People Almost Never Change Without First Feeling Understood

This post's title is a quote from the book I've started reading for the leadership program: Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen, "of the Harvard Negotiation Project." My manager suggested it because she likes it so much and feels it's really impacted her approach.

I'm very much liking the book so far, partly because it makes a lot of sense to me. The big premise is that to best negotiate confrontational conversations, you need to really listen and learn, change your basic stance to a non-confrontational one (without avoiding the issues either--really talk them through, just without trying to "win"). Pretty typically organized book, in that it starts with the premise in the introduction, explains the entire concept in brief in the first chapter, then breaks everything down with more specifics the rest of the book.

I just finished reading the first detail chapter: "Stop Arguing About Who's Right: Explore Each Other's Stories." Basically, everyone has a perspective that is only part of the big picture. We are each right and capturing the truth, but only as we understand it. Instead of pushing our interpretation of things, we need to stand back and listen to their interpretations to learn from each other and get a fuller understanding of the situation. It's not an either-or approach, but an "and stance."

I bring this up here because I feel it explains and explicates what I was trying to capture with this blog's title/description at the top of the page. I've always worried it would be interpreted as moral relativism or lazy ethical thinking, when I really intended it to say what this chapter just spelled out to me. I know I'm right in some ways, but even when you disagree with me you're right too. Let's talk about it and learn from each other. Sometimes I can get a little strident, but that doesn't mean I don't want to hear from you.