Honest Conversations

What’s a difficult conversation? What’s an honest conversation? And what’s the difference?

• What makes a conversation ‘difficult’?
• What makes for an ‘honest’ conversation?
• Why they’re not the same

The role emotions play

• What neuroscience tells us about how our emotions work
• How certain situations can prompt strong reactions
• The NLP model of communication and how our brains will delete, distort and generalise information based on our own unique map of the world
• The belief cycle
• Techniques for identifying your emotions and managing them

Understanding your purpose

• Where most conversations go wrong
• Are you looking for them to change behaviour, to understand new information, to influence them or to express your feelings?
• The A to B model for structuring your honest conversation

Giving and receiving feedback

• The benefits of giving and receiving feedback
• How emotions play a role in feedback
• How to structure feedback using the See/Saw Model
• How giving positive feedback can be just as difficult for some people
• How to manage your emotions and accept feedback with grace
• Keeping focused on the positives

Raising issues

• How to build up to an honest conversation
• Maintaining rapport while raising issues
• The LADDER model for planning and executing the discussion

Empathy and understanding others’ perspectives

• How a perceived lack of understanding and empathy raise the temperature
• Practical techniques for ‘standing in the other’s shoes’
• Effective questioning and listening
• The role of positive intentions and values in honest conversations

Making sure you get it right

• The ‘must haves’ for effective honest conversations
• Unconscious biases
  • Affinity bias
  • Attribution bias
  • Conformity bias
  • Confirmation bias
  • Gender bias
• Factual inaccuracies
• The Ladder of Inference as a model for taking a fact-based approach

Actions and next steps

• Review
• Personal action planning
• Next steps