Today we continue our look at the book, Crucial Conversations – Tools For Talking When Stakes Are High.
Enjoy this excerpt.

When conversations matter the most – that is, when conversations move from casual to crucial – we’re generally on our worst behavior.
Why is that?

We’re designed wrong.
When conversations turn from routine to crucial, we are often in trouble.
That’s because emotions don’t exactly prepare us to converse effectively.
Countless generations of genetic shaping drive humans to handle crucial conversations with flying fists and fleet feet, not intelligent persuasion and gentle attentiveness.

We’re under pressure.
Crucial conversations are frequently spontaneous.
More often than not, they come out of nowhere.
And since you’re caught by surprise, you’re forced to conduct an extraordinarily complex human interaction in real time.
What do you have to work with?
The issue at hand, the other person, and a brain that’s drunk on adrenaline and almost incapable of rational thought.
It’s a little wonder that we often say, and do things that make perfect sense in the moment, but later, on seem, well, stupid.

We are stumped.
You don’t know where to start.
You’re making this up as you go along because you haven’t often seen real life models of effective communication skills.
Left with no healthy models, you are now more or less stumped.
So what do you do?
You do what most people do.
You wing it.
You piece together the words, create a certain mood, and otherwise make up what you think will work – all the while multiprocessing with a half-starved brain.
It’s little wonder that when it matters the most, we are often at our worst behavior.

We act in self-defeating ways.
In our doped-up, dumbed-down state, the strategies we choose for dealing with our crucial conversations are perfectly designed to keep us from what we actually want.
We’re our own worst enemies – and we don’t even realize it.

~ Evolution of Self!
#communication #people #crucialconversations #learning #growth #tuesdaythought