Managing Difficult Dinner Conversations Over the Holidays

This time of year, many of us will return to our families to celebrate the holidays. Whether this is a family of birth or family of choosing, the holidays can be stressful and hard for many, and the inevitable contentious, tense conversations arise. 

Political issues, topics that raise issues from our past or trigger us, often lead us to avoid or withdraw, or lean further in and fight -- all in ways that aren't super productive.

The good news is that you have the power within you not only to diffuse but to manage these conversations that often fill us with dread, rage, or any other variety of emotions over the holidays. 

So much of what makes these situations hard is our initial approach to them, largely based on expectations of how they'll be based on the past.

Keep in mind, communication is at least as much about the relationships you build as the words you speak.  

Even if you find yourself disagreeing with everything someone says, starting from a place of compassion and doing all you can to make sure they feel heard goes a long way to improving all of these interactions. 

The first step is managing what's going on in our own brains. When we find ourselves in difficult situations, we often allow our fight or flight instinct to take over and we don't make rational choices.  So a little work on the front end can save you tons of stress and time, so you can communicate from a place of choice, not based on old habits.

The second step is to be clear about your goal for the dinner. What would be an ideal outcome? Is the goal to change someone's mind? (unlikely).  Is it to come across as thoughtful, curious, respectful? (maybe more likely).

Here are a few specific suggestions to consider on managing tense conversations:

1. Anticipate beforehand.  What topics set you off? What topics would you want to avoid? How will you talk about topics that are contentious? In an ideal world absent any stress, what would you say or how would you want to come across?  Practicing helps you feel more prepared and even having a few prepared phrases can help you not feel like a deer caught in the headlights, or say something you might later regret. 

2. Master Small Talk. The first, easiest way to do this is by asking questions. And then listen -- truly listen -- to the answers. Be prepared with a few things you might want to ask people about. Think about, or look at social media feeds to find, what people might have been up to that you could ask about. 

3. Manage your stress with care.  In other words, take care of yourself.  We often think about compassion as something we show others, but here, it includes showing compassion for yourself.  The holidays can be stressful times, people are often tired and run down. Taking care of yourself -- creating space for things you enjoy, time alone, exercise, whatever it may be -- is one of the single most important things you can do to be clear-eyed, in control of your reactions, and in tune to the sense of compassion we all have for others.  

4. Have allies and get some space.  If you can, bring a friend or someone from outside the family to help diffuse and manage the situations. If you can't, or even if you can, try to identify ways you can find space -- to take a walk, get some fresh air, take a break and come back to the interactions with a different perspective. Pulling yourself out of the immediate and seeing the broader context is 50 percent of managing hard conversations.

   We all have the capacity to show a little more compassion to ourselves and all those around us. Seeking less to blame, and more to find common ground. If we can approach each interaction this way, it will be easier to find the words we need to communicate with confidence, clarity and authenticity.  It's like your own super power -- you get to control the tone and approach.
   
   You'll be in more emotional control if you come from a place of trying to see more of how we are the same than we are different.  And then knowing when to agree to disagree and move on.
    
   Wishing you and yours very Happy Thanksgiving. May you find gratitude for all of the blessings in our lives, seen and unseen.
   

Final Five Habits of Successful Communicators

Each of the last four weeks, I have shared the top habits of good communicators — what are the behaviors and ingrained ways of being that make the most successful communicators the best at what they do? — based on Honestly Speaking . These are habits — not just one-and-done tactics you try — that effective communicators develop, hone, and deploy.

As we’ve talked about, good communicators work at it, and some of being good at communicating is honing your skills, while other parts are more about working on yourself.

Find more of these habits and other tools to help you communicate better in Honestly Speaking: How the Way We Communicate Transforms Leadership, Love, and Life available now wherever books are sold.

Here are the final five habits. I’d love to hear what you think.

1. They don’t make things up. This might sound obvious (it should be!) but sometimes a quick “white lie” about an accomplishment or motivation, or even an excuse to not go out on a date with someone, can have disastrous consequences. Honesty is always the best policy.

2. They are the same person online as they are in real life. Sure, you’ll have some differences based on the platform (your Facebook posts might look different than your LinkedIn posts, for example), but they shouldn’t be that different.

3. They respect other people’s time, energy, and privacy. This should go without saying, but particularly in the age of social media it bears repeating:

   1. Emails should be short, succinct, and used sparingly. “Reply All” is often unnecessary. 

   2. Never text or message someone with something that might be interpreted as urgent when it’s not. (For example, saying “give me a call” without any additional context.) This goes back to direct communication; if less is more (and it is!) then use your words to state what you want to state as opposed to making someone guess what you want. Do people the courtesy of allowing them to prioritize. 

   3. Don’t overshare. This is a fine line and really depends on your comfort level. Just keep in mind that in posts on social media, texts with friends, or even lunchtime conversations with colleagues, you really don’t need to tell everyone every single detail. 

   4. Don’t tag people on social media or call them out (particularly in regards to posting pictures) without their consent. This gets annoying fast and can definitely feel like a violation of trust. 

4. They are respectful overall. They are respectful of themselves, of those they are talking to, of the medium, of the time, and of the content. It’s not about the communicator as much as it’s about everything and everyone else. 

5. They acknowledge there is always work to be done to be a better communicator. Being great at communication means understanding that it’s a never-ending, multi-laned street. Some days you will simply be better at this than others, and that is okay. The goal isn’t to be perfect all the time, it’s to be conscientious all the time.

Find the rest of these habits and other tools to help you communicate better in Honestly Speaking: How the Way We Communicate Transforms Leadership, Love, and Life available now wherever books are sold.

Five Key Behaviors of Excellent Communicators

Over the last month, I’ve been sharing they core habits of good communicators based on the Honestly Speaking book. These are habits — not just one-and-done tactics you try — that effective communicators develop, hone, and deploy. This week is the penultimate batch.

Good communicators work at it, and some of being good at communicating is honing your skills, while other parts are more about working on yourself.

Find more of these habits and other tools to help you communicate better in Honestly Speaking: How the Way We Communicate Transforms Leadership, Love, and Life available now wherever books are sold.

1. They are willing to have—and are good at having—difficult conversations. We live in a culture of deflection and avoidance. Passive-aggressive behavior is the enemy of healthy communication. Great communicators are willing to have honest conversations, even when it’s hard, and they do so by making sure the other person understands their motivations and intentions. 

2. They show how they feel instead of just telling. “Show, don’t tell” is one of the first rules of writing for a reason. Instead of just telling people you’re upset, showing them why with examples is much more effective. 

3. They know their audience. Great communicators take the time to know who they’re speaking to and how they will best understand information.

4. They apologize genuinely when they’ve done something wrong. “I’m sorry, but” is not what I’m referring to. A genuine apology involves reflection and ownership. The best communicators do this and also reap the benefit of stopping a story before it spins out of control in the mind of another person (or group of people).

5. They communicate enthusiasm and passion. Everyone is operating with their own ideals and priorities. You should care the most about what impacts you, and if you’re sharing something that’s really exciting or important to you that you think the audience might not know about, don’t miss an opportunity to share your enthusiasm and passion. If you’re not excited about what you’re saying, you can’t expect anyone else to be.

Find the rest of these habits and other tools to help you communicate better in Honestly Speaking: How the Way We Communicate Transforms Leadership, Love, and Life available now wherever books are sold.

Five More Habits of Excellent Communicators

For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been posting five habits of good communicators based on the Honestly Speaking book. These are habits — not just one-and-done tactics you try — that effective communicators develop, hone, and deploy. Over the next few weeks I'll be sharing 5 more each week, 25 in total.

Good communicators work at it, and some of being good at communicating is honing your skills, while other parts are more about working on yourself.

Here is the third group of five habits:

1. They make a clear distinction between facts and opinions. Phrases like, “In my experience” or “According to the research I’ve read” go a very long way. This is about trust. If your audience can trust that you’re a reliable source of information, they are far more likely to trust you. Especially in our current political climate, leaders can stand out if they are clear about what’s opinion and what’s fact and provide a shared basis for conversation around a common set of facts. 

2. They ask questions. Questions are incredibly powerful. Not only do they clarify a situation, but they show you are a thoughtful and careful listener. Asking questions shows that you’re listening, and listening is the key to open and honest communication.

3. They follow up when they say they will and don’t leave people hanging. You know that person in your life who takes forever to respond to a text or email? Or worse, that person who promises to follow up by a certain point and then never does? This is not just an annoyance—this is a healthy communication destroyer.

4. They talk about their accomplishments in the context of what they learned. This is particularly  important in a high-stakes situation, like a job interview, or if you have a hard time talking about yourself in a professional context. You absolutely should talk about all the great things you’ve done, but rather than supplying a list of all your accomplishments, you should be framing those accomplishments with the lessons you learned on the way. This shows humility, but it also shows a willingness and openness to learning new things. 

5. They are who they are. Always. We’ve talked a lot about authenticity in this book because it really is that important. The best communicators are trustworthy in the eyes of the people they are communicating with, and that trust starts with not making people guess what version of you will show up in any given moment. Don’t try to be someone you’re not, because you’ll likely fail every time.

Find more of these habits and other tools to help you communicate better in Honestly Speaking: How the Way We Communicate Transforms Leadership, Love, and Life available now wherever books are sold.

Second Five Habits of Excellent Communicators

Last week I shared the first five habits of good communicators based on the Honestly Speaking book, and over the next few weeks I'll be sharing a few more each week.

Good communicators work at it, and some of being good at communicating is honing your skills, while other parts are more about working on yourself. You'll notice that many of the items on this list are about how you show up as much as the words you share.

Good communicators develop good habits and patterns that reflect clarity of purpose, empathy, and care, and they are thoughtful about how and what they say. Much like an Olympic athlete or a concert musician practices and hones their skill with drills so that the basics become habits, so too with communication. 

Here are the second five habits:

1. They use body language well. Good communicators maintain eye contact with the people they are talking to. They shake hands confidently and don’t cross their arms while being spoken to. These might seem like small things, but the way you present yourself physically can make a huge impact in terms of how much you’re understood and heard.

2. They are constantly referring back to the mission, the goal, or the shared connection. It is easy to get bogged down with the minutiae of your day-to-day operations, be it at home or at work. Great communicators are always referring back to the shared dream, whether a company mission statement or their marriage vows. Keeping your eye on the ball ensures that people are focused not just on tasks, but the greater success of your work or life as a whole. 

3. They are able to say things multiple ways. Everyone has their own preferred method of communication, and the best communicators understand that. They don’t just communicate in the way that works best for them; they find ways to make their message heard in multiple ways. 

4. They are not didactic or condescending. One of the easiest ways to lose an audience, either at work or at home, is to either talk over or talk down to them. Great communicators talk about complicated issues in a way their audience will understand, without being preachy or making the audience feel dumb, and make sure they are bringing their audience with them.

5. They are humble. Think about some of the greatest minds of our generation—are they always talking about how great they are? Do they make a point of mentioning that they are extremely intelligent or successful? Do they claim to be entirely self-made? No. The best leaders are confident, communicate gratitude, apologize honestly, and are humble about their successes, along with always looking for ways to improve. This makes them relatable and trustworthy. 

This article is based on Honestly Speaking: How the Way We Communicate Transforms Leadership, Love, and Life available now wherever books are sold.

First Five Habits of Excellent Communicators

Over the next five weeks, I’ll be using this space to share some (25 to be exact) of the key habits of the most successful communicators — whether it be at home, at work, with strangers or family, or online. Many of these are covered in Honestly Speaking: How the Way We Communicate Transforms Leadership, Love, and Life available now.

Good communicators work at it, and some of being good at communicating is honing your skills, while other parts are more about working on yourself. They develop good habits and patterns that reflect clarity of purpose, empathy, and care, and they are thoughtful about how and what they say. Much like an Olympic athlete or a concert musician practices and hones their skill with drills so that the basics become habits, so too with communication. 

Here are the first five habits.

1. They carefully check for grammar and spelling errors before they send emails, texts, and posts on social media. It might seem like I’m nitpicking here, and different people have different strengths and abilities here. But in general, it’s true what your fifth-grade teacher always said: your spelling and grammar matter. This of course doesn’t mean that you will always be perfect; typos happen. But this comes back to the idea of care and conscientiousness in your communication. It’s about being perceived how you want to be perceived—as thoughtful, credible, and intentional. Again, it’s about the audience, not you. You might have the most important idea in the history of your company, but if you send an email riddled with errors, it will show to the recipient that you didn’t put a whole lot of thought into relaying the message— which makes it seem like you don’t really care about them. Especially if you’re a communications professional, you should try to communicate clearly and effectively and set a good example. 

2. They are direct. Excellent communicators don’t beat around the bush. They don’t couch difficult news in fluff. They don’t leave people guessing as to their true intentions. They say exactly what they mean directly. Just come out and say it.

3. They are genuinely empathetic. If there’s one tool we can all work on to make the world a better place, it’s empathy. When a person feels heard and understood, they are more likely to listen to what you have to say, and your work together (both professional and personal) will be much more fulfilling. Be respectful and get out of your own way. 

4. They find a true connection with people. Have you ever met someone who made you feel as though you’d been friends or colleagues forever? This isn’t divine intervention; this is one person’s ability to find what connects them to others and make the most of it. 

5. They are good storytellers. Some of the best communicators understand the basics of ninth-grade English: a story must be compelling in order to captivate the hearts and minds of your audience. Whether you’re talking about the challenges of a certain project or having a conversation with someone in your personal life, the best way to be heard is to tell a good story. A good story can be an example, a short narrative, or something more imaginative. It’s how good communicators move from telling to showing. 

I’d love to hear what you think!

Imbuing an Open Culture with Respect

How you share your feedback, how you communicate your opinions and guidance — how people feel when you speak and communicate with them — is how you imbue a culture with respect.

Interesting to see Google last week release new internal guidelines to guide employee interactions and culture. After a period of rapid growth to more than 100,000 employees and a history of an open culture that permitted and encouraged open debate on any number of issues, Google faced a challenge that I faced internally at Facebook and many companies face in today’s world — how do you maintain the best aspects of an open culture while also ensuring everyone feels respected, and people are able to focus on their work?

Lots of ink has been spilled on the topic of culture, and in particular tech culture — whether it be the upsides of openness and transparency leading to more accountability and the best ideas from any corner of an organization, or the toxic bro culture and other aspects of a company culture that perpetuate unconscious bias that harms everybody and the company’s bottom line.

But at the end of the day, it all comes down to respect. Respect between company leadership and employees, and mutual respect among employees. At companies with the highest retention rates and employee satisfaction, employees do their best work and are most motivated to keep coming to work when they feel the company respects them for who they are, the strengths they bring to their work, and respects their contributions to the company and the bottom line. Companies whose leaders respect opinions and encourage feedback are the ones that often grow and succeed because the best ideas can come from anywhere and you’re more likely to do good work if you feel like your work matters and your opinions are valued.

At the same time, mutual respect among employees is critical. It’s important, especially as companies grow. When companies grow, it’s easier and more common for interactions to become less like relationships and more like transactions — and increasingly done by email, chat or other means — but not in person. And it’s a lot easier to be aggressive, rude, bully or simply not care about the other person’s reactions to what you say - -when you don’t have a relationship with them. It’s a lot hard to be an asshole to someone’s face than if they are more anonymous or, worse, it’s just broadly directed into a larger group. When people feel disrespected by their colleagues, either directly or indirectly, people either become more aggressive — OR they shut down — and their own thoughts, opinions and suggestions — their voices — are silenced.

So increasingly, open cultures — if they are to continue — require respect. And there are two key aspects to imbuing an open culture with respect.

First, you need to set the rules of the road. Respect means different things to different people, and what something MEANS to someone often doesn’t clearly translate into what BEHAVIOR or ACTION they are supposed to take. The best values and rules of the road are specific, provide reasoning for why they are in place, and what you want people to do. They should be universal and positive — rather than negative (“Do this”, rather than “don’t do that”).

Second, and critically, you need people to model and live the rules of the road. They need to model respect. This means leaders at all levels, whether you’re the leader in an org chart or simply a leader of the culture. Modeling good behavior, and calling out and reframing bad behavior when it happens is key. It’s not enough to write out the rules — they need to be modeled and encouraged by people throughout the org — especially leaders. This is partly what the responsibility is of leaders today. And it’s also partly how you can distinguish yourself as an employee at any level — by acting like a leader.

Respect, even if while in disagreement, respect even when you don’t know all the answers and especially when you do, is a key way of acting that transcends all roles, levels and geographies — and is the glue that keeps an open culture working and thriving.

This is why the work we do on leadership communications is so important — and has such a significant impact on organizations. How you share your feedback, how you communicate your opinions and guidance — how people feel when you speak and communicate with them — is how you imbue a culture with respect.

You can read more about what makes a healthy, inclusive culture and how to communicate effectively as a leader in Honestly Speaking : How the Way We Communicate Transforms Leadership, Love and Life available now.

The Critical, not-so-secret Secret about Communication

Often we approach communication as an activity or a thing we do – a set of actions to master – like commanding a stage, owning a room, delivering a speech, writing a clear email. But at the root of many of our challenges is that we often miss a key way of thinking from the outset.  It’s much more than something to simply master. 

Communication as much about building relationships as it is about speaking.

The typical way most of us communicate is to get out into the world what’s going on in our heads. We think that once we’ve said what we have to say in the way it makes sense in our own heads or hearts, we’ve done the work. But that’s only half of it. This first half is the content or the message, but the best message in the world won’t land well unless the audience is receptive to it. And when it fails to be received by the other person, it’s frustrating. We often retreat or push harder, finding less common ground and more fault with the other person, and being less receptive to the messages other people may share with us over the long run.

So there has to be something more.

Leading, loving, and living are experienced through our relationship with others, and so communication is a two-part activity.

It’s more than just sharing or pushing information out into the world, it’s broader than just delivering a message. It’s about an array of styles and tactics that inform the way you share the informa­tion and how it’s received by others—about how you relate to and interact with others. If something is worth sharing with another person, it’s worth sharing because you think it should mean something to them.

The goal for you with what you share is to get significant overlap and alignment between what you say and how you say it—between your message and how you work to build a relationship with the audience.

Communication is a two-way interaction between you and your audience, an implicit agreement to seek some com­mon ground.

That doesn’t necessarily mean 100 percent agree­ment, but it does mean mutual understanding. For most of us, effective two-way interactions are not a given. In any context, whether at work or in your personal life or online, the purpose of communication is to share ideas, thoughts, information, emotions, motivations, or intentions (information) with an­other person or people so that whoever you’re speaking to feels, knows, or does something you want them to (receptivity).

The goal isn’t to entirely overlap your world and my world, but to reside as comfortably and for as long as possi­ble in the place of overlap, of common ground and mutual understanding.

Every person hears and interprets inputs slightly differ­ently, and so how you say it is as important as what you say.

The intention, tone, and feeling behind what you say, even if it’s a weekly email report to your team at work, matters, because that’s how you connect what’s going on in your heart or mind with another person.  Being successful in achieving your goal requires building a rela­tionship with another person where that person (or persons) is receptive to what you’re saying.

The good news is that you have more control than you may realize over how receptive they are, and being good at communication is something every­one can do well, because we all practice it more than we may realize. 

By keeping in the back of your mind how you approach communication as a means of relationship building, the words you use and they way they land will be far easier and land far better than they previously have.

This article is excerpted from Honestly Speaking: How the Way We Communicate Transforms Leadership, Love, and Life now available in hardcopy, ebook, and audiobook formats.

Why the Way We Communicate is Now More Important Than Ever

Communicating – speaking, writing, listening, reading, connecting – is something we all do every day. Sharing with others a mix of information and emotions in every interaction is what makes us uniquely human.  And communication, this finding shared understanding with others, is something that increasingly we all struggle with, despite having more communications tools at our fingertips than ever before, and despite using them in more casual ways than we’ve ever done before.   

Communicating effectively -- whether to a team, to our partner or online -- is something most of us want to get better at – and can. And we need to.

Recent studies show us that employers increasingly rate “soft skills” like communications as a key competency they look for in hiring, with 77 percent in one study saying they were as important as hard skills.* Employers in the work­place increasingly cite communications and transparency as among the most important attributes in a company in employee engagement surveys. Salesforce reports that com­panies that communicate effectively are 50 percent more likely to have low employee turnover rates.**  Companies and nonprofit organizations alike are increasingly investing in communications platforms and skills trainings for their teams because they realize how critical it is for retaining em­ployees and achieving their objectives. When a 2015 Pew study asked respondents to select the skill that was most im­portant for children to learn in order to succeed, 90 percent said “communication.”***

Last week my book Honestly Speaking was published. I wrote it because I believe communicating and connecting with others with honesty, authenticity, and confidence is something we all want to get better at and I wanted to share some of the common truths and lessons I’ve learned in the spirit of helping you.

More than any other skill, communicating effectively is at the core of leadership and love. But it also requires discipline and focus. Like anything worth doing, it takes effort. This book is about en­couraging everyone to put a little more effort into commu­nicating well—which will yield better, nicer conversations in our world—and give you some tools to make that effort eas­ier, faster, smoother.

We live in a time of increased polarization and less immediate consequences for our words with more tools and more volume than ever before. But I believe we can improve our relationships, our politics and the places we work with a bit more honest self-reflection and a bit more thoughtful discipline around how we speak – hence, being honest in how we speak, or honestly speaking.

I wrote Honestly Speaking because I believe in empowering everybody to communicate better.  Being honest with yourself and communicating it clearly with others is something everybody can do. I believe it’s something we can all do, it’s something the world needs more of, and is at the root of so many of the insecurities and challenges we all experience every day.

Communication isn’t about pushing more information out or getting more off your chest.  It’s about finding more common ground with others, seeking to understand what people mean when they speak and seeking to understand how people hear what you say, can really transform so many of the problems of polarization we seek today. 

Communication is really as much about relationships as it is about speaking. It’s about knowing yourself and how you show up in the world, so you can share your ideas and thoughts more effectively. At the end of the day, we all want to be heard, seen, and acknowledged by others.  So much of the anger and frustration in our politics comes from a place of people not feeling heard, and not taking ownership over their own feelings. 

Communication -- listening, understanding, speaking and sharing – communing – is something that we can all do with a little effort, discipline and focus. Doing it will make your work better, your relationships better and help you live a life of meaning and happiness.

NOTES

* Harris Poll of 2,138 hiring managers and human resource profession­als age eighteen and over between February 10 and March 4, 2014.

** Leung, Stuart. “Why Interpersonal Communication Skills Matter More in Business Than Intelligence.”

*** Pew Research, “The Skills Americans Say Kids Need to Succeed in Life.”

The Two Key Communications Questions for Every Context

There are a million nuances that go into our communica­tion, but at work and in our personal lives, it boils down to one thing: less is more.

The most effective communicators I know, even ones who I have vehemently disagreed with, have been able to distill their message into a few concise sound­bites. The result of this work and discipline has meant respect and admiration, if not agreement.

And that’s the goal, isn’t it? In the workplace or even in a marriage, we could never expect people to agree on things all the time. But they can have open dialogue about the things they disagree with, every time.

People complicate things when it comes to communica­tion because they miss asking the two key questions everybody should always start with in any communications context.  Disciplining yourself to answer them for yourself will go a long way to helping improve how you communicate in any context:

1. Who is my audience?

2. What is my purpose?

Doing the work of answering these two questions clearly and honestly will help set you up for success in almost any context.

It takes a bit of empathy to answer the first question. Who is your audience, and how might they receive the information you want to share with them?  How do they like to be connected to?  What level of knowledge or sophistication do they have with the content of your message?

For example, a room full of salespeople don’t need to know the technical background of a project, just as your spouse doesn’t need you to rehash all their shortcomings before asking them to change a behavior.

Knowing your audience means respecting their time and intelligence and communicating with them in a way that they will respond to.

It takes a lot of self-awareness to answer the second ques­tion. What is the one goal or purpose behind this email, conversation, presentation, or meeting?   

For example, the surface answer might be, “I want a raise” or “I want my spouse to know they hurt my feelings,” but the real an­swer might require some serious reflection. “I operate in a vacuum in my job and don’t feel like I’m seen or appreciated” might mean that the purpose of your talk with your boss is more than just asking for a raise; it’s figuring out a more con­sistent means of communication.  Be clear about your purpose or your goal – and being honest – will help you keep clear on whether people are hearing what you want them to.

This article is excerpted from Honestly Speaking: How the Way we Communicate Transforms Leadership, Love, and Life, published July 30 2019.