My Review 4/5

Crucial conversations are hard to have. Our biology fights it. Often casual conversations morph into crucial ones. A crucial conversation is one where stakes are high, opinions vary, emotions are charged. Need open communication to have a successful endeavor (family/corporate). Silence kills, holding back from the truth harms both yourself and the party impacted.

Most often casual conversations turn into critical ones. These are not the types of conversations you can rehearse or prepare for. Three outcomes of these types of conversations: foul it up, avoid it, do it right. The fool’s choice (false dilemma) is that it’s either be honest or hurt yourself. IE be honest with the boss is career suicide.

Crucial conversations are the results of free flowing information from each individual’s ‘pool of meaning’. Start with the heart and get understanding onto the table. Dialog is the results of good conversational skills. Two things kill dialog: silence and violence. Trying to force meaning into the shared pool of meaning (violence) or withholding from the shared pool (silence) kills fruitful dialog. Good dialog is the free flowing exchange of meaning between parties.

Best dialog people are keenly aware of the changing situation. They see when others no longer feel safe to contribute to the pool of meaning. When emotions run high they are able to step back and ask themselves “What do I want to accomplish”. Much of this book is active listening in practice. Another aspect of crucial conversations is avoiding “Villain, victim, and helpless” stories. All of these tales leave out “the rest of the story” usually our own part in the predicament. ‘My boss is a micro-manager’ (but I’ve missed several key deliverable) is a villain story.

Capture the actions from a conversation. “Who will do what, by when and follow-up”. Know that not all crucial conversations have consensus, but that all do have actionable traits. If you are having the ‘same’ crucial conversation again and again, it’s time to change the message. It’s not “you broke curfew again” now it’s “you failed to honor your commitment”.

Date Read

2016/05/18

Date Added

2016/09/29

Goodreads book information

Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High by Kerry Patterson

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/883911

Bookshelves: personal-development, business

Author’s Note

Initial md Generated using https://github.com/jsr6720/goodreads-csv-to-md

Kerry Patterson, Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, American Media International 2003 (Audio CD)1

Significant Revisions

tags: 2016, book, review, Patterson, personal-development, business

  • Apr 22nd, 2024 Converted to jekyll markdown format and copied to personal site
  • May 18th, 2016 Originally published on goodreads

EOF/Footnotes

  1. ISBN: =”0972488901” ↩