Hard Moments: Say, Stay, Stand

The conversation you have been not-having.

You know which one. You have rehearsed it in the shower, lost the argument in your head twice, and said nothing on any given Monday when the chance was actually in front of you.

Four lessons about that conversation — and about the habits that keep it from happening. Not a technique for winning it. A practice for staying in it.

Recorded in 2021. I am leaving it as it was.

That is a description of the move, not a three-step method.

This is not the practice for every hard conversation. See Three places to not do this, below.

Two frameworks, and no script

CARE — the habit loop, for mapping what runs you before you ever get into the room.

PRIZE — four moves for shifting a conversation that has already jammed.

Throughout, I play both chairs — the person who has to say the hard thing, and the person it is being said to.

What's in it

• Before you start — how to work it, and the three places not to use it. Read first.
• Start here — the one practice you can use inside a conversation.
• Pre-work questionnaire — twenty minutes, and the only thing in here that makes the rest personal.
• Lesson 1 · On Your Mark! How your brain trips you up in difficult conversations.
• Lesson 2 · Get Set! The maps you'll need to stay the course.
• Lesson 3 · GO! The four moves.
• Lesson 4 · The Race is Only Beginning. The four moves demonstrated against five people you already recognize — and putting it into an ordinary week, where the conversation is with someone you'll see again on Thursday.
• Printable practices for every lesson.

The practices attached to each lesson are the course — the videos are me explaining why they work.

What it is built for

• giving or taking feedback that stings
• conflict with a colleague, a client, or someone you live with
• the burnt-out team member everyone has stopped addressing
• the person whose beliefs have hardened past argument
• the avoidance that has quietly become the relationship
• the power struggle nobody is winning

Three places to not do this

The skills in this course ask you to move toward a hard conversation on purpose. That is the right move most of the time and the wrong move some of the time. So, plainly:

• Not with someone who controls you, threatens you, or hurts you. Compassionate audacity assumes a person who can be reached. If you are managing your safety, you are not in a difficult conversation — you are in a different situation, and it needs different help.
• If you hold the power, you score only yourself. Manager to report, clinician to client, parent to teenager: you may ask how it landed. You do not get to tell them how it landed, and you do not get to grade their answer.
• If the distress doesn't settle, stop. Not as a discipline problem. Practicing into something that won't come down is how people get hurt. Set it down and talk to someone — a supervisor, a therapist, a friend who is not in the conversation.

What I am claiming, and what I am not

Three things, and nothing beyond them. Whether a specific conversation lands. Whether you acted like yourself inside it. And whether the other person experienced you as there. Everything else — the calmer team, the better marriage, the easier Monday — may follow. I am not promising it, and I would be suspicious of anyone who did.

Questions

You will catch your reaction sooner, and you will come back to the conversation more often. That is the whole of it.