Fierce Conversations Principles 2 & 3

We’re starting the new year fresh with a video series on the book Fierce Conversations by Susan Scott. Each video will dive into one or two of the seven principles Scott outlines in her writing on how to have difficult conversations.

Today are principles 2 & 3.
Principle 2: Come out from behind yourself into the conversation and make it real.
Principle 3: Be here. Prepare to be nowhere else.

Transcript:
Hi, I’m Amy with Illuma Learning and we are continuing our series on fierce conversations. And I’m gonna talk today about principle two and three. We talked last time about mastering the courage to interrogate reality and really starting to look at things as they are, rather than the narrative that’s playing out in our head, really looking at what’s going on in reality.

The second principle is: Come out from behind yourself into the conversation and make it real. I love that. I think that is so powerful that statement. Come out from behind and make it real. And if you sit back and just absorb that, you know what that means. She goes on to say, while many fear real, it is the unreal conversation that should scare us to death. When the conversation is real change occurs before the conversation is even over. Have you ever been in a meeting where there is an elephant in that room that needs to be discussed and everyone dances around it and maybe they do some sideways glances at each other? But no one is really talking real, about what’s real in the situation. And so when we do access that at home, maybe with your teenager, with your little kid, with your, spouse or significant other, and then at work with the person you report to, and then with the people that report to you, what a powerful experience it is to get to talk real and something happens. I love that line. I wanna say it again. Change occurs before the conversation is even over.

So if we can look at master the courage to interrogate reality, and then come out from behind yourself into the conversation and make it real. Wow. So the third principle is: Be here. Prepare to be nowhere else. Now in the age of this stuff going on all the time, that is, that’s so tough, and how powerful it is when you actually do go out to dinner and you don’t use your phone, nobody’s using your phone. And I know you’re like me, you go out to dinner and you’re looking around at other tables and you’ll see a whole family and everybody’s on their phone, nobody’s talking. So this principle is a really important one if we want to get change. And so Susan, the author Susan Scott, she says, our work, our relationships, our lives succeed or fail one conversation at a time. While no single conversation is guaranteed to transform a relationship, any single conversation can speak and listen as if this is the most important conversation you will ever have with this person. It may be.

So as I have grown in my career, I can think back on conversations that I have had with people who have managed me. And some of those conversations were really positive. That person really saw something special in me and helped me grow, helped me have the courage and the confidence to keep going. And others, I wasn’t so great. Early in my career I made some big mistakes and I was dumb enough not to see them. And I had a boss who was willing to really speak the truth and really be there and talk to me about it rather than shame me, but really be there to look for behavior change. And I’ve had a boss who never spoke the truth to me. And to this day, I don’t respect her. I look back, and that was such a long time ago, and I think, wow, she was older than me. She had everything. She had all the power. Why didn’t she really be there and give me something real, because it would’ve helped me move in my career even faster? So those are the second and third principle of fierce conversations, and we’ll tackle the other principles coming up in our next blog.