The key to having a daring conversation is giving yourself enough time to properly prepare for one — but not so much time that you never have it, or that by the time you have it, the person you are speaking with either has no idea what you are talking about or the situation that was such a big deal to us didn’t even register on her Richter scale. While time is subjective, and the ten to twenty minutes of sensation I feel before I speak may feel like twenty eternities in purgatory for someone who is brand-new to speaking, when it comes to a daring conversation, as a rule it’s best to have it within a week of deciding your organs could finally unstick themselves if you said something. And before you do, here is how you can set up yourself, and the other parties involved, for success.
First, schedule the conversation. If you’re not going to wing it, nobody else involved should, either. Give the person or people you are going to speak with a heads-up that you’d like to speak. And then prepare:
Reverse-engineer what you want to say from your desired outcome. You should be masterful at doing this by now!
Identify the questions you can ask to learn other people’s truth. It’s easy to go into a daring conversation with a laundry list of complaints. Or assumptions. Instead, for each thing that triggers you, pull out of the emotion and find a question or two so you can investigate what is going on for the other party.
Distinguish what you are entitled to say from what you want to say. As a kiddo, I had several stints in therapy. It was one of the few spaces where I could unload all my pent-up emotions. Bang things. Occasionally break things. And more important, say the things I was too petrified to say to the people I wanted to be saying them to. One of my therapists told me, and I was too young at the time to appreciate it, that while I could scream profanities at a certain family member, if we ever did have a daring conversation that probably wouldn’t move me toward what I really wanted — for the person to acknowledge and take responsibility for his actions. Now that it’s decades later, I always give myself time and space to speak my vitriol, especially when somebody has truly wronged me. I just strive to do it without an audience, because it never serves me to attack another person, especially someone I want something from — irrespective of how entitled I feel I am to do so. And if and when a daring conversation doesn’t go the way I intend, and someone lashes out at me, I (usually) resist the temptation to attack back. Instead, I assert myself and then stand in my power via silence.
Speak your words. If you’re anything like who I used to be, you spend a lot of time thinking about what you want to say, but you don’t always default to practicing your words out loud. When you verbalize what you plan to say, you minimize ruminating. And you ensure that when you do speak, you actually say what you intended to say — so that your words have the maximum possible positive impact.
Bless and release — before you say anything. It’s difficult, if not impossible, to have a true daring conversation with someone when you are still enmeshed in anger toward them. When you see yourself as a victim or martyr and someone else as somebody who “did something to you.” One of my favorite Oprah-isms is “Forgiveness is giving up the hope that the past could have been any different. It’s accepting the past for what it was, and using this moment and this time to help yourself move forward.” You don’t need to let anybody off the hook for his or her actions, but you need to be fully in the role of protagonist and ready to move forward if you are going to have a productive conversation with the person.
Play nicely with the sensation that thoughts of your daring conversation elicit. Daring conversations can be emotionally and physiologically triggering. Nonetheless, they are an important way to step into our moxie.
Excerpted from the book Step into Your Moxie: Amplify Your Voice, Visibility, and Influence in the World. Copyright ©2018 by Alexia Vernon. Printed with permission from New World Library — www.newworldlibrary.com.
