Episode 174 - Two Types of Hard Conversations
Most of us know when we need to have a hard conversation. It’s more difficult to notice the ones we’re quietly putting off because we think there’s always more time. There are two different kinds of hard conversations, and understanding which kind you’re dealing with can make a difference. A deadline conversation has urgency built in: avoiding it can lead to unwanted consequences. A drift conversation is about something important, but it's easy to postpone because nothing terrible happens today if you don’t say what you need to say. In this episode, I’m breaking down both types of conversations, why drift conversations can be especially easy to avoid, and how to start participating more intentionally in the relationships that matter to you. Because whether there’s a deadline or not, the same skills can help you start the conversation, stay in it, and handle whatever happens next. Here’s what I cover:
Why deadline conversations can actually be easier to act on when time and external consequences make avoiding them harder
The reason drift conversations are so easy to put off and why your relationship continues to change even when you decide to “deal with it later”
How the thoughts and stories you keep to yourself can become part of the drift in a relationship
Why recognizing that you have a finite amount of time in every season of a relationship can help you decide what’s worth saying
How to participate in creating the relationships you want without needing to control how the other person responds
Reserve your seat for Sara’s next workshop: sarafisk.coach/voice
Find Sara here:
pages.sarafisk.coach/difficultconversations
youtube.com/@sarafiskcoaching1333
Transcript
00:59
I was having a conversation with a client in a session the other day, and it was so helpful I wanted to share it with you.
01:06
There are two different kinds of hard conversations, and understanding which kind you're dealing with I think is helpful, and it matters. So let's get into it.
01:18
The two different types of hard conversations, I call one a deadline conversation and the other a drift conversation. Let me give you a definition of a deadline conversation.
01:30
It's gonna be very obvious to you. It's a conversation with a deadline built into it. Let me give you an example. I've been coaching a woman, I'll call her Laura.
01:40
Laura hired a contractor to come and do some work on her house, and a lot of things were not turning out the way she had wanted and were not what she had paid for.
01:50
She made an appointment, and the contractor was coming to her house on Monday. That was the deadline.
01:57
At some point, she had to decide what she was gonna say because if she didn't say it, there were consequences that she didn't want.
02:07
She would have to hire someone else to come finish the work, or she would have to be stuck with work that didn't meet her standards. That is a deadline conversation.
02:16
It's where time kind of has you backed in a corner, and if you don't say what it is that you wanna say, there's gonna be consequences that you don't want.
02:26
Maybe your boss needs an answer by Friday, or the opportunity is gonna go to someone else.
02:32
Your mother-in-law is coming next week, and you're gonna have to do what she wants to do because you haven't proposed an alternative activity.
02:41
The parent-teacher conference has been scheduled, and you're gonna have to talk to the teacher about how she's not enforcing your child's IEP.
02:51
Those are all consequences that you don't want, and that combined with the deadline creates urgency. Now, sometimes we hate that urgency.
03:03
It's what is waking us up in the middle of the night because the contractor's coming on Monday, and we don't know what we're gonna say.
03:09
It's what is making us rehearse on the way to work or on the way to the parent-teacher conference. But there's actually something very useful about that urgency.
03:20
It makes avoiding the conversation sometimes impossible, if not harder. Time is making the decision for you, and if you don't do it, something's gonna happen that you don't like.
03:34
Now, those types of conversations we need help with. We need to know how to start the conversation, how to stay in the conversation, and how to handle whatever happens.
03:45
That's work that I'm teaching every single week in a free workshop called Speak Up. Look for the link in my bio, and I'm gonna come back to it in a second. Drift conversations are the other kind.
03:58
Let me give you a definition. Drift conversations are really conversations that don't have a deadline. They're about important things, but they don't have to happen immediately. Here's an example.
04:11
I have another client whose son is graduating from high school in a year. He just started his senior year. He plans to go away to college.
04:21
And as she is beginning to think about this transition to empty nesting, she's also thinking about her marriage.
04:28
Raising kids has occupied an enormous amount of time and energy and attention, and as she's beginning to experience the last kid who's not taking all the time and the energy and attention, she's noticing, "It's just gonna be me and my husband, and a lot of our interactions feel more like roommates now than lovers, than husband and wife." And she's starting to ask herself questions.
04:58
"Do I like the relationship we have? Do I wanna be closer?
05:02
What's gonna happen when we're no longer organizing so much of our life around, you know, taking care of kids or when they're all gone?" But there's no deadline.
05:14
No one is telling her, "You know what? We need to discuss the state of our marriage by Friday at 5:00." She could talk to him tonight. She could talk to him next month.
05:25
She could wait until the son literally graduates or until he moves out. She could even wait after that. That's what makes drift conversations so interesting.
05:36
Nothing terrible necessarily happens today when you don't have the conversation. That's why postponing them can feel so easy.
05:47
It almost feels like we're putting something on a shelf that we're gonna get to later, but it isn't, because the relationship keeps happening while you are waiting Your child grows up.
06:02
Your marriage keeps taking shape. Your friendship keeps developing the patterns that it has. And time is passing inside the relationship, whether you're actively participating in it or not.
06:19
That's what I mean when I call it a drift conversation. Think about an actual boat that drifts. It seems to be stationary on the water.
06:29
You don't have to be having-- You don't have to have the motor on or be turning the wheel for it to go in any direction.
06:35
The boat still moves just by the nature of the ocean creating waves and currents. Relationships do that too.
06:44
And I think sometimes we unconsciously don't realize that we're not able to pause our relationships. They keep happening. We say things like, "You know what?
06:56
I'll figure out how to talk about that eventually," or, "I'll deal with this when things calm down," or, "We'll work on our marriage after the kids leave." But that relationship is not just sitting on a shelf.
07:11
You're continuing to have a relationship during that entire time because, in large part, our relationships are the thoughts that we have about each other.
07:22
So if I'm worrying that my husband and I are dri- have drifted apart, that now we're more like roommates than husband and wife or lovers, then my mind is finding evidence for how that might be true.
07:34
I begin to tell myself stories about what's happening in our relationship, and I'm having that all inside my own brain, not necessarily sharing it. But that's where the drift is actually happening.
07:49
The drift happens in my mind before it happens in real life. The truth about the drift conversations is that it's a choice. It just doesn't feel like one we are actually making.
08:05
Now, I don't say this because we all need to panic and immediately start having conversations with everyone that we have an unresolved issue with. That's not what I'm asking you to do.
08:16
I'm actually asking you to become more conscious about something that is much more simple but also much more useful and profound, and it is this.
08:28
We have a finite amount of time with every person that we love.
08:33
That is very simple and also profoundly useful when we're thinking about the types of relationships that we want to be creating and how the, how we need to be doing that.
08:45
This came up in a recent coaching session with someone I'll call Molly.
08:49
Molly was divorced, and during her divorce, her father expressed a couple of opinions about what he thought of her and the way that she had conducted herself during the divorce.
09:01
He didn't approve of some of the decisions that she had made, and she had always meant to address it with him, but she kept putting it off, putting it off, putting it off.
09:11
Then he had a series of small strokes that didn't do any, um, permanent damage.
09:17
He did have to stay in the hospital for a few days and then a rehab facility while he recovered, and when she came to the session right after that had happened, the first thing she said was, "I've gotta talk about it with him because I don't know if this is gonna happen again." So what she had learned was that sometimes in these drift conversation scenarios, where it's really something that doesn't have an urgent timeline on it, sometimes life will give me an urgent timeline that I didn't realize was gonna happen.
09:55
When people perceive their remaining time as more limited, emotionally meaningful relationships become more important.
10:07
We've all heard somebody who has a death or something happen in their family, and they say, "You've gotta reach out. Tell people you love them. Hold your children close," right?
10:17
Those kinds of situations really put our time into focus.
10:23
Aging also helps bring time into focus because I'm sure it will make sense that an eighty-year-old thinks very differently about time than a twenty-year-old. But here's what I want you to hear.
10:36
Sometimes life will create deadlines for you if you don't have these conversations on your own, just like the ocean creates movement for a boat and causes it to drift.
10:52
Your kid starts senior year, right? Suddenly, there are only so many ordinary Tuesday nights before they leave. Your best friend tells you she's moving.
11:03
Your parents start aging in ways that become very obvious, and suddenly something that felt unlimited, there's edges around it.
11:14
There's limitations, and you can see the ending of a particular chapter, and that can really change what matters.
11:24
I think there's something very useful about creating that awareness before life creates it for us, not as a scare tactic, but as information.
11:36
For example, if your daughter is fifteen, there are three more summers before she's eighteen. Now, does that mean that every summer has to be magical?
11:47
Maybe she spends half those summers in her room. Who knows? That's not the point.
11:51
The point is to make it conscious that this version of your relationship has a time limit, and if there is something that you want to say- You need to say it because every version of relationships that we have with the people around us have those time limits, with our parents, with the season of our marriage, with friendships, even with coworkers, brothers and sisters.
12:22
We want to be able to look at time in a way that is helpful because if the only conversations that you prioritize are the deadline conversations, some kind of external deadline is making you have the conversations, some of the relationships that matter to you the most won't get talked about.
12:47
There's always something else that is calling for our attention. There's work deadlines, there's appointments, there's laundry, somebody needs a ride, somebody needs dinner, right?
12:57
Deadline conversations will grab your attention because the urgency is yelling at you. The contractor is coming back on Monday. But drift conversations don't yell. Drift conversations whisper.
13:14
They say, "I wish we were closer. I miss him. I don't know if we're okay. I wish I could tell her this. I don't want this relationship to keep feeling this way.
13:28
I want something different between us." And none of those things necessarily require action by Monday, so they can stay at that whisper level for a long time.
13:41
So here's a question I want you to think about. What would you do differently if you stopped unconsciously treating this relationship as though you had unlimited time?
13:55
I do not mean what would you do if this person died tomorrow or this was your last day to live. I don't think that's useful. That creates a lot of unnecessary fear and panic and urgency.
14:06
What I mean to call your attention to is just your participation in this relationship.
14:14
What do you want that to look like before the kid leaves home, before your parents get to the point where you're not able to communicate as well with them anymore, before a friendship chapter closes, before you're empty nesters?
14:33
Did you say the things that mattered to you? Did you ask for what you wanted? Did you try to repair what you wanted to repair? Did you let someone know that you wanted more closeness?
14:47
Did you establish some limits when limits were needed? Did you participate in creating the relationships you wanted instead of just waiting to see what the relationship became?
15:01
The goal is not to guarantee an outcome because let's be honest, you could reach out to your husband and he could say, "You know, that's not something I'm interested in." You can try to repair something with a friend and discover that that relationship is not gonna be able to be repaired.
15:18
The goal in having the conversation is not to guarantee that the other person responds the way you want.
15:26
The goal is to be able to look back and say, "I participated in trying to make that relationship meaningful for me on whatever level I choose. I did what was mine to do.
15:39
I said what was mine to say." So I want you to think about a drift conversation that you might want to have.
15:50
It's probably something that could remain exactly the same if you don't talk about it for another six months, maybe another year even.
16:00
I want you to just ask yourself, "What do I want to do with this relationship? What do I want it to be?
16:08
Is the way that I'm participating right now moving us in that direction?" Because if the answer is no, you have options and you don't have unlimited time.
16:23
We need to begin to think in concrete terms about the reality of the way time passes for everyone because those deadline conversations, those are almost actually a lot easier to have because of that external consequence that's forcing us to take action.
16:43
If you need help having a deadline conversation, I need to see you in my next free workshop because that's what we do every single week.
16:50
We figure out, "How do I have this conversation that's bearing down on me soon?" And here's the secret.
17:01
The same skills that will help you have the deadline conversations in a way that is less urgent with taking up less of your time, less brain space, less hand-wringing, less rehearsing, less feeling terrible until you get to the day when the conversation's happening, it's actually possible to have deadline conversations in a very non-stress way.
17:25
That's what I'm teaching women how to do every single week in the coaching that I do, and we're starting with the free workshop Speak Up. Find the link in my bio. Sign up for this next week.
17:34
And here's the secret. The same skills that make it easier to have those deadline conversations make it easier to have these drift conversations as well.
17:45
Knowing how to bring something up in a way that feels good to you, knowing how to stay in the conversation and say what you want to say without collapsing or without the emotions taking over, without freezing, and knowing how to handle what happens after, those are actually the three steps of every conversation.
18:05
So as we end, wrap up for today, think about two things. Number one, what would be different in my relationships if I actually acknowledged the limitations of time? What would I do differently?
18:19
How would I participate differently in my most important relationships? And number two, which skill do I really need to work on? Do I need to work on starting the conversation?
18:31
Do I need to work on staying in the conversation? Or do I need to work on handling what happens after?
18:37
And if you want some help with that, that's why you show up for one of the free workshops that I'm doing every single week. The link is in the bio. I'll see you there. Thanks for listening.
18:45
See you next week.
