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Tool 29 · Develop yourself
What do I need to say? What am I afraid of?
A guided 15 to 20 minutes conversation, here in TAIU. This exercise does not assume the conversation should happen, does not label the other person and will not hand you a script.
What do you want from it?
An outcome, an understanding or simply to have said it. Those are three different conversations. People often prepare for the wrong one.
Some conversations are correctly avoided. That is a real answer here.
What you'll look at
- 01Who it is with
- 02How long you have been not having it
- 03What you want from it
- 04What you are afraid of
A note from Mark
The conversation people rehearse is almost never the conversation they need to have. They rehearse the version with the good ending, where the other person understands immediately and says the right thing. That version is not available. Preparing for it is why the real one goes badly.
The most useful question I know here is what you want from it. If you want an outcome, you are negotiating and you should prepare accordingly. If you want to be understood, you are asking for something they may not be able to give. If you simply want to have said it, the conversation is much shorter than the one you have been dreading. You can have it this week.
Read my full view ↓
I would also take seriously the possibility that you should not have it. Not every unsaid thing needs saying. Avoidance is sometimes judgement, and I would rather you decided that deliberately than kept rehearsing.
If you do have it, say the hard part early. Long preambles do not soften anything. They just give the other person time to work out that something is coming.
What you'll get
This will not sort you into a personality type.It will give you answers about your own life that you can test.
01
The real subject
02
What you want from it
03
Whether to have it
04
Your first sentence
+
Your TAIU handover: a summary of what the conversation found, written so you can take it with you.
See everything included ↓
- 01What you came here with
- 02The conversation
- 03What you need to say
- 04What you want from it
- 05What you are afraid of
- 06How long you have been not having it
- 07What the avoidance is costing
- 08Is this the right instrument
- 09The rival reading
- 10What deserves protecting
- 11The credible alternative
- 12What, if anything, should change
- 13Your first sentence
- 14What remains unresolved
- 15Where this goes next
When you finish
Bring it back to your tree.
Your tree is where TAIU keeps a picture of your whole life, in parts like work, money and health.
At the end, the conversation asks how Family and belonging feels for you right now, in your own words. It also asks what, if anything, would feel different. Nothing changes on your tree unless you say it changes.
The conversation writes this summary for you. Keep the sheet, print it or paste it into My Tree. Nothing from the conversation is stored by TAIU.
- Session
- Date
- The part of life this belongs to
- How you described it
- What would feel different
- What we found
- The alternative we tested
- What deserves protecting
- What should change, if anything
- Next actions
- What to notice or find out
- What remains unresolved
What now?
01 · Save it
What the conversation is actually about.
02 · Test it
Say the hardest sentence within the first thirty seconds. Preamble makes it worse, not gentler.
See more ↓
If safety is part of this
If you are afraid of the person, or if there has been control or violence, this is not a conversation to prepare. Your safety comes first and specialist support will do more than any preparation.
What I would do
- 01
Find the real subject before drafting anything. It is rarely the rota.
- 02
Decide what you want from it. Wanting an outcome and wanting to have said it are different conversations.
- 03
Test whether it should happen. Some avoided conversations are correctly avoided.
- 04
Write one sentence, not a script. Scripts fail in the first thirty seconds.
- 05
Say the hardest thing in the first two sentences, because the longer preamble runs the worse it lands.
Test it
- 01
Ask what you would do if they agreed immediately. If you do not want the thing you would get, the subject is wrong.
- 02
Ask what the avoidance is protecting. There is usually something worth naming.
- 03
Say the first sentence out loud once. If you cannot, it is not yours yet.
The alternative
The obvious conclusion is that you are avoiding a difficult conversation and should be braver. Often the evidence says something else. Sometimes the conversation is not the instrument: you need to make a decision and having the conversation first is a way of asking somebody else to make it for you. Sometimes what you want is not the outcome you have rehearsed but simply to have said it out loud, which is a smaller and much more achievable conversation. And sometimes the avoidance is correct, because the person cannot hear it and the cost is real.
Think about this
- Who it is with, and what it is really about.
- How long it has been unsaid.
- What you want from it, honestly.
- What you are afraid of, specifically.
- What the avoidance has been protecting.
Take this to Ask Mark
You have done the exercise. Now look again at what it found.
This looks at what you found and helps you understand it. It is not another exercise to repeat.
Take this to Ask Mark →Go a little further
LEARN · SERVICE
Relationship support
Relate
If the same conversation keeps failing, a third person in the room changes it.
Find out more ↗
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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.
Read more ↗
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Recommended by the TAIU community
What helped you?
If you've read, watched, listened to or tried something that helped you think about this differently, we'd like to hear about it.
We review recommendations before sharing them with the community.
Finished the exercise?
What did this uncover?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Further thinking
Difficult Conversations
Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen
The Dance of Anger
Harriet Lerner
The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work
John Gottman
See the thinking ↓
Book
Difficult Conversations
Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton and Sheila Heen
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.
Book
The Dance of Anger
Harriet Lerner
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.
Book
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.