51 Douglas Stone Quotes on Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most, Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well and Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most - Quotes.pub

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Listening well is one of the most powerful skills you can bring to a difficult conversation.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

we have a deep desire to feel heard, and to know that others care enough to listen.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

Ten Questions People Ask About Difficult Conversations 1. It sounds like you’re saying everything is relative. Aren’t some things just true, and can’t someone simply be wrong? 2. What if the other person really does have bad intentions – lying, bullying, or intentionally derailing the conversation to get what they want? 3. What if the other person is genuinely difficult, perhaps even mentally ill? 4. How does this work with someone who has all the power – like my boss? 5. If I’m the boss/parent, why can’t I just tell my subordinates/ children what to do? 6. Isn’t this a very American approach? How does it work in other cultures? 7. What about conversations that aren’t face-to-face? What should I do differently if I’m on the phone or e-mail? 8. Why do you advise people to “bring feelings into the workplace”? I’m not a therapist, and shouldn’t business decisions be made on the merits? 9. Who has time for all this in the real world? 10. My identity conversation keeps getting stuck in either-or: I’m perfect or I’m horrible. I can’t seem to get past that. What can I do?

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

Paradoxically, there is also considerable persuasion power in inquiry and listening.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

People align their actions with implicit incentives, not official rhetoric.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

Sometimes life deals us a blow that we can’t cope with on our own. What constitutes such a blow is different for each of us. It may be something as undermining as rape or as horrifying as war. It may be a physical or mental illness, an addiction, or a profound loss. Or it may be something that would not disturb most other people but does disturb you. We sometimes ascribe valor to those who suffer in silence. But when suffering is prolonged or interferes with accomplishing what we want with our lives, then such suffering may be more reckless than brave. Whatever it is, if you’ve worked to get over it and can’t, we encourage you to ask for help. From friends, from colleagues, from family, from professionals. From anyone who might be able to offer a hand.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

Nothing affects the learning culture of an organization more than the skill with which its executive team receives feedback.

Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well Quotes

Learn That Your Feelings Are as Important as Theirs. Some of us can’t see our own feelings because we have learned somewhere along the way that other people’s feelings are more important than ours. For example, it was always assumed that your father would move in with your family when his health began to fail. But now that he has, his constant demands and crankiness are beginning to take a toll, especially on top of managing his medications and frequent doctor’s visits. You are exhausted and frustrated, and wonder why your brother isn’t willing to do his share. Yet you don’t raise it with parent or sibling. “It’s hard, but it’s not that hard,” you reason. “Besides, I don’t want to rock the boat.” Your girlfriend calls and says she can’t have dinner on Friday after all. She’s wondering whether Saturday is okay. She says a friend of hers is in town and wants to see a movie on Friday. You say, “Sure, if that’s better for you.” Although you said yes, Saturday is actually not as good for you, because you had planned to go to a baseball game. Still, you’d rather see your girlfriend, so you give your ticket away. In each of these situations, you’ve chosen to put someone else’s feelings ahead of your own. Does this make sense? Is your father’s frustration or your brother’s peace of mind more important than yours? Is your girlfriend’s desire to see a movie with her friend more important than your desire to see a baseball game? Why is it that they express their feelings and preferences, but you cope with yours privately? There are several reasons why you may choose to honor others’ feelings even when it means dishonoring your own. The implicit rule you are following is that you should put other people’s happiness before your own. If your friends or loved ones or colleagues don’t get their way, they’ll feel bad, and then you’ll have to deal with the consequences. That may be true, but it’s unfair to you. Their anger is no better or worse than yours. “Well, it’s just easier not to rock the boat,” you think. “I don’t like it when they’re mad at me.” If you’re thinking this, then you are undervaluing your own feelings and interests. Friends, neighbors, and bosses will recognize this and begin to see you as someone they can manipulate. When you are more concerned about others’ feelings than your own, you teach others to ignore your feelings too. And beware: one of the reasons you haven’t raised the issue is that you don’t want to jeopardize the relationship. Yet by not raising it, the resentment you feel will grow and slowly erode the relationship anyway.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

You finally show your professional artist friend the self-portrait you painted. At this stage of your development, what you need is a little encouragement, something along the lines of “Hey, cool. Keep working at it.” What you get instead is a list of twelve things you need to fix. We can flip this story. You showed your work to your professional artist friend because you were hoping for a list of twelve things to fix, and instead get a “Hey, cool. Keep working at it.” How is that going to help you get better?

Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well Quotes

No matter how good you get at reframing, the single most important rule about managing the interaction is this: You can’t move the conversation in a more positive direction until the other person feels heard and understood. And they won’t feel heard and understood until you’ve listened. When the other person becomes highly emotional, listen and acknowledge. When they say their version of the story is the only version that makes sense, paraphrase what you’re hearing and ask them some questions about why they think this. If they level accusations against you, before defending yourself, try to understand their view. Whenever you feel overwhelmed or unsure how to proceed, remember that it is always a good time to listen.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

Creating pull is about mastering the skills required to drive our own learning; it’s about how to recognize and manage our resistance, how to engage in feedback conversations with confidence and curiosity, and even when the feedback seems wrong, how to find insight that might help us grow.

Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well Quotes

I’ve been graded, rated, and ranked. Coached, screened, and scored. I’ve been picked first, picked last, and not picked at all. And that was just kindergarten.

Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well Quotes

we don’t know what we don’t know.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

If you are having a difficult conversation, and someone asks why you disagree, how come you never say, “Because what I’m saying makes absolutely no sense”?

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

We Ignore the Complexity of Human Motivations

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

Telling someone to change makes it less rather than more likely that they will.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

And sometimes, evaluations contain judgments that go beyond the assessment itself: Not only didn’t you qualify in the backstroke, but you were naïve to think you would, and so, once again, you’ve fallen short of your potential. The judgment that you are naïve or falling short is not based on the assessment—the outcome of the race. It’s an additional layer of opinion on top of it. And it is the bullwhip of negative judgment—from ourselves or others—that produces much of our anxiety around feedback.

Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well Quotes

In truth, we are all fast and slow, strong and weak, motivated and lazy in a thousand tiny ways throughout our days that the generalizations simply don’t capture.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

Our Assumptions About Intentions Are Often Wrong

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

Blame Is About Judging, and Looks Backward

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

When competent, sensible people do something stupid, the smartest move is to try to figure out, first, what kept them from seeing it coming and, second, how to prevent the problem from happening again. Talking about blame distracts us from exploring why things went wrong and how we might correct them going forward. Focusing instead on understanding the contribution system allows us to learn about the real causes of the problem, and to work on correcting them.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

Seeing my own contribution to my circumstances makes me stronger, not weaker. If I contribute to my own problems, there are things I have the power to change.

Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well Quotes

WE’RE GOOD AT WRONG SPOTTING If you’ve ever received feedback at work—or had an in-law—you are familiar with the many shapes and sizes of wrong: It’s 2 + 2 = 5 wrong: It is literally incorrect. I could not have been rude at that meeting because I was not at that meeting. And my name is not Mike. It’s different-planet wrong: Somewhere in the universe there may exist a carbon-based life form that would have taken offense at my e-mail, but here on Earth everyone knows it was a joke. It used to be right: Your critique of my marketing plan is based on how marketing worked when you were coming up. Before the Internet. And electricity. It’s right according to the wrong people: Some see me that way, but next time, talk to at least one person who is not on my Personal Enemies List. Your context is wrong: I do yell at my assistant. And he yells at me. That’s how our relationship works—key word being “works.” It’s right for you, but wrong for me: We have different body types. Armani suits flatter you. Hoodies flatter me. The feedback is right, but not right now: It’s true that I could lose a few pounds—which I will do as soon as the quintuplets are out of the house. Anyway, it’s unhelpful: Telling me to be a better mentor isn’t helping me to be a better mentor. What kind of mentor are you anyway? Why is wrong spotting so easy? Because there’s almost always something wrong—something the feedback giver is overlooking, shortchanging, or misunderstanding. About you, about the situation, about the constraints you’re under. And givers compound the problem by delivering feedback that is vague, making it easy for us to overlook, shortchange, and misunderstand what they are saying. But in the end, wrong spotting not only defeats wrong feedback, it defeats learning.

Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well Quotes

By identifying what you are doing to perpetuate a situation, you learn where you have leverage to affect the system.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

The blame frame creates a difficult burden. You have to feel confident that others are at fault, and that you aren’t, to feel justified in raising an issue.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

get curious about what you don’t know about yourself.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

Blame Can Leave a Bad System Undiscovered

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

If I’m the boss / parent, why can’t I just tell my subordinates / children what to do?

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

The big three blind spots are tone of voice, facial expressions, and body language. The listener is very aware of these, the talker is not.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

difficult conversations do not just involve feelings, they are at their very core about feelings.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

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 marine biology training 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.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

We don’t care where the ball lands, as long as it doesn’t land on us.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

we can make a reasonable argument that engaging (well) in difficult conversations is a sign of health in a relationship.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

One important role pattern is called “accidental adversaries.”3 If two people bump into each other enough and cause each other enough frustration, each will begin considering the other an “adversary.” Each attributes the problem to the personality and questionable intentions of the other. But often the true culprit is the structure of the roles they are in, which are (accidentally) creating chronic conflict. If we are each at one end of a rope and our job is to pull, then merely doing our jobs creates a tug-of-war.

Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well Quotes

PULL BEATS PUSH Training managers how to give feedback—how to push more effectively—can be helpful. But if the receiver isn’t willing or able to absorb the feedback, then there’s only so far persistence or even skillful delivery can go. It doesn’t matter how much authority or power a feedback giver has; the receivers are in control of what they do and don’t let in, how they make sense of what they’re hearing, and whether they choose to change. Pushing harder rarely opens the door to genuine learning. The focus should not be on teaching feedback givers to give. The focus—at work and at home—should be on feedback receivers, helping us all to become more skillful learners. The real leverage is creating pull. Creating pull is about mastering the skills required to drive our own learning; it’s about how to recognize and manage our resistance, how to engage in feedback conversations with confidence and curiosity, and even when the feedback seems wrong, how to find insight that might help us grow. It’s also about how to stand up for who we are and how we see the world, and ask for what we need. It’s about how to learn from feedback—yes, even when it is off base, unfair, poorly delivered, and frankly, you’re not in the mood.

Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well Quotes

Ninety-three percent of American motorists believe they are better-than-average drivers. In a 2007 BusinessWeek poll, 90 percent of the managers surveyed believed their performance in the workplace to be in the top 10 percent.4

Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well Quotes

Nothing affects the learning culture of an organization more than the skill with which its executive team receives feedback. And

Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well Quotes

Thanks for the Feedback is about the profound challenge of being on the receiving end of feedback—good or bad, right or wrong, flippant, caring, or callous. This book is not a paean to improvement or a pep talk on how to make friends with your mistakes. There is encouragement here, but our primary purpose is to take an honest look at why receiving feedback is hard, and to provide a framework and some tools that can help you metabolize challenging, even crazy-making information and use it to fuel insight and growth.

Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well Quotes

Receiving feedback sits at the intersection of these two needs—our drive to learn and our longing for acceptance.

Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well Quotes

Learning that you can’t control the other person’s reaction, and that it can be destructive to try, can be incredibly liberating. It not only gives the other person the space to react however they need to, but also takes a huge amount of pressure off you. You will learn things about yourself based on their reaction, but if you are prepared to learn, you’ll feel free from the desperate need for their reaction to go one certain way.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

Often we go through an entire conversation – or indeed an entire relationship – without ever realizing that each of us is paying attention to different things, that our views are based on different information.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

But they are two different topics, and should be two different conversations. Trying to talk about both topics simultaneously is like mixing your apple pie and your lasagna into one pan and throwing it in the oven. No matter how long you bake it, it’s going to come out a mess.

Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well Quotes

difficult conversations are almost never about getting the facts right. They are about conflicting perceptions, interpretations, and values.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

Depending on how we handle them, feelings can lead to great trouble. But the feelings themselves just are. In that sense, feelings are like arms or legs. If you hit or kick someone, then your arms or legs are causing trouble. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with arms or legs. The same with feelings.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

Simply by changing your own behavior, you gain at least some influence over the problem.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

Before you tell me how to do it better, before you lay out your big plans for changing, fixing, and improving me, before you teach me how to pick myself up and dust myself off so that I can be shiny and successful—know this: I’ve heard it before. I’ve been graded, rated, and ranked. Coached, screened, and scored. I’ve been picked first, picked last, and not picked at all. And that was just kindergarten.

Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well Quotes

It doesn’t matter how much authority or power a feedback giver has; the receivers are in control of what they do and don’t let in, how they make sense of what they’re hearing, and whether they choose to change. Pushing harder rarely opens the door to genuine learning. The focus should not be on teaching feedback givers to give. The focus—at work and at home—should be on feedback receivers, helping us all to become more skillful learners. The real leverage is creating pull. Creating pull is about mastering the skills required to drive our own learning; it’s about how to recognize and manage our resistance, how to engage in feedback conversations with confidence and curiosity, and even when the feedback seems wrong, how to find insight that might help us grow. It’s also about how to stand up for who we are and how we see the world, and ask for what we need. It’s about how to learn from feedback—yes, even when it is off base, unfair, poorly delivered, and frankly, you’re not in the mood.

Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well Quotes

Explicit disagreement is better than implicit misunderstanding.

Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well Quotes

People almost never change without first feeling understood.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

The urge to blame is based . . . on the fear of being blamed.

Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most Quotes

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