Motley Fool Money - 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

If you're a small business owner, you already know what it takes to keep everything moving. You're juggling customers, invoices, and about 100 decisions every day. Thankfully, taxes don't have to be one more thing on that list. With Intuit TurboTax, you can get your business taxes done for you with a full service expert. TurboTax matches you with your dedicated tax expert. Who knows your industry understands your business write-offs and gives you the personalized advice your business deserves. upload your documents right in the app, hand everything off, and still feel like you're in the loop the whole way through.

You can even get real-time updates on your expert's progress right in the app, which makes it so much easier to stay on track. And you can get unlimited expert help at no extra cost, even on nights and weekends during tax season. Visit turbotax.com to get matched with an expert today, only available with TurboTax full service experts. 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, getting 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 faith, 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. It's so easy to get those kinds of motives. And in 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.