Difficult Conversations … the knot metaphor

It may be usefult to compare a difficult conversation to knots … you want to unfasten.

Which kind of difficult conversation? Think of every time you are dealing with a conversation and all of the following conditions apply:

• Each one is persuaded he/she is right.
• Each one is persuaded the other is wrong.
• Each one believes that the argumentations the other puts forward to support his/her thesis are not grounded.
• This is a win/lose debate.
• Since one is so confident that he/she is right, he/she does not pay attention to the other’s thinking, which is surely meaningless, and does not understand it.
• Most times he/she is persuaded that bad intentions move the other. He/she acts in order to pursue his/her own interests, against the other, in a selfish way.

Now figure a knot, that is not too tight … we could unfasten it … but …

frequently, in haste, we tend to pull both ends of the rope; the knot becomes tighter and much more difficult to unfasten.

This circumstance occurs in most difficult conversations in which opposite views confront each other, and quickly the desire to win the debate leads both to strongly pull both ends tightening the knot more and more.

When this happens people having conversations are not able to reach neither shared conclusions nor meaningful decisions. These conversations can be extremely long, waste huge amounts of time, dramatically worsening the quality of the relationship.

How to deal with all this?

1. Be aware when this dynamic takes place. It is not easy but very helpful. Just being aware of the very fact that we are in the middle of a point counter point conversation should make us very doubtful about any possible successful outcome in the conversation.

2. Do not ostinately pull your end of the rope. Your istinct, normally, when you don’t reflect much, leads us to reply with stronger and stronger argumentations, with better and better rationality supporting our thesis, with growing energy and a louder voice. As to now, let’s just say this is the perfect recipe for aggravated conflict, increased distances and almost no hope to find any meaningful solution.

And you, what do you think?

Tagged as: conversazioni difficili, difficult conversations