‫To increase your success rate when it comes to talks about challenging topics you need to reframe.
‫You need to change your mindset in some very crucial, important aspects.
‫You need to move from truth to different stories.
‫Again we can argue all day about the truth, of what is true or not. What is true for you doesn't need
‫to be true for me.
‫What you need to see here is that there are different stories and you need to understand what those
‫different stories are, related to the situation you're talking about. Also, move from accusations into
‫intent and impact.
‫If you accuse someone chances are very likely they will close up, they will get defensive, they will get
‫angry, sad, upset. All those things that will get in the way, aggressive, in the way of working together
‫forward in a good way. So move from accusing to looking instead at, what were the intentions here? And
‫what was the impact based on those intentions? Move from blame to looking at contribution.
‫If we seek to lay blame it's like there's this line in life. When we enter a difficult situation, when
‫we're encountering hard times, we can either go above the line where it says learn or we can go below
‫the line where it says blame. So, blame tends to be pointed back into the history, doesn't really move
‫us forward. While learning more opens up to new possibilities. So, here it is going from blaming, finding
‫someone, something to blame, instead of looking at contributions. How did you contribute to this? How did
‫I contribute to this situation? Also, move from: what's wrong with you? To: what's going on here? When someone
‫feels like you're trying to figure out what's wrong with them, or that you think there's something wrong
‫with them, they tend to either get very defensive, shut down or very aggressive. And it's not really opening
‫up that open communication and honesty.
‫Instead if you can look at the other side of things, what's going on here? As a curious detective trying
‫to uncover, what's going on in this situation? Without judging or labeling. You will have a much bigger
‫chance of succeeding with your talk. Along those lines also move away from judgments, characterizations,
‫labels and instead talk about feelings. When we label people that kind of also breaks down communication, it
‫doesn't open up new possibilities. Judging, the same thing, easily move us away from an adult conversation
‫into a parent talking to a kid. So instead look at feelings, when this thing happened, how did I feel? How
‫did you feel? What did I experience? What did you experience? Move away from strategies, reframe some
‫strategies into instead talking about needs. When we're stuck on strategies, ways of doing things, then
‫that easily gives rise to a conflict, because my strategy might conflict with your strategy. So again,
‫look instead, what was the need behind the strategy? What did I really want? Why did I do this? Why was
‫this so important to me? Why did I do that way?
‫If we can't find the need behind, then we can also, if we can create that trust and openness, we can look
‫at alternate strategies that will not collide and conflict with each other.