What to do: preparing before personal interactions
Who says that speeches and public speaking gigs are the only times you should prepare ahead of time?
Before an important private interaction I always take a little time to sketch out in my mind how things are going to go. How will I open the conversation? How will she respond? Which responses are most likely, and how will I deal with each of them?
The temptation is to just walk in and start talking. We have conversations every day, right? What’s to prepare? If it’s important, and if you’re only going to get one really good shot, prepare ahead of time.
I usually do this with mind mapping
For most interactions this takes up just a few minutes before the start of the conversation, and I don’t do anything formal or on paper.
But if the conversation is really important and the stakes, whether for me or the other person, are really high, I take the time to do some formal preparation. The most effective way I’ve found for preparing for an important conversation is to create a mind map.
I usually start out by mapping what I’d like to accomplish, and what the conflicts in the interaction are likely to be (if any). For example, if I’m delivering news about a poor customer review to the staff member responsible for working with that customer, then my goal is to improve performance in the future, and the conflicts are likely to center around the quality of performance or why “the customer is seeing things the wrong way.”
Then I create a branch (you can visualize a mind map as a tree with branches) for my opening line—this is often the most difficult for me when it comes time for the actual conversation, so I usually plan it ahead of time.
Once I have it written down I can check it for perspective: does it assume that I understand the motivations of my employee (bad idea), or have I started by identifying the facts at the root of the problem (neutral ground from which to start mutual exploration)?
Once I have the opening line sketched out and sanitized, I create subbranches for each of the possible responses for the employee, and sketch out my response to each. I don’t carry this too far—I’m not writing a screenplay after all—but I do carry it far enough that I’m sure I have the major bases covered.
An example
For example, two possible responses in this situation are: “Really? That surprises me. I thought we had an excellent rapport and that I met her needs” and “This is totally her fault. She was difficult to deal with from the beginning and she’s lucky I helped her at all.” What’s important is not that I get the words right, but that I capture the sentiment of the employee’s response and know how I am going to respond so that I steer the conversation in the most productive direction possible.
Look carefully at yourself during this prep work
It is important at this stage to be honest with yourself and to be imaginative in preparing for the possible responses from your conversation partner to your message. If your partner responds in a way that you are completely unprepared for and you start to founder and lose control of the conversation, then your message will be lost and not recovered without considerable follow-on eVort on your part. Try to anticipate the questions, and know how you are going to respond to every possible response.
If you’re well prepared you can dodge, parry, and thrust with confidence while staying on message in your private communication.
