How to Say the Hard Thing and Keep the Relationship | A Bit of Optimism: Feelings at Work | PART 5

When I'm in a really intense conflict with someone, maybe I care about them, maybe I have loved working with them. I can't see any of that. Like I see like a monster in front of me. When I'm able to relax that and be like, Oh it you're not some evil being with bad intentions, but you're just a person who I seek to understand, who I want to help understand me, it changes everything. Now we can both win. This person isn't a monster, it's just something that happened. Even that's a relief. For me, the most important thing the thing that I always try to come back to is reminding myself of this one golden sentence. Conflict is a team sport for mutual understanding. You're in the car rehearsing exactly what you want to say about that thing that's been bothering you. The words are perfect, the tone is calm but firm. You're compassionate.

You're clear. You're setting your boundaries. You're crushing it. Then you get to work, you see the person you need to talk to, and what comes out of your mouth is, Hey, good weekend. We move on with our day, completely avoiding the hard conversation we needed to have. Or We do say what we wanted to say, but it doesn't come out exactly like we rehearsed. We fumble our words, we say what we want to say in all the wrong ways, they get defensive, and now it's even worse. Worse

than if we had just said nothing. The reason this scenario is familiar. is because most of us just plain suck at having difficult conversations. But here's the good news. Having uncomfortable conversations is a learnable

We already have this episode, so unlocking it is cheap and permanent: the full transcript (46 minutes, 10,252 words), segment and word-level timestamps, and .txt, .srt, .vtt and word-level JSON downloads, as many times as you like, forever.

10 free credits is 10 episodes like this one a month. Episodes nobody has transcribed yet cost their length in hours, because we have to actually transcribe them.