Now that you know what you want to talk about, it’s time to turn to the how of dialogue. How

the stakes were fairly low at first, but with time and growing emotions, the relationships soured and quality of life suffered—driving the stakes up.

You want to gather a lot of meaning from various experts. You send out a meeting invite to “discuss new product features.” The discussion is robust. You end the meeting with a pretty clear consensus among the gathered experts. Next, you review some market research, get feedback from the finance team, and do some limited customer testing. You take

Just after we observe what others do and just before we feel some emotion about it, we tell ourselves a story. We add meaning to the action we observed. We make a guess at the motive driving the behavior. Why were they doing that? We also add judgment—is that good or bad? And then, based on these thoughts or stories, our body responds with an

“What do I really want?” “What should I do right now to move toward what I really want?”

(Asks for other’s path.) Honestly? I don’t know what to think. All I know is what I just shared, and I hope you can see how I might at least have the question. Did you?

The worst at dialogue fall hostage to their emotions, and they don’t even know it.

So what do you do if the other person doesn’t seem to care about your purpose? You choose that as the topic of the Crucial Conversation you need to have.

“What am I pretending not to notice about my role in the problem?” “When I found out that Louis was holding project meetings without me, I felt like I should ask him about why I wasn’t included. I believed that if I did, I could open a dialogue that would help us work better together. But then I didn’t, and as my resentment grew, I was even less