state when surrounded by highly charged emotions.

DEEP DIVE INTO THE BOOK
Kerry and Co. listed seven essential models to manage and hold a crucial conversation efficiently and nicely.

1. Start with the heart: Stay focused on what you really want. Understand that the only person you can directly control is yourself before going into any conversation. You have to manage your mindset and emotions. It is challenging to change others but easier to improve oneself. Therefore, it is essential to pay attention to your motive when you find yourself moving towards silence or violence.

2. Stay in Dialogue: Learn to look. When conversations turn crucial,  failing to see what’s going on at the moment is why we often miss or misinterpret the early warning signs. The sooner we notice that we are not in dialogue, the quicker we can get back to the discussion. To avoid turning a healthy conversation into unhealthy, you must :

• Learn to look at the content, the context and the conditions
• Look for signs when things become crucial
• Learn to watch for safety problems
• Look and see whether others stakeholders are moving towards silence and/or violence
• Be self-aware of possible outbreaks of your style under stress

3. 
   
   Make it safe: The safer people feel around you, the more of an open conversation they will have with you. This can be done from an authentic place of compassion and curiosity. We need them to tell us everything and sometimes listen to them from the beginning. The more you listen, the more their emotions will subside, the more open they become and the more willing they are to listen to us. The opposite is also true. The more significant the fear, the more likely they will either close down or fight back. Closing down can take the form of masking (where they pretend to agree or pretend they are listening), avoiding or withdrawing. There are four paths of powerful listening: Ask, Mirror, Paraphrase ad Prime.
   
   4. Don’t hook by emotions: A crucial conversation is highly charged by emotions. The very first thing you must do is to name that emotion. Is it anger? Frustration? Hurt? Disappointment?  Emotions must be understood very nicely. So how can you engage in an honest conversation without closing them down? This requires a mix of confidence. Five tools to use are:
   1. Share the fact
   2. Tell your story
   3. Ask for the other person’s story
   4. Talk tentatively
   5. Encourage testing
   
   5. Agree on a mutual purpose: It is essential to find a mutual objective. There are four skills to get back to the mutual purpose.
   1. Commit to seek mutual purpose
   2. Recognize the purpose behind the strategy
   3. Invent a mutual goal
   4. Brainstorm a new strategy
   
   6. Separate facts from the story: We choose what story to tell ourselves and when a particular story drives us in the wrong direction, we can choose to tell a different story.
   Skills for mastering our story:
   1. Act: notice your behavior
   2. Feel: Get in touch with your feelings
   3. Tell a story: Analyze your stories. What story is creating these emotions?
   4. See/hear: Get back to the facts. What evidence do I have to support this story?
   
   7. Agree on a clear action plan: the ultimate goal of a conversation is to take action. If action is not taken, all healthy talks in this works will lead to disappointment and hard feelings. Reaching the point of shared meaning does not mean we will have a successful outcome. There are some pitfalls such as a lack of making a decision, making a wrong decisions or no action made to follow the decision.
   
   To help overcome these pitfalls, there are four questions to determine which way to go.

1. Who cares. Don’t involve people who don’t care.
2. Who knows. Who has relevant expertise to help to make a fruitful decision?
3. Who must agree. Who are the people who could block the implementation later on if  involved in the decision making now?
4. Wow many people must be involved. Try to include as few people as possible.

In conclusion, if people learn the skills to handle crucial conversation at any moment, it will make their life more smooth and successful. At any given point in our professional or personal life, we need to have serious and crucial conversations with people who will have a different mindset, values and emotions. The wisdom and techniques in this book make it doable.

THE BIG THREE – KEY POINTS
Keypoint #1: The safer people feel around you, the more open of a conversation they will have with you.
Keypoint #2: The only person you can directly control is yourself.
Keypoint #3: A useful story creates emotions that leads to healthy actions during any dialogue.

One Last Thing
“The mistake most of us make in our crucial conversations is we believe that we have to choose between telling the truth and keeping a friend.”
― Kerry Patterson, Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High