How to Be Emotionally Agile during Difficult Conversations

Negotiating a tough contract. Dealing with an irate customer. Confronting Uncle Joe at the holiday gathering for saying something disrespectful. Asking for a raise. Ending a relationship. Giving critical feedback. Saying no to someone in need. Disagreeing with the majority in a group. Terminating an employee. Apologizing.

At work, at home, and across the backyard fence, difficult conversations are attempted or avoided every day.

A difficult conversation is anything you find it hard to talk about.

Feelings Matter: They Are Often at the Heart of Difficult Conversations

Feelings, of course, are part of what makes good relationships so rich and satisfying. Feelings like passion and pride, silliness and warmth, and even jealousy, disappointment, and anger let us know that we are fully alive.

At the same time, managing feelings can be enormously challenging. Our failure to acknowledge and discuss feelings derails a startling number of difficult conversations. And the inability to deal openly and well with feelings can undermine the quality and health of our relationships.

Working to get feelings into the conversation is almost always helpful as long as you can do it in a productive way. If you are able to share feeling with skill (A skill anyone can improve with practice), you can avoid many of the potential costs associated with expressing feelings and even reap some unexpected benefits.

There are many methods you can use to include emotions in a way that is healthy, meaningful, and satisfying. One of the most powerful is learning how to "negotiate with your feelings."

Don’t Treat Feelings as Gospel: Negotiate with Them

Most of us assume that our feelings are static and nonnegotiable, and that if they are to be shared authentically, they must be shared “as is.” In fact our feelings are based on our perceptions and our perceptions are negotiable. As we see the world in new ways, our feelings shift accordingly. Before sharing feelings in a difficult conversation, then it is crucial to negotiate—with ourselves.

What does it mean to negotiate with our emotions? Fundamentally, it involves the recognition that our feelings are formed in response to our thoughts. Imagine that while scuba diving, you suddenly see a shark glide into view. Your heart starts to pound and your anxiety skyrockets. You’re terrified, which is a perfectly rational and understandable feeling.

Now imagine that your knowledge of sharks enables you to identify it as a Reef Shark, which you know doesn’t prey on anything as large as you. Your anxiety disappears. Instead you feel excited and curious to observe the shark’s behavior. It isn’t the shark that’s changed; it’s the story we tell ourselves about what’s happening. In any given situation our feeling follow our thoughts.

This means the route to changing your feelings is through altering your thinking. Our thinking is often distorted in predictable ways, providing rich ground for negotiating our emotions. First, we need to examine our own story. What is the story we are telling ourselves that is giving rise to how we feel” What is our story missing? What might the other person’s story be? Almost always, an increased awareness of the other person’s story changes how we feel.

Stephen Covey shares a personal story in his classic book, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, that illustrates this point.

“I remember a profound shift in thinking I experienced one Sunday morning on a subway in New York. People were sitting quietly – some reading newspapers, some lost in thought, some resting with their eyes closed. It was a calm, peaceful scene.

Then suddenly, a man and his children entered the subway car. The children were so loud and rambunctious that instantly the whole climate changed.

The man sat down next to me and closed his eyes, apparently oblivious to the situation. The children were yelling back and forth, throwing things, even grabbing people’s papers. It was very disturbing. And yet, the man sitting next to me did nothing.

It was difficult not to feel irritated. I could not believe that he could be so insensitive as to let his children run wild like that and do nothing about it, taking no responsibility at all. 

It was easy to see that everyone else on the subway felt irritated, too. So finally, with what I felt like was unusual patience and restraint, I turned to him and said, “Sir, your children are really disturbing a lot of people. I wonder if you couldn’t control them a little more?”

The man lifted his gaze as if to come to a consciousness of the situation for the first time and said softly, “Oh, you’re right. I guess I should do something about it. We just came from the hospital where their mother died about an hour ago. I don’t know what do think, and I guess they don’t know how to handle it either.”

Can you imagine what I felt at that moment? My story about the man changed. Suddenly I saw things differently, and because I saw differently, I thought differently, I felt differently, I behaved differently. My irritation vanished. I didn’t have to worry about controlling my attitude or my behavior; my heart was filled with the man’s pain. 

Feelings of sympathy and compassion flowed freely. “Your wife just died? Oh I’m so sorry! Can you tell me about it? What can I do to help?” Everything changed in an instant because my story about the man changed.”

Many of us when we approach a difficult conversation want to push our negative emotions aside. While that emotion is an authentic experience, we have to be careful that we don't get hooked by these negative experience. Negotiating with your feelings means there is a balance between acknowledging how you’re feeling or some negativity and yet not getting hooked by it.

Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi death camps, speaks to this very compelling idea that between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose, and it's in that choice that comes our growth and freedom.

When there's no space between stimulus and response, we are hooked. What that might look like is being undermined in this meeting, so I'm going to shut down. I feel really angry, so I'm going to give the person a piece of my mind. What we do is we start attaching our emotions to an action, almost treating those emotions as fact.

When we're doing that, when our thoughts, our emotions, and stories are driving us, that's not effective. Our emotions are data, not directions. We can tap into them, we can notice them with curiosity, we can notice them with compassion, we can say, “What is this thing that I'm feeling strongly about, and what does it tell me about what's important to me, my values? What is critical in my workplace,” and so on. We can tap into these, but without treating them as directives to action. Ultimately, who's in charge here, the thinker or the thought?

Too often we confuse being emotional with expressing emotions clearly. They are different. You can express emotion well without being emotional, and you can be extremely emotional without expressing much of anything at all. Sharing feelings well in a difficult conversation requires thoughtfulness. 

Negotiating with your feelings is a skill that can be developed.

Here are two simple things you can do to become more emotionally agile.

The first is, often when we experience emotions, we'll say things like, “I am stressed. I am anxious. I am sad. I am pissed off” What you're doing when you're saying that is you are basically identifying you, all of you, 100% of you, the “I am,” as being sad or stressed, angry or whatever it is.

There's incredible power in noticing that emotion, but creating some distance. I'm noticing that I'm feeling stressed, I'm noticing that I'm feeling sad, I'm noticing the urge to leave the room, I'm noticing the urge to shut down, I'm noticing the urge to blame." When you prefix the emotional story with simply, “I am noticing,” and calling it for what it is, a thought, emotion, a story, not a direction, you create incredibly important space that allows you to then decide who do you want to be in the situation.

Second, is that often people get very hooked on the idea of being right. “What if I'm right?” “What if my colleague is an idiot?” “What if I'm right?” “What if my team member really is a slacker?” Sometimes we get so focused on being right, that we forget that what we're doing might not be serving us. Think about an area of your life, it might be at home, it might be to do with a specific project or product, or even with an individual, where you’ve become so focused on being right that it's actually stopping you from being effective.

Now, if the gods of right came down and said to you, “You are right. You are right. You are right. You are right. Your colleague is an idiot. The team member is a slacker. You are right,” you still get to choose who you want to be. What is an action that can take you closer to being the person, the leader, the parent that you most want to be?

In the words of George Eliot, "it's never too late to be who you were meant to be."

To your greater happiness and effectiveness,

Peter Mclees, Leadership Coach, Facilitator and Performance Consultant

SMART DEVELOPMENT

Email: petercmclees@gmail.com  

Mobile: 323-855-1713

P.S. Check out a great Harvard Business Review article entitled 7 Tricky Work Situations and How to Respond to Them. The author outlines verbal strategies that along with the agility tips presented in this post will help you send messages in a clear and emotionally impactful way during difficult conversations.

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