Tania Kindersley
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The Difficult Five Minute Conversation.

The Difficult Five Minute Conversation.

Nov 17, 2022



I am slightly astonished at myself. Today, I had not one but two of the Difficult Five Minute Conversations. I read somewhere that you have to have these and I’ve been thinking of them ever since. I love that they have a name. (You may have noticed by now that I give everything names. I don’t quite know why. It soothes me in some way, and makes me laugh.)

The five minute conversations are those things that you put off and put off, because you may have to do something which frightens you - ask for help, risk hearing something worrying or disappointing, draw clear lines in the sand. You might be compelled to admit a weakness. (One of today’s Difficult Conversations involved precisely that and it was not at all comfortable.)

The point, I think, is that you really need something - usually to give information or to get information. The reality of that information is often so much better and less terrifying than the five act horror-opera you have conjured up in your head. Even if the answer is a dreaded no, at least you know where you stand. 

One of my true weaknesses is that I want everything to be lovely. I don’t want to have knotty, gnarly chats about the non-lovely parts of life. This is quite weird, because I’m very good now at confronting uncomfortable emotions and admitting to them. I can talk fluently about shame and fear. I write about those all the time. (I have trained myself to do this, because honesty is such a release, and the bitter gremlins of shame thrive in the dark. The more I bring them into the light, the less power they have.)

But asking someone for help that might be a bore for them, or feeling that I am imposing on someone, or simply making a request which they won’t especially long to meet - that puts the jangles in me. Magical thinking kicks in. If I just pretend it’s all not happening, it might go away.

It never does. So - the Difficult Five Minute Conversation.

I have recently learnt a brilliant technique for this. It comes from something called Negotiation Theory. That is what people used when they went into Northern Ireland or the Balkans or, more mundanely, when settling thorny labour disputes. The idea is that you concentrate on interests, not positions. That sounds so bland and even veers on management-speak, but it’s one of those simple notions that is life-changing.

The interest is what you both want. That’s what you concentrate on. The person you are having the difficult conversation with may see the world differently, may have radically different core beliefs, may tell themselves a completely different set of stories. But just as there are universal human emotions - love, fear, joy, hope - so there are always mutual interests. What is the delightful end which would make you both happy? How can you come together and focus like a laser on that? You put aside all the other stuff, and make your mission the achieving of those mutual interests.

I’ve only just starting learning about this and I haven’t got into the weeds of it, but as I understand it there is a vital element of empathy in negotiation too. It helps if you can see the situation through the other person’s eyes. They might have doubts and blocks and desires which are meaningless to you. (This is the core belief bit. If your core beliefs are to do with kindness and connection and their core beliefs are to do with success and efficiency, then you are going to have to do a bit of perceptual heavy lifting.) If you can acknowledge the things which matter to the other person, and honour those, then you are going to get to the shared interests easily and more quickly.

Here’s one of my core beliefs. It is being useful. It’s not front page news. It’s not very glamorous or rock and roll. But I adore being useful. Sometimes, when I sit down to write these musings, I get a little cross with myself because I believe I don’t have anything useful to tell you. I show up, because I said I would show up, but sometimes all I’ve got is a whimsical red mare story or something about looking at the sky. This one, however, is the ultimate in usefulness. That makes me very pleased.

I feel so relieved that I had these two conversations. Not every single wrinkle is ironed out, but I now have valuable information I did not have before. There is a sense of moving forward, to something that will be a little easier and brighter and better. I feel my shoulders come down and I think to myself: why didn’t you do that days ago?

But old habits die hard and the fear is real and I can’t transform every facet of myself overnight. We humans all carry with us ancient survival mechanisms which put us in the brace position. I sometimes think that my whole purpose in this phase of my life is finding those, recognising where they came from, convincing myself that they are no longer helpful, and gently letting them go. There are days when this feels like a full-time job.

It is worth the effort. And every time I find a good method or an interesting idea or a liberating notion, I give it to you, and that means something. It’s pouring with rain here and all the autumn colours have gone and the beauty of the mares is covered up with rugs and there is not much, in the immediate landscape, to make my soul sing. It’s putting-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other weather. But I have sunshine in my heart, because I did the Difficult Five Minute Conversations and because I wrote them down and because I turned them into something of use. 

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