You will be able to break a situation down into what happened, what you concluded and what you felt, before you talk.
Jia Hui is a senior analyst at an insurer's office in Paya Lebar. Each month she pulls together a report for the regional team, and each month one section comes from Ben, a colleague at the same level. For the past three months Ben's section has arrived late, and Jia Hui has stayed back until nine to finish the report on time. To Ben she has said nothing, though she has said a great deal about him, to her partner, to a friend from university, and to herself on the walk to the MRT.
By now she is sure of what is going on. Ben does not respect her time. He knows she will cover for him, so he does not bother. If she raises it, she expects it to go badly, because she is angry and she knows it will show.
She is right to be wary. A conversation that starts from where she is now probably will go badly. This lesson is about what to do before you open your mouth.
Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan and Al Switzler, the authors of Crucial Conversations, describe a sequence they call the path to action. You see and hear something, you tell yourself a story about what it means, the story produces a feeling, and the feeling drives what you do.
This should sound familiar. Lesson 2.2, Find the situations, people and stories that set you off, showed you the story sitting between an event and your feeling, and lesson 3.2 taught you to question it. Patterson and his co-authors add a point for conversations in particular. By the time most of us decide to raise a problem, we have run this path many times. The story has hardened into what we think of as the facts, and we walk in ready to argue about our conclusions rather than what happened.
The fix is to walk the path backwards before the conversation. Start from what you are feeling, trace it back to the story, and trace the story back to what you actually saw and heard.
A fact, for this purpose, is something a camera or a calendar could have recorded. It is specific, it is observable, and the other person could check it.
"He submitted the report two days after the deadline" is a fact. So is "the deadline was the 5th, and his section arrived on the 7th at 4pm". So is "this has happened in each of the last three months".
Facts have a useful property, which is that the other person can usually agree with them. Ben might have reasons for being late, but he is unlikely to argue that his section arrived on the 7th if it did, and that gives the conversation somewhere solid to start.
When Jia Hui wrote her facts down, she was surprised at how short the list was. There were three late submissions, on the 7th, the 8th and the 6th, and two evenings when she had stayed until nine to finish. In the second month Ben had sent one message, which read "sorry, swamped". Everything else she believed about the situation had come from somewhere other than what she had seen.
A story is your explanation of the facts: why it happened and what it says about the other person. "He does not respect my time" is a story, and so are "he knows I'll cover for him" and "he thinks his work matters more than mine".
Stories are not always wrong. Sometimes they turn out to be accurate. The problem is that they feel exactly like facts, especially after you have told them to yourself many times. And they are almost impossible for the other person to agree with. If Jia Hui opens with "you don't respect my time", Ben will defend himself against the accusation, and the actual problem, a report that keeps arriving late, will get lost.
Notice the words that give a story away: always, never, doesn't care, doesn't respect, on purpose, obviously. Any sentence about what someone thinks, intends or feels is a story, because you cannot see inside their head.
Jia Hui's stories: he doesn't respect my time. He knows I'll cover for him. Our manager thinks Ben is the stronger analyst, so he can get away with it. When she wrote the third one down, she realised it had been sitting underneath the others all along.
The third column is how you feel. Name the feelings as precisely as you practised in lesson 2.3, Put a precise name on what you feel, and check for a second layer underneath the first.
Jia Hui wrote: resentful, tired. Then, underneath: anxious that her own work was being judged by a report that was late for reasons that were not hers. That anxiety connected to her third story, about their manager, and it explained why the issue had felt so heavy for three months.
Separating the three columns does not make the feelings go away. It does make them easier to handle, because you can see which feelings come from the facts and which come from a story you have not checked. Jia Hui's resentment came mostly from the story that Ben did not respect her. Her tiredness came from the facts. Her anxiety came from a story about their manager that Ben had nothing to do with.
Going in with the facts first gives the other person something to agree with. Your story still matters, and lesson 6.3, Say what you think, then ask what they think, shows how to share it. But it comes second, labelled as your interpretation, after the facts are on the table.
In the activity below you take the conversation you have been avoiding and sort it into the same three columns Jia Hui used: the facts, the story you have told yourself, and the feelings that came with it.
Take the conversation you have been avoiding and write three columns: the facts, the story you have told yourself, and the feelings that came with it.
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