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Six skills that do most of the work in a hard conversation.
Your patterns
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Skills
Separate what happened from what you concluded
Facts are what a camera would have caught. Everything else is a reading. Naming the difference out loud lowers the temperature because the other person can disagree with your reading without calling you a liar.
“What I saw was X. What I made of it was Y. Is Y right?”
Position vs. need
A position is the thing someone demands. A need is what the demand protects. Positions collide; needs often don't. Ask about the need before you argue with the position.
“What would it give you if we did it your way?”
Hold the boundary, drop the volume
A boundary is about what you will do, not what they must do. Said once, quietly, with a consequence you can actually carry out, it works better than a raised voice.
“I'm not going to keep talking while I'm being shouted at. I'll come back in an hour.”
Regulate before you respond
Above roughly a 7 out of 10 in activation, your judgement about tone is unreliable. A short delay is not weakness or conceding — it protects the outcome you want.
“I want to answer this properly. Give me until tonight.”
Repair without self-erasure
You can acknowledge the effect of something you did without agreeing to a story about who you are. Specific, bounded repair beats a blanket apology.
“Cutting you off was unfair, and I'm sorry. I still need us to finish the money conversation.”
Notice the loop
Most recurring conflicts run the same three or four steps. Once you can name the loop, you can step out of it at your own move rather than waiting for theirs.
“We're doing the thing again. Can we stop at this step and try it differently?”