Last week I was talking to a client who shared that he lost his cool in a meeting.
He was meeting with a colleague who consistently gave him tasks that were all deemed urgent, but then wouldn’t do anything with his results for weeks. It felt like he was wasting his time and not get to his other work. And in a meeting with her last week, it happened again and he couldn’t control himself and swore about it.
Luckily they had a good relationship, so she wasn’t put off by it.
But it stressed him out because he’s been trying to improve his leadership presence. So he wanted to figure out why he couldn’t control his frustration in those moments.
This isn’t a rare occurrence, this happens to almost everyone. But why?
There are 3 main reasons and I’m going to go over them over the next few weeks.
This week, I’ll talk about the first barrier that holds us back in hard conversations: Our own limiting beliefs about conflict and hard conversations.
Because the better we can maintain balance in the face of difficult situations, the better we can maintain control of both ourselves and the conversation.
Limiting Beliefs?
If you’ve ever gone hiking on official trails, you’ll notice that the path that everyone is supposed to walk on is packed and cleared, making it easier to follow. By contrast, paths that people don’t normally walk through are overgrown with vegetation and hard to navigate. Similarly, we’ve all developed ways of thinking about conflict that are ingrained in us.
This means that every time we face conflict or difficult behaviors, we have a preset way of viewing the situation and responding to it that’s normal to us. In current popular vernacular, people refer to these as limiting beliefs or mindsets.
How can you fix it?
Outside of therapy, the fastest way to remedy these limiting beliefs is to identify a positive mindset and then identify a behavior that reinforces that mindset so you can practice it daily.
For example, conflict might be hard for you because you automatically view the other person or their behavior as the main problem.
One possible reframe is to shift that view slightly to “the other person isn’t the problem, the problem is the problem here.”
That may sound unnecessarily complicated, but that might mean instead of viewing a late employee as being a nuisance, it’s allying with the other person to solve the problem of lateness, not fix them as a human being.
For my client, he realized that even before the meeting started, he was expecting that she would give him bad news and was already feeling frustrated.
That made it hard for him to anticipate and prepare effectively.
And these limiting beliefs not only make it hard for you to handle difficult conversations – they can erode trust and credibility.
What preconceived notions about difficult conversations or the other person are you bringing into your hard conversations?
Cheers,
Chris
