Resources

Worth your time on this question

Everything worth your time on the question: What do I need to say? What am I afraid of?

Five things on this subject: one TAIU exercise, three things to read and one free service or course. Practical support sits first, before anything written to be interesting. If the same conversation keeps failing, a third person in the room changes it.

This page is for going further on your own. If you would rather work the question out with somebody asking, that is the conversation.

The conversation I keep not having: talk it through

LEARN · SERVICE

Relationship support

Relate

If the same conversation keeps failing, a third person in the room changes it.

Counselling for couples, families and individuals, in person and online.

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TRY · 10 MIN

Before You Have The Conversation

TAIU

One page before a conversation you have postponed.

One page of preparation before a conversation that has been postponed.

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READ · BOOK

Difficult Conversations

Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen

Best for finding out what the conversation is actually about.

The central idea is that every difficult conversation is three conversations at once: what happened, how everybody feels and what it says about who we are. Most conversations go wrong because people prepare for the first and are ambushed by the third. Reading it before you say anything will change your opening sentence.

The Dance of Anger

Harriet Lerner

Worth your time if you recognise yourself as the one who sorts things out and cannot work out why that has started to feel unfair.

Lerner writes about families as systems, where one person steadily doing more quietly arranges for somebody else to do less. It explains the pattern most people notice late: you become competent, then indispensable, then angry with people for depending on you in exactly the way you taught them to.

The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work

John Gottman

Relevant when the exercise identifies a partner relationship as an area you want to work on.

Recommended by the TAIU community

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