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A guide to difficult conversations

medium.dave-bailey.com

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Re: A guide to difficult conversations

#401

Post by MadWombat »

dang wrote: post #285
MadWombat wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am not sure whether you are using NVC well or not, but this comment makes you sound like a pompous ass. I suppose thats what you learn by picking up the book you mentioned.

Whoa. Please don't take HN threads further in the direction of personal attack or name-calling, regardless of how bad another comment was or you feel it was. That makes this place worse, both obviously and subtly: obviously because it increases ill will and steers toward flamewar; subtly because it deprives readers of information you might have been able to convey. If you want to post something like this, the thing t…

Beg pardon. I generally refrain from posting comments like that, but this one was too hard to resist.

Re: A guide to difficult conversations

#402

Post by woodandsteel »

elhudy wrote: post #239
jacobolus wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is speculatively projecting a lot of thoughts and feelings on the brother-in-law, which is quite patronizing. It also awkwardly uses overcomplicated words and overcomplicated passive grammar. Try reading the linked blog post again, and hold up your proposed question against each of Dave Bailey’s suggestions.

>This is speculatively projecting a lot of thoughts and feelings on the brother-in-law, which is quite patronizing. Isn't that what negotiation is about, when dealing with someone who won't effectively communicate their thoughts? Speculating the wants/needs of that person and addressing them directly? This isn't something I'm making up, I've just read it in "Never Split the Difference". The book was written to addres…

>Isn't that what negotiation is about, when dealing with someone who won't effectively communicate their thoughts?

No, negotiation is the process that happens when you and the other party have decided you want to work out a mutually acceptable agreement. The other person in this situation has not decided to do that, and so the trick is how to get the him to that point. I think Zelphyr's approach would be a lot more likely than yours to have that effect.

Re: A guide to difficult conversations

#403

Post by woodandsteel »

Nemi wrote: post #117
weeksie wrote: post #14

It's funny because few things make me seethe like someone talking to me in this way during a high stress moment. The artifice is transparent and if the conversation is tense the tone is quite easy to read as condescension. I'm hardly dismissing NVC as a tactic, just that when done poorly it's worse than simply being direct.

I think the one underlying thing that differentiates whether a person sees this as "fake" and ineffective or profound and valuable is one underlying attitude: whether you believe that the other person does or does not genuinely want to help you and whether you genuinely want to help them. I like to think of NVC a little differently than most people. It is not a tactic or a strategy, it is a reframing of the problem i…

That's a very valuable comment.

Re: A guide to difficult conversations

#404

Post by woodandsteel »

crikli wrote: post #66
weeksie wrote: post #14

It's funny because few things make me seethe like someone talking to me in this way during a high stress moment. The artifice is transparent and if the conversation is tense the tone is quite easy to read as condescension. I'm hardly dismissing NVC as a tactic, just that when done poorly it's worse than simply being direct.

Presenting this communication pattern as an effective "one size fits all" method is a pretty bad idea. You have to "know your audience." This means you need to know your employees, bosses, or colleagues as people and work to understand what motivates them. This is challenging, risky, and requires an opening of the mind to not just understand different psychologies but to accept them as viable alternatives to your own…

>You have to "know your audience." This means you need to know your employees, bosses, or colleagues as people and work to understand what motivates them. This is challenging, risky, and requires an opening of the mind to not just understand different psychologies but to accept them as viable alternatives to your own.

I agree, but the trick is how to get them to be open with you about what is going in their mind, and I think NVC is a good way to get that to happen. But I would also add some people are sociopaths (or are stuck in a situation where they have to act that way), and NVC won't work there.

I absolutely despise the NVC communication pattern because very few people actually speak like this and when they do so it's an obvious deviation from their status quo. It feels fake because it is, and it feels fake because I know the pattern. It's like when I get "feel/felt/found"[1] from a salesperson...I know what they're doing and it's not going to work.

NVC is for when you genuinely want to respect both your own needs and those of the other person, which is not at all true for the salesman case.

Re: A guide to difficult conversations

#405

Post by woodandsteel »

neatcoder wrote: post #74
HarryHirsch wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The artifice is absolutely transparent, especially when it comes to business relationships, particularly employer-employee relationships. They are short-termist, interchangeable, and besides, the employer is a psychopath. Everyone has internalized that fact, and then they insist you express your feelings! It doesn't get more preposterous than that.

That's not how I see it. Yes, the employer (the organization) may be psychopath but I am not interacting with an organization while having a difficult conversation. I would be interacting with a manager or a colleague or someone who reports to me. These are human beings who are not psychopath. These are also not short-termist. Sure, we would all change jobs sooner or later but I would sure like to maintain good relat…

I am a huge fan of NVC, and I agree most people are not psychopaths. Unfortunately, organizational structures can be such that decent people are forced to behave like psychopaths, and I don't think that NVC, at least not by itself, can fix that.

Re: A guide to difficult conversations

#406

Post by woodandsteel »

jdsully wrote: post #318
rsweeney21 wrote: post #119

The formative years of my career were spent as a software engineer at Microsoft where communication was direct and sometimes harsh. Code reviews could be particularly harsh with comments like "this code is bad because..." or "this is unreadable." At first it was really hard, but eventually my skin got pretty think. I even came to love the efficiency of direct communication in programming. When I became a founder, the…

Microsoft of the 90s/early 2000s was a much different place then it is now. The closest example today would be a trading floor (but not quite as aggressive). It took a certain type of person to do well there - but if you survived your first few months the open communication was amazing. You were allowed to express negative emotions instead of pretending everything is great all the time. If you thought a decision was…

But Satya Nadella is a big NCV fan he has really turned Microsoft around in recent years. Maybe that style worked for a while, but it became very dysfunctional. I recall a famous cartoon with the organizational structures of Apple, Oracle, and MS, and the MS one had everyone pointing guns at each other.

Re: A guide to difficult conversations

#407

Post by jdsully »

woodandsteel wrote: post #406
jdsully wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft of the 90s/early 2000s was a much different place then it is now. The closest example today would be a trading floor (but not quite as aggressive). It took a certain type of person to do well there - but if you survived your first few months the open communication was amazing. You were allowed to express negative emotions instead of pretending everything is great all the time. If you thought a decision was…

But Satya Nadella is a big NCV fan he has really turned Microsoft around in recent years. Maybe that style worked for a while, but it became very dysfunctional. I recall a famous cartoon with the organizational structures of Apple, Oracle, and MS, and the MS one had everyone pointing guns at each other.

I don't claim it was perfect, and Ballmer wasn't the right fit to lead that type of organization. The culture came from BillG himself, his favourite line being "That's the stupidest fucking thing I've ever heard in my life". But BillG would listen to you if you were right, you just had to fight back. The company modeled its culture on that example.

Again it was a different time, place, and culture. Its not the right thing for Microsoft right now. But I do dislike when people talk as though it as pure abrasiveness for abrasiveness sake. People talked that way because they cared and were invested. It was a nice time and I remember it fondly.

Re: A guide to difficult conversations

#408

Post by [deleted] »

yomly wrote: post #380
jacobolus wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is speculatively projecting a lot of thoughts and feelings on the brother-in-law, which is quite patronizing. It also awkwardly uses overcomplicated words and overcomplicated passive grammar. Try reading the linked blog post again, and hold up your proposed question against each of Dave Bailey’s suggestions.

>This is speculatively projecting a lot of thoughts and feelings on the brother-in-law, which is quite patronizing. The most powerful and influential communicators/connectors I've encountered in my life essentially only ever do this. I suppose the nuance is that they treat every person as an individual, so (on a semi-subconscious level) spend their first interactions profiling the individual so they understand their…

[deleted]

Re: A guide to difficult conversations

#409

Post by __blockcipher__ »

ehsanu1 wrote: post #358
vfinn wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah, silly me. I forgot to mention that I was referring to his 3 hour Youtube workshop (link was in the summary), not the summary itself. Hard to imagine the book would be that different. Still, I appreciated the applied Krishnamurti :).

I don't believe Marshall's idea is to apply a template-based approach to communication, if that is what you mean. The templates themselves are not NVC, but are rather a guide to help the uninitiated to apply the philosophy behind NVC. Aside: I'm definitely interested in learning more about Krishnamurti after reading this thread of conversation.

Catching up now. Would highly recommend listening to some of his talks, or reading some of his books. Freedom from the Known is very accessible; it's basically a "cleaned up" version of his talks.

I'm currently reading Krishnamurti's Notebook, which is absolutely beautiful. But perhaps difficult to understand if you're not familiar with his terminology/way of thinking.

He uses a lot of words, like religion, meditation, truth, with a meaning that is entirely different from how we normally use them.

His whole way of thinking is so foreign that when I first encountered him it seemed almost boring. But as I kept going I was really enraptured by the beauty of the way of thinking he models. He's very much a "first principles" thinker, but from an internal psychological perspective rather than in the traditional external "scientific" sense. (Which is not to say that he's unscientific. Just that the focus of his attention begins from internal perception).

I've already written a novel here, but his whole life story is fascinating. His wikipedia page is a surprisingly thorough account. However I didn't learn his life story until after having been exposed to a bunch of his talks, and thus I might be biased but I think that's the right order to do it in. He talks about himself occasionally, but tends to drop small details rather than talking endlessly about himself.

Here's a couple random links:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ux-1aRB8Res&list=PLfZ5kzVg_z...

^ The above is a series of 18 talks with Allan W Anderson (some sort of theologian/philosopher type professor). This series is great because you get to see how the views/behavior of Anderson change as he engages in dialogue with Krishamurti.

His "public" talks (i.e. more like "lectures" although he was adamant that they were not to be treated as such) are in a different style, but the same content is covered.

If you want just one talk, I really enjoyed this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyNeWEGgmFQ It's the 7th of a series of talks, so skipping right to that one is going "out of order", but the content is pretty great. (I pulled that talk randomly from some notes of mine).

Side note: Krishnamurti was a significant influence on Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, and the physicist David Bohm.

Re: A guide to difficult conversations

#410

Post by throwawaystale »

leesalminen wrote: post #126

I’m generally a good conversation participant, but this week has made me second guess myself. My father-in-law is currently hospitalized after his heart stopped this weekend. He’s currently in an induced coma. Brain damage is a foregone conclusion at this point and they’re unsure if he will ever regain consciousness. My wife and I happened to be on vacation in Costa Rica when this happened. We hopped on the next avai…

This is awful. But in the end, it takes two, and you can only control your side of the conversation.

I had a similar experience in my last divorce, doing every possible thing to make the negotiations non-confrontational, win/win, etc. My wife's stance was "I get everything", and no amount of kindness, reasoning, or patience could move her. (As you might imagine, the result was a trail of destruction, for me and her both.)

I take some solace in this Buster Scruggs quote: "Misanthrope? I don’t hate my fellow man, even when he’s tiresome and surly and tries to cheat at poker. I figure that’s just a human material, and him that finds in it cause for anger and dismay is just a fool for expecting better."

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