This is the time of year where conversations are happening with great frequency. Summative conversations, evaluative conversations, planning conversations, hiring conversations, etc. Lots of talking, lots of meetings. You want this time to be an investment and bring about the outcomes you desire. How are you wanting to be intentional and have powerful impactful conversations that get your required and desired results? Well, sometimes we must start by creating some new wiring that will push out some old hardwiring. Because we are all hardwired to survive, and belonging is a key component of survival, none of us will ever change that and we probably don’t want to. We can become more self-aware when we begin to distinguish a real threat from just a paper tiger. When we feel threatened it leads us to jump to conclusions and just flat make stuff up without asking. When we become more self-aware, we can catch ourselves and shift our mindset. You remember, it just takes TARP – (Time, Attention, Repetition, Reflective Feedback). These tips are offered for consideration:

• Be intentional about becoming self-aware
• Pay attention to your patterns and recognize when you are triggered
• Let your actions include PAUSING, breathing
• Consider questions that generate possibility, curiosity, connection, opening
  • For example: What’s really going on here for me? For others? What am I assuming or making up? What might be another explanation for what just happened?

Judith Glaser taught us that the most important thing we can do with our words when we speak is to create trust. When we are transparent, put the relationship first, ask questions to understand, and seek shared success, we engender trust and our own brains respond. This takes courage and determination if you are coming from feeling threatened, AND it is absolutely worth it because that conversation is likely to influence the rest of your day.

“To get to the next level of greatness depends upon our culture, which depends upon the quality of our relationships, which depends on the quality of our conversations.”
Judith Glaser