change is important to acknowledge, but you need to move your thinking towards embracing vulnerability rather than running away from it. Without being brave enough to take a risk, you won't get to this lower right quadrant. The reward is progressing to the upper right quadrant, to success and growth. That's where we play the game we really want to play – and play it well.
Moving away from doing the wrong thing well to doing the right thing poorly takes a huge amount of courage. In advance, congratulations for taking this significant step.
Being able to deal with the tough stuff starts with getting clear on what the tough stuff is for you personally. Knowing which conversations you may be avoiding at times but would like to be better at will bring a greater awareness to what you can change in these situations. Once you have some clarity about which key conversations you find tough, it's important to start being comfortable with being vulnerable. Taking the courageous step to changing your behaviours will be the pathway to growth and success.
Apathy. That's my tough stuff. I don't mind anger, tears or other heightened emotions – I actually enjoy the energy that's present in those circumstances. But a noncommittal attitude, lack of ownership or inaction drives me crazy.
It would be easy for me just to avoid dealing with apathy. I can easily surround myself with people who have energy and passion. Yet, I have found that through dealing with my own tough stuff I have become good at dealing with apathy. In fact, colleagues say the way I deal with apathetic behaviour is a great strength. No-one is immune to the tough stuff, but we can all achieve successful outcomes by building our skills.
For me the tough conversations are those that often do not have a clear right or wrong answer. Having a greater awareness about the conversations that I naturally avoid has helped me make a courageous choice to tackle them. The ancient Greek philosopher Socrates famously said ‘know thyself', and in my personal and professional experience, I find the more individuals know themselves, the greater the chance for personal growth and change. It all starts here: get clear and specific on what's tough for you and make the courageous choice to tackle it.
What riles me is when people say ‘I can't' – a non-possibility mindset. I can handle ‘I don't want to', but when people say ‘I can't' it gets under my skin, probably because it seems to go against everything I stand for. I believe in people's potential, I believe there is more in a person than you can see in any given moment, and I believe we can always get better.
Similar to Darren, my life might be easier if I simply avoided the ‘I can't-ers' and chose to align myself with only the positive, possibility thinkers, but I haven't. I have gone the other way and become a psychologist – a profession where I deal with the non-possibility mindset all the time.
I have survived by tackling my own tough stuff head-on, learning the skills of acceptance and empathy, and applying the tools in this book to help make a difference with those tough conversations I struggle with most. By confronting my tough stuff, I have found that I get to live within my purpose: there is nothing better for me than helping a person break through a limiting belief and transform from ‘I can't' to ‘I can'.
• Identify the specific key conversations that you find tough. This will help you work out which areas need most attention.
• You will have to have key conversations – there's no way around it. Becoming skilled and confident at these conversations will see you succeed for years to come.
• Vulnerability means taking risks without knowing the outcome. It means being okay with making mistakes. Being equipped to deal with the tough stuff means being vulnerable at times.
• Moving away from doing the wrong thing well to doing the right thing poorly takes courage, and the rewards of this courageous step are success and growth.
• Remember that there are no perfect managers or leaders – we all make mistakes.
• Avoid procrastination, aim for perfection and be okay with ‘perfectly good enough'.
2
Dealing with the tough stuff
Foundational skills
As a leader, supervisor or manager, there's one inevitable task you will encounter: the tough-stuff conversation. Whether it's addressing underperformance, critiquing work or dealing with heightened emotions, some situations with some people will be tough – there's no escaping it.
Given that we can't avoid the tough conversations, a clear choice remains. The fact that these conversations are inevitable leaves us the options to:
▪ passively ignore them
▪ actively avoid them
▪ have them reluctantly
▪ get good at them.
We think the last option is by far your best choice if you plan to stay in a leadership or management role for longer than the next month or so, particularly if you want to be a leader with influence. If, on the other hand, you're a few weeks away from handing in your notice and heading to Tuscany to eat, drink and generally be merry, then perhaps you can get away with the first three options.
For the rest of us, who have to make do with reading about Tuscany (and occasionally sitting through a bad romantic comedy about a 50-something woman rediscovering her life) and turning up to work each day, there really isn't much choice. It's imperative to get good at the tough-stuff conversations because, quite simply, your leadership legacy is defined by how well you handle them.
The two steps to getting good at the tough conversations are:
▪ building a better understanding of human behaviour
▪ learning how to modify and influence the behaviour of others.
These are foundational skills that underlie the strategies and practices, but before they can be applied we need to unpack some basic principles about why we do what we do.
Human behaviour can be mind-boggling at times. For every example of strength, bravery, courage and heroism in the world there are as many acts of stupidity, irrationality and downright bizarreness. Yet all behaviour can be understood in the context within which it's exhibited. At some point in our lives we have all been flabbergasted by someone's behaviour and asked ourselves, ‘Why do people act this way?' or thought, ‘I don't understand why they have done this'. But it's worth considering the broader context to understand the why behind the what.
Understanding why people behave the way they do can be tricky and has essentially spawned the science of psychology. Despite human behaviour being incredibly complex and diverse, the building blocks of behaviour (what we do) are best understood through a simple yet effective tool known as the ABC model.
The ABC model breaks down and segments behaviour in order to understand it better in the same way that an editor pulls sentences apart and considers each word on its own. If you've ever studied psychology or read books on behaviour modification, you will have encountered this model. It's back-to-basics psychology, but it provides a great platform for investigating what else is at play when we're exploring human behaviour. When dealing with the tough stuff, understanding the context of someone's behaviour is important and will lead to greater success in your ability to influence that behaviour.
The ABC model of human behaviour (see figure 2.1) considers behaviour across three elements:
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