DREIESKIVA​|Roald Kvam

What are you looking for when you’re in important conversations? What do you need to see in order to catch problems before they grow so serious that communication breaks down?

In the book “Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High,” Kerry Patterson (et al.) teaches us to look for three key things:

• Notice and understand when a conversation turns crucial—and difficult.
• Notice whether the conversation feels safe for everyone involved.
• Notice when someone changes their style and is under stress.

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Notice when a conversation becomes crucial—and difficult

To help ourselves spot early warning signs, we can train ourselves to pay close attention to signals that indicate we’re entering a crucial—and difficult—conversation.

Physical signs
What happens in your body when conversations get tough? Do you feel a knot in your stomach? Do your eyes go dry?

Emotional signs
How do you react—or try to hide it—when you feel scared, hurt, or angry?

Behavioral signs
If you imagine watching yourself on a screen: Do you see yourself raising your voice, pointing a finger like a loaded weapon? Or do you go completely quiet?

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Notice whether the conversation is safe for everyone

If you can detect that a conversation is becoming both crucial and difficult, you can act immediately.

These actions can—and should—follow two tracks:

• Pay attention to the content of the conversation
• Pay attention to the behavior of those having the conversation

Both reveal something vital about the level of safety during the pressure you’re experiencing together.

“When you really pay attention, everything is your teacher.”—Ezra Bayda

Here are a few more keys to understanding safety:

When it’s safe, you can say anything
Dialogue requires a free flow of meaning. Nothing kills dialogue like fear.

When it’s unsafe, you start seeing anything
When your emotions intensify, important brain functions shut down. We become narrow-minded—almost blind. Or we start seeing anything, like “ghosts in broad daylight.”

Look for these “safety breaches” so you can spot—and understand—when dialogue is in danger. That’s how you can re-engage your brain in the conversation.

Practically speaking, try stepping out of the conversation… and looking at it from a slight distance: Is it starting to turn fearful?

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When it’s unsafe—you can restore safety

The key here is to interpret all kinds of attacks and rhetorical jabs as signs that safety is at risk—instead of taking them personally and letting the important conversation completely derail.

If someone gives you the silent treatment, tries to mock you, insult you, or tear down your arguments, it’s easy to take it as a personal attack.

Don’t let that happen.

Redirect the silence or the aggression as indicators that someone feels unsafe. Then do something—on your side—to make it safe again on their side.

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Notice when someone changes their style—because they’re under stress

What style or patterns do you default to when you’re under stress? And what signs can you spot in the other person?

Silence patterns:

• Masking – You understate or only share partial truths.
• Avoiding – You steer clear of sensitive topics.
• Withdrawing – You exit the conversation—or the room—altogether.

Aggression patterns:

• Controlling – You force others into your way of thinking.
• Labeling – You dismiss people or ideas by slapping on a label.
• Attacking – You shift from winning the argument to making the person suffer.

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Let’s review what we’ve looked at:

• We’ve explored how to recognize when a conversation becomes crucial and difficult.
• We’ve emphasized the importance of noticing emotional, physical, and behavioral signs. The earlier we can catch that a conversation is becoming tough, the more we can keep our brain engaged and our emotions in check.
• By doing this, we can also help others stay grounded—and contribute to turning unsafe conversations into ones that feel safer to be in.
• We’ve explored how we can notice when we (or others) change our style under stress.

Here I just want to warmly encourage you to work deeply—and brutally honestly—with the patterns you fall back on in conversations when you’re in “fight” or “flight” mode, whether that pattern is silence or aggression.

Fear stifles meaning—and kills the flow of meaning. If opinions are being forced or withheld, you know you’re facing a challenge…