Failure to Communicate: How Conversations Go Wrong and What You Can Do to Right Them

CHAPTER 4

Rethinking What We Do

Finding Balance

WE’VE SEEN WHAT makes us recoil when the trouble in a conversation dials up, whether because of an unexpected attack, thwarting ploys where we’re vulnerable, our own emotional reactions, our counterpart’s unreadable intentions, and worst by far, all of these coming at us at once. No wonder we respond to difficult conversations as we would to combat—they look dangerous.

But since we’re not getting through these conversations the way we want to (and aren’t getting the results we want, either), we need to do better. We don’t have to face these conversations as though we’re caught in the wheels of war. We can take a new look at the same conversations and rethink how to get where we want to go. We ...