Stepping up to difficult conversations: what my grad students would tell you
This post is a continuation of Stepping Up to Difficult Conversations: Know Your Strongest Hopes.
I wanted to know what my students would tell others about the act of stepping up to a difficult conversation, now that they had, albeit by force of assignment, completed their own. Here’s what they told me:
- It’s freeing. It releases you from something holding you down or holding you back.
- Stepping up with intention makes you a better person, helps you find a center in a chaotic world.
- You shouldn’t be afraid to step up and look into the big black hole. You will not lose yourself in that hole!
- You won’t be alone in that conversation for more than a heartbeat, because the other will join you fully when you know how to do it. They’ve been waiting, too.
- It’s empowering because you’re deciding not to be a victim of the conflict.
- At the other side of the conversation, I found myself—the person I had lost for all the years I had avoided that conversation.
At the other side of the conversation, I found myself. Can there be anything more powerful than that?
I’m humbled by what my students did, because sitting there in that classroom with them, I could see that they had really, truly stepped up. They had spoken up and gotten to the heart of what mattered. They had made a difference in their own lives and in the lives of another person. And in mine.
What difficult conversation have you been avoiding and how can I help?
Conflict Zen by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at ConflictZen.com.
I wish I had read this before last Thursday. I had emailed a former friend (a 13 year friendship that ended very badly) with whom I had not talked for almost three years. We agreed to meet for a drink. However, her body language when I arrived was so negative and responses so limited that much of our 45 minutes together was spent in silence. I AM glad though that I reached out and tried. Who knows? Maybe in another three years?
Delaney, reaching out’s a pretty darn courageous first step. Allowing that first step to digest for a while and then getting in touch again makes tons of sense…but no need to wait three years! Try three weeks or three months instead.
Best,
Tammy