Practicing Hard Conversations Makes Them Eaiser

Practicing hard conversations makes them easier. This is true even if the live conversation doesn’t look much like your practice.

Hard Conversations As Graphs

Hard conversations feel like a graph traversal/search problem to me. Nodes are topics, facts, decisions, emotional beats. Edges are transitions, questions, clarifications. You can have cycles, edge weights (some topics are easier to move to than others), etc. Which path will we take? What node will we end up on?

Hard conversations go in unpredictable directions, and some of the paths are bad. “What if they yell at me?” “What if they destroy my arguments with facts and logic?” “What if they lose respect for me?” Bad news: the graph is infinite at human scale. It’s impossible to prep for all paths.

The benefit of practice isn’t from exhaustively searching the graph and visiting every possibility. It comes from the increased calm and sense of preparation you feel during the difficult conversation.

Another reason hard conversations are hard is they can be emotionally charged. Emotions are useful signals about what is going on in our brains but crank up the conflict resolution difficulty level. Now you’re doing multiplayer graph traversal during an earthquake.

Practice By Sketching And Talking

Try sketching a graph! Where will you start? Where might you go next? Practice some edges. What phrases are your transitions? Where do you want to end up? Spending a few minutes drawing and saying phrases out loud helps me. Maybe don’t tell them you did this - saying “I prepped for this discussion by reading up on Dijkstra’s algorithm” does not lend itself to emotional connection. You know what does? Practice.