If you are looking for the right passive-aggressive gift for the holidays, consider a self-help book. These days, there’s an endless supply of books on conversation, usually difficult ones, replete with advice, rules, steps, examples, and flowcharts.
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There’s the canonical, How to Talk So People Listen; the franchise, How to Talk So Teens Will Listen and Listen So Teens Will Talk ; and the clickbait: How to talk to Men: 59 Secret Scripts to Melt His Heart, Unlock What He’s Thinking, and Make Him Want to Be with You Forever. As with self-help books generally, they promise to elevate you to a higher plane of being, in this case as a suave and poised communicator.
The people responsible for the most recent wave of books about difficult conversations are from the Harvard Negotiation Project. On the stroke of the new millennium, Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen published Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most.
They identify three types of conversations:
The What-Happened Conversation
The Feelings Conversation
The Identity Conversation
Those categories help identify what a difficult conversation is truly about: an incident, feelings, or one’s character. For the authors, the purpose of having difficult conversations, the why, is ultimately to resolve conflict.
As for how to have a difficult conversation, they propose a process called Learning Conversations, in which you learn the other person’s story, express your views and feelings, and problem-solve together. It’s a kind of thesis, antithesis, synthesis model.
Rules, rules, rules. In a difficult situation, they recommend that each partner explore their motivations and intentions, share the impact of the situation on them, take responsibility, describe feelings, and reflect on identity issues. Identity issues aren’t always the big, thorny categories like race and gender. It could mean that I think about myself as a professional photographer and that’s why it bothers me when you bring up your Instagram whenever I talk about my business.
Self-help books act as if after a few tweaks our conversations would proceed with emotional professionalism and flawless logic. I don’t know about you, but I simply don’t engage with many people in my life in this register.
Advice that aims to create procedural neutrality is hard to follow if you do, in fact, have a fiery stake in the conversation. These books ask you to subordinate your position, at least temporarily, even in a case where you have been wronged, for the sake of the conversation. In a heated moment, it’s hard to “focus not on what is true, but on what is important,” as Stone, Patton, and Heen advise. The truth is always important, no?
Skip forward twenty-five years and we get Charles Duhigg’s Supercommunicators.
Duhigg rebrands Stone, Patton, and Heen’s three conversations as: The What’s This Really About? Conversation; The How Do We Feel? Conversation; and The Who Are We? Conversation. It’s a nice little update.
When you’re in a conversational jam, Duhigg suggests the matching principle. Pretty much, identify what kind of conversation you’re in and respond by matching your partner. If your partner is discussing their daughter’s loser boyfriend, then respond by sharing something about your family, preferably your daughter’s loser boyfriend.
The matching principle is not simply topical, I’ll point out. If your partner is angry, you don’t have to become angry, but you should respond in the register of emotion (care, concern, acknowledgement of feelings).
The point is that you’re always calculating with these self-help books. Which conversation am I in? What does my partner really mean? How can I match them? There’s a meta-conversation running alongside our conversations that can be made explicit, albeit at the risk of being pedantic.
Too much meta can be clumsy. If someone were to ask me, as teachers are trained to ask students, Do you want to be helped, hugged, or heard? I’d probably cringe and say, I want to be not patronized. The poor partner is just following advice from these self-help books and identifying what kind of conversation we’re in. They’d say, You sound angry. I’d say, I’m exasperated.
Them: So we are talking about feelings.
Me: Could we actually deal with the issue instead of diagnosing the conversation?
You get the point. There is something avoidant and wooden about discussing conversations. Ideally how we engage with each other should be intuitive rather than robotic, pausing the conversation to establish ground rules.
We don’t need to slip into the language of how-to books and the professional feeling industry. We don’t need to adopt a sanctimonious tone. Depending on the conversation we’re in, we could just ask, Do you want my advice? Or say, When something like that happened to me, I couldn’t leave my house for days.
Most of us have spent enough time in the Oprah-Dr. Phil complex to know better than to offer advice when someone wants emotional support. It’s important to adapt the various rules and concepts into your own vocabulary and personality rather than talking to your aging father like you’re a therapy bot.
Of all the bullets in all of the self-help books in the world, I like this one the best:
• We will make mistakes
We can’t bring in renowned dramatists to script our difficult conversations. Instead, real-life difficult conversations sound more like something out of an improv show. If you screw up, if you break character, don’t lose heart. Accept that it’s part of the genre.
If I were to write a self-help book on difficult conversations, I would add two considerations to all the rules and steps that preceded me.
The first is, What is the truth and how do I know that? This asks us to account for our sources. It may be hard to locate the root of a feeling or a received truth from childhood or a mood in the air, but this question of knowing, an epistemological one, is necessary to substantiate our place in a conversation.
Sometimes there is no single truth. In that case, I’d need to consider what is at stake for my partner and me. Are the stakes equal?
A difficult conversation is often tied to someone’s identity, and identity undeniably affects the interactive dynamics as well as the positions that a partner might hold. It may well be that they have more to lose in a conversation so they avoid having it or wave a broken bottle around while we’re talking.
The second consideration is, Should I speak from a cool place or a warm place? That is, should I speak dispassionately, relying mostly on logic, or should I speak out of passion and let my convictions be known by the force of my belief Speaking from a cool place usually establishes the territory as neutral and the battle as logical (note the language of warfare) while speaking from warm place conveys the importance of the issue and adds a human element to the argument.
If, for example, you consider yourself an environmentalist and you’re seated next to a climate denier at a wedding reception, you could coolly assail the denier with evidence or you unleash your inner Greta Thunberg on him. How dare you and such. Indeed, my question is better formulated not as an either/or but as, How much of drink A should I mix with drink B until we’re all having a good time?
There’s a lot of useful advice in self-help books about difficult conversations. And the authors mean well.
But the takeaway, it seems to me, is that we have all been manipulated by strategic people.
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What I Mean to Say: Remaking Conversation in Our Time by Ian Williams is available via House of Anansi.
