Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - The Keys to Crucial Conversations

Episode Date: April 14, 2020

Having more work conversations via video conference? You’re not alone. Effective conversations at work are more challenging these days. Fortunately Emily Hoffman, the communications expert behind "Crucial Conversations," has some helpful tips to share. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

stop wasting your nights on a mattress that doesn't get you experience the most comfortable mattress in the world the sleep number smart bed at the touch of a button you can personalize your comfort choose firmer or softer adjust cooler to warmer and right now save up to twenty five hundred dollars during our massive labor day event hurry into your local sleep number store today because we have your number. With The Motley Fool Money Extra, I'm Chris Hill. These days, more and more work conversations are happening through video conferencing, which means it's more difficult to pick up another person's cues

because you're not in the same room with them, which is why having productive outcomes in these situations is more important than ever before. Last summer, Motley Fool co-founder David Gardner talked with Emily Hoffman, the communications expert behind Crucial Conversations, about the keys to more effectively communicating at work. If you want a conversation to go differently than it has before, to go better than it has before, you have one option, which is to change the way you enter that conversation,

to change the you that you bring to that conversation. I can't change the other person. I can change me. So we really talk about how do I work on myself first? And there's a couple of great skills. I'll talk briefly about two of them that I love. The first one is to say, I need to focus on what I really want here. What is my intent when I come into that conversation?

Because ultimately, it's our intent, our motive, or what we call our heart that drives our behavior. So if I can get my intent right, I'm going to be successful. And if you think about, in fact, I'd love all of our listeners to do that right now. Think about the last time you had a conversation that didn't go very well. When you think about that conversation, get in your mind, either you got really upset or maybe you cried or maybe you just shut down completely and thought, this is not worth it.

I'm not going to say anything because I'll just get in trouble. Whatever it was you did, it didn't go very well. I want you to think about in that moment, what was your intent? What was it you wanted? For most of us, if we're honest about it, our intent was to save face, to avoid conflict, to blame someone else, to be right in the conversation. That's pretty much always my intent with my husband, right? Like, I'm going to be right, he's going to be wrong, and he's going to apologize to me, right?

It's so easy to get those kinds of motives. And instead, what we teach people is to challenge yourself and say, okay, that's maybe what my intent was when it didn't go very well. But what is it that I really want here? And not just what do I really want for me, because that starts very self-focused, but what do I want for that other person as well? What should they be getting out of our conversation? And what do I want for our relationship?

And what do I want for our team or our organization? Having to go through that process of asking those four questions and really thinking about what is it I want, that's how we challenge and get back to a better intent, an intent that will help us learn, produce results, strengthen relationships, and ultimately want to hear the other person. I'm Chris Hill. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.