Mastering the Difficult Conversation: The Four Key Skills for Leading Change and Leveraging Possibility in Any Situation

You know which conversation this is. The supervisee whose work has slipped. The colleague you have started routing around. The parent in a case meeting who has decided you are the problem. Your own family. You have rehearsed it, and you have either not had it or had it badly, and you have quietly concluded that something about you is not built for this.

Mitch Abblett’s position is that nothing about you is broken. Five habits take almost everyone out, and they start before you speak. Wanting, the craving to be right and to be validated. Wrestling, where you set about controlling the outcome and looking for someone to blame. Wilting, where the fog comes down and you cannot find your words. Worrying, which tips into something close to panic. And wavering, the doubt he calls the killer, sitting on top of your psyche like Everest. Named and mapped, they stop running the show quite so completely.

The second half is a process for the conversation itself, built around five moves: getting genuinely present, reframing what is happening behind the other person’s behaviour, saying the uncomfortable true thing with what he calls compassionate audacity, doing it from a point where being right has stopped mattering, and leaving the other person their autonomy rather than telling them how they feel. He is emphatic that this is not a script and not a technique. He says the scripts are pointless, and he spends a fair amount of the course explaining why the feedback sandwich fails. What he offers instead is closer to what a good diplomat or a good martial artist does, which is to have practised the principles until they are available under pressure.

You’ll walk away with

• The five habits that derail hard conversations, named clearly enough that you can catch yours in the moment rather than three days later
• A habit loop map of your own reactions: the trigger, the body response, what you then think and do, and what that quietly pays you
• A two-question pause before you speak, covering why you are talking at all and whose agenda you are actually serving
• A short body-based practice for slowing yourself down that works as a standalone habit and then transfers into the conversation
• A way of interrupting a reactive loop once it has already started, which is when you usually notice it
• The five-part process he calls PRIZE, taught as a flowing sequence you cycle back through rather than a checklist you work down
• Reframing that lets you see the pain point behind the other person’s behaviour without needing to be right about what it is
• Speaking equivalence: naming your own experience as no more and no less valid than theirs, which is what makes the honest sentence land instead of escalate
• The compassionate limit, including saying this needs to stop and meaning it, and knowing when to end the conversation without abandoning or attacking
• Practices attached to each skill, designed to be done between lessons rather than watched

Watch the course trailer

OBJECTIVES

• Demonstrate skill in managing difficult interactions by conducting in-the-moment assessment using Dr. Abblett’s PRIZE System.
• Develop “scan and response” skills with the top five challenging conversations you face.
• Demonstrate skills for proactive and effective response in these situations.
• Elevate your confidence for communicating with anyone about anything going forward.

PROGRAM OUTLINE

Lesson 1: On Your Mark!  Welcome to the Conversational Race You Did NOT Want to Run!

• The Anatomy of Difficult Conversations (and why that is crucial to understand)
• Assessing ourselves: What makes these conversations such a challenge?  How – exactly – are they getting stuck?
• Understanding why standard point-counterpoint and / or polite-and-dutiful-as-usual conversations fail
• How in this course you can learn the least taught communication skills – the WHEN, WHEN NOT, and HOW to emotionally and behaviourally scan and respond with others who are fixed, “certain” and unskillfully fired up
• Stretching Practice: Consulting Your Inner Compass
• Stretching Practice: Timing and Targeting Results with Intention

Lesson 2: Get Set!  The Habits You’ll Need to Stay the Course of the Conversation

• Learn to use the “Process Grid” tool for in-the-moment scanning of actions and reactions in these conversations
• Understanding the brain and learning basis of unskillful emotional reactivity for people in these hot button conversations and the reward-based learning habit “loops” people form that limit compassion, connection and collaboration
• Sampling the role of mindfulness-based skills for “flipping” these tough situations toward compassionate, creative progress
• Mapping your own reactive, unskillful habit loops which have knocked you flat or sent you running for the hills in these tough conversations
• Stretching Practice: TEAR Habit Loop Mapping
• Stretching Practice: Taking a NAP with Your Map

Lesson 3:   GO!  Learning the PRIZE System of the Difficult, Yet Effective Conversation

• Overview of Dr. Abblett’s PRIZE skills for enhancing the quality, timing and impact of communication responses
• Skill 1: Presence in the body and mind with core mindfulness, cognitive flexibility, focus and panoramic awareness skills in order to sidestep unskillful emotional reactivity, thinking errors / biases, and set yourself up for leading the moment
• Skill 2: Reframing other’s behavior and possible inner experience with skills of compassionate yet direct, authentic perspective-taking
• Skill 3: Inserting “compassionate audacity” from the Zero point in terms of learning to sidestep short-term, egoic agendas and instead do what resonates – what truly fits – with yourself, the other person, situation and needs of the broader context using structuring, guiding and containing interventions.
• Skill 4: Empowering common humanity for making resonant, effective choice to connect, create, respect boundaries or collaborate.  Here, you’re skillfully inviting the other person stand with you on equal footing in the here-and-now truth of what is occurring, absent distortion, bias and value judgment in the situation so that effectiveness and positive outcomes become possible.
• Stretching Practice: SLOWing Before Speaking
• Stretching Practice: Dropping Stinkin’ Thinkin’ Into Conversation Gaps
• Stretching Practice: SNAPPing Unskillful / Reactive Habit Loops
• Stretching Practice: Reframing & Seeing Behind Other’s Behaviour

Lesson 4:  The Race is Done and Yet Only Beginning — Putting PRIZE Conversations into Practice in Daily Life

• In Action: Demonstration and skill by skill modeling of PRIZE methods
• Touching the Unvaccinated Elephant at Home and at Work
• Going from Feedback to “Feel-back” with Others
• Encounters with the Political Polar(ized) Bear
• The “Ask”
• The “End”
• Shades of Racial Grey
• Separation of Church and Hate
• Learning to stay on track and claim the greatest prizes in your conversations with others
• Stretching Practice:  Speaking Equivalence
• Stretching Practice: Truth-Talking Amid Challenge
• Stretching Practice:  The Compassionate Dope-Slap