C: Welcome to Slingshot25 Shotcast, a series of bite-sized podcasts that will feel like an expresso shot to your brain. I’m Courtney
J: And I’m Jackie.
C: Something we’ve been thinking about is courage, courage, courage. Five minutes of courage. It’s one of the things we teach, we talk about. It’s really a recency effect because we just did a webinar on tough conversations and we asked people like, what, you know, what makes tough conversations tough? And we heard everything that people are afraid of in a tough conversation and all the things that courage would help with. We heard things like being scared of what the other person is going to say, feeling not prepared, not knowing what to say, lots of fear. And so we thought it’d be really good to talk about, well, how do we help you muster some courage? So that’s what we’re going to do in this episode.
J: Let’s do it. Let’s muster some courage.
C: So the first little one is that I would invite is some reframing. So much of the time we think about giving feedback as a negative, a hard thing, a bad thing we don’t want to do. And this is a very simple question, but can you embrace the idea of “Can I be a loving critic to someone that, when I actually care about them and I care about them enough, it’s worth my energy to find some courage to share things that are going to help them. Whether that’s to help them be better, to help them avoid a habit, to help them, I don’t know, keep repeating the same thing. If you’re doing it for someone, I think sometimes it’s easier to muster courage. Jack, what do you got?
J: Yeah, I love that. I have so many things, but I’m just going to give you one today that I think about. If you’re going to have a conversation that is making you nervous, that you are anxious about, the best thing you can do is to prepare for that conversation. I see people be anxious about a conversation, but they just sit in stew in that sort of anxiety. There’s a quote from Mark Twain. I use it a lot. I love it. It’s something along the lines…I’m not going to get it exactly right, but the quote is “My life is full of tragedy, most of which never happened”. We create so much tragedy in our heads. There are so many stories in our head that keep us stuck and keep us from doing the work that we need to do. So, I like to use this idea of what I call ‘outsource your anxiety’. Outsource your anxiety onto essentially a planning document, if you will. I mean, you can do this on a Post-it note or, I guess even in your head, but I do encourage you to actually write it down. What I want to encourage you to do is to get a little bit of discipline about how you want to prepare for that conversation that’s making you nervous so that you’re still going to have to muster up those minutes of courage to go in and do that. But you’re going to feel a lot better about what’s going to be on the other side of that. Breaking the ice and getting into the conversation. So maybe it’s helpful if we talk a little bit about the things that you can do to prepare? What are the kinds of questions you would ask yourself in preparing for that anxious conversation?
C: Yes. I think the first one is getting really clear about what you want.
J: Oh yeah.
C: So much of time we’re thinking give feedback, give feedback, give feedback. If you are getting ready for a conversation, just know that feedback conversations are going to get emotional. They’re going to get dicey. They may move in directions you didn’t anticipate. It’s really important to get clear about what you want and if you’re not sure what you want, if there’s not an outcome, if there isn’t a desired behavior change, if there’s not something you can identify, then maybe ask yourself if you even need to have the conversation. Sometimes people just want to tell you, “I told you”. Well, just needing to tell people stuff isn’t actually helping performance in any way. And it actually might be damaging trust or damaging a relationship.
J: Oh, absolutely. And I think we kind of kid ourselves on that. We think that it’s a really strong objective, but it’s really just kind of like the idea of like rubbing the puppy’s nose into the carpet if they’ve piddled on the carpet. That’s not an objective. So get really clear about that. I love that, Courtney. The second thing that I think about is taking some perspective. I like to say, take a walk around the problem. Walk around the issue and to take three perspectives.
J: The first perspective is, of course, yours. And this isn’t just, “oh yeah, this is how I’m thinking about this”. You can start there. But then challenge yourself to confront your stories like, “how true is that?” and “what kind of emotions do you have tied up in this? You don’t have to share this work with anyone else. We actually encourage you not to, so that you’ll be more honest with yourself when confronting your own story. So that’s the first perspective. The second perspective is the other person’s. Just imagine what they’re going to be thinking and feeling about this subject and jot a few notes down just start to anticipate. You can’t know, you can’t know for sure, but I bet you’re going to get pretty close and it’s going to help you to show up in that conversation far more empathetic. And the third perspective, it’s kind of an odd one. We call it the fly on the wall perspective, which is really what would a neutral third party say about this situation? I find that that tends to kind of dial down the office politics and the drama. If someone rolled in here that didn’t have anything to do with this place, how ridiculous would this appear to them? Some of these perspectives are kind of hard to get other than your own.
C: And dialing down to make things less intense makes them not so scary. Then it doesn’t require as much courage.
J: Yeah, I love that. That’s true. Yeah.
C: It’s the perspective of “how much is this going to matter tomorrow?” “How much is it going to matter in five months?” “How much in a matter of five years?” Maybe I can have five minutes of courage because it’s really important right now and it’s not going to matter.
J: Yeah. I love it.
C: We have a couple other tips about preparing and setting the tone, and anticipating how people are going to react. Just whatever you can do to get your mind prepared for the conversation allows you to have a little more confidence and maybe not be as nervous. It’s about getting your mind right before the thing even starts.
J: Yeah. I love that. Actually, this is one place that I encourage people in setting the tone is script out and practice saying your very first line. It’s the only line of the conversation that you actually will have any control over because then it’s game on. Practice saying it a few times to the dog, or the cat, or I don’t know, on your drive to work. Say it out loud, and make sure that it’s a statement that really sets a welcoming tone and a “let’s have an open conversation” kind of tone.
C: All right. So we had this conversation because we believe that most things with 15 minutes of courage, just go do them, is going to make a big difference. It’s going to reduce your anxiety and just go do the right thing. It will. You know how we talk about a double-yolker and that an egg is a double quoter, I’m going to close with my favorite courage change quote. It’s by Jack Canfield and it is “Everything you want is on the other side of fear”. So if you want team health, you want trust, you want this issue to stop coming up, find 15 minutes of courage and go have that conversation.
So that’s all we have for this episode of our Shotcast, but we always have more to say, if you want more, drop us a line at slingshot25.com until next time.