@realnatberman2: Alex Simon was asked in an interview, what’s the first step to having a difficult conversation? Her answer came down to one sentence she reminds herself of constantly. Conflict is a team sport for mutual understanding. That fights against everything we’ve been trained to believe about conflict. We treat it like a competition. Someone’s right, someone’s wrong. Someone wins the argument, someone loses it. And that entire framing crowds out the actual point of the conversation, which was never to win. It was to understand each other. Conflict exists because two people need information from each other that hasn’t surfaced yet. None of that gets revealed by fighting to be right. It gets revealed by both people actually trying to understand what’s true for the other person. Here’s what happens in real conflict though. Tunnel vision kicks in. You stop seeing the other person as a person entirely, and start seeing something closer to an obstacle, even if five minutes earlier you respected them completely. The shift happens the second you catch yourself doing that and choose differently. Nobody has to lose for both people to walk away better off. You can both leave a hard conversation actually understanding each other, and that’s not a consolation prize. That’s the actual win the whole time. Comment the word “BETTER” if you want a place to practice having hard conversations without needing to win them.. Interview credit: alex simon via @simonsinek
