Well, as I predicted, I did not try out a defensive and aggressive style in my “difficult conversation” last week in the Negotiation Workshop.\u00a0 But luckily, it wasn’t necessary.\u00a0 The person I was speaking with was incredibly attentive to my character’s concerns, and clearly understood the meaning of active listening.<\/p>\n
It is easy to feel satisfied with a conversation when both you and your counterpart have been trained in the methods for effective listening and negotiation.\u00a0 And, indeed, I left last Thursday’s role-play confident about my ability to\u00a0voice my own concerns during a difficult conversation, and although I still felt a bit uncomfortable speaking uninterrupted about how hurt I was by the whole situation, it felt reassuring that the person I talked with was interested in what I was saying.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But I’m just not sure how much I can take from this role-play and envision it happening in real life.\u00a0 I remember my real-life difficult conversation, and the feelings of guilt and embarrassment that I had when trying to express my anger.\u00a0 It wasn’t difficult to express anger (in a nice way) in the role play, because I was pretty sure at that point that the person I was talking with would be receptive and understanding.\u00a0 But I guess I just think that most people aren’t that good at dealing with difficult conversations.\u00a0 Most people aren’t going to have these skills that Workshop participants are learning, and will be much harder to talk with than the person in my role play.\u00a0 I’ve never before had a probelm visualizing how effective negotiation skills could be in real-life situations, but something about the emotional weight of difficult conversations makes me pessimistic that someone with my instincts could ever get past “caving.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
And it frustrates me that I couldn’t quite find it in me to be aggressive and defensive during this role play, because I think I just need to\u00a0know what it feels\u00a0like to act in that way.\u00a0 (I would much rather try out this style in a role play than in real life!)\u00a0<\/p>\n
It’s not that I don’t think these “difficult conversation” skills don’t work.\u00a0 On the contrary – I have a lot of faith in the power of listening and attentiveness during difficult conversations, and, as my role play proved, it works almost perfectly when two people are equally amenable to these skills.\u00a0 But I almost wish that my difficult conversation role play had been more<\/em> difficult, and that I could have re-lived that real-life conversation that I can still vividly remember.\u00a0 Even though I was very satisfied with the outcome of the role play, I still<\/em> felt as though the anger that I would have harbored if I were this character would have remained repressed.<\/p>\n Is there a way to vent anger at the same time as being a good negotiator?\u00a0 Or do you need to have an aggressive personality in order to feel heard when you’re angry?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Well, as I predicted, I did not try out a defensive and aggressive style in my “difficult conversation” last week in the Negotiation Workshop.\u00a0 But luckily, it wasn’t necessary.\u00a0 The person I was speaking with was incredibly attentive to my character’s concerns, and clearly understood the meaning of active listening. It is easy to feel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":920,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1287],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-16","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pon-intern"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/920"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/pon1\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}