Episode #181
Before any difficult conversation, first negotiate with yourself: shift from proving you’re right to curiosity about differing views and shared contribution to the problem.
Name and describe your feelings explicitly; trying to hide them leads to passive-aggressive leakage. There’s a crucial difference between naming emotion and being emotional.
Most hard conversations share a structure—competing stories (rightness, blame, assumptions), unspoken feelings, and identity stakes—which applies at work, with teens, and even to managing your own self-doubt.
So I think the biggest thing that I have learned is that the very first negotiation I need to have is with myself, with my own internal voice, like what I'm really thinking and feeling.
So there's a big difference between describing or naming emotion and being emotional.
And in that way, difficult conversations always have the same underlying structure in terms of the things that people are preoccupied with.
How to have difficult conversations. (40:23)
Today I bring you Sheila Heen. An expert on managing difficult negotiations, Sheila is a lecturer at Harvard Law School and a founder of Triad Consulting. Her corporate clients include Apple, Unilever, the Federal Reserve Bank, Pixar, Novartis, and numerous others. She often partners with executive teams, helping them work through conflict, repair working relationships, and make sound decisions together. She’s the author of two New York Times bestselling books. Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most and Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well. She’s also spent the last 20 years with the Harvard Negotiation Project, developing negotiation theory and practice. Sheila has appeared on shows as diverse as Oprah, The G. Gordon Liddy Show, NPR, Fox News, and CNBC’s Power Lunch.
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