A question I am often asked when training is: “How do you start a difficult conversation?”
People find initiating the discussion quite stressful and I understand why. We are going to tell someone something they probably don’t want to hear and, even though we’re raising the issue to help them, we know they are likely to have a negative emotion. Most of us don’t want to upset someone because we care.
The opening of your difficult conversations is the only part I advise you to prepare for, to the point of having a script. There are several ways to open and I want to give you the most reliable one – I, issue, outcome (the commas demarcate the three sections of the sentence).
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