- 06 Jul, 2026
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Acas Guide To Challenging Conversations
By their very nature, these conversations can feel uncomfortable, challenging, and awkward. You’ve likely faced one you dreaded, put off, or avoided entirely, whether with a partner, a child, a family member, a friend, or a colleague. When a conversation feels loaded, finding the right words can sometimes feel impossible. Make womanaroundtown.com/contributed/a-full-breakdown-of-pridesdate-features-worth-knowing-about/ your goal to move toward clarity and mutual understanding. Speak from the “I” and name your feelings, your needs, and your experience.
Here are some tips for handling unexpected difficult conversations. This can be even truer when we are having difficult conversations. As an example, it’s harder to maintain eye contact and gauge how interested people are online, which can in turn lead to not being able to ‘read the room’ as well as face to face. And if you don’t feel confident you have people’s attention, it can make it significantly harder to maintain focus and engage with your team.
Include both viewpoints as a legitimate part of the discussion. Share your purposes and let the other person know you’re looking to sort out the situation together. The key is to shift your thinking from I need to explain myself (or deliver a message) to I need to listen and learn more about what’s going on. Our research shows that the listening is really the critical part. When communicating virtually, you want to engage everyone and remain present yourself. When everyone is just a little square on the screen, it can be harder to navigate meetings, manage conflict and present your true self, but you can still win people over with these few, conscious steps.
At the end of the day, the most important elements are sharing your feelings and keeping those you care about close to you. Hard conversations are uncomfortable, and we’d all like to avoid them, but tackling them head-on means that you’re being brave. If you or the other person gets shaky or emotional, take pauses to reset. There are few things in life that can make your stomach drop and your hands shake quite like the lead up to a difficult conversation.
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This is especially helpful for online discussions when you can’t provide reassurance in person. Plus, when they’re done with care, difficult conversations can build trust, shift long-standing dynamics, and even open space for healing and repair. Naming your feelings with “I” statements is powerful, and it helps shift the tone from attacking the person you’re talking with to inviting them to collaborate.
Emotional security is closely linked to secure attachment, effective emotion regulation, and a stable sense of self that does not depend on constant external validation. These individuals are better at managing interpersonal conflict and experience lower physiological stress reactivity, and, as a result, they maintain higher relationship satisfaction over time. It’s much easier to get distracted on a video call than when you’re sitting across the table from someone. To ensure your focus stays solely on the task at hand, mute notifications on both your phone and computer.
What Is Acceptance? Plus, 9 Tips To Help You Learn To Let Go
- Making notes before the meeting can ensure that you cover all the points you need to.
- You can test ways to redirect the conversation without losing momentum or sounding defensive.
- And because their self-worth is not contingent on “winning” the interaction, they can afford to be precise rather than punitive.
- But if we both walk away thinking about at least a couple of new things, then that actually is progress.
The real problem gets abandoned as the main concern becomes how to protect oneself. Pay extra attention to body language and other nonverbal cues. But they’re often very difficult to talk about — leaving us anxious, unsure, frustrated, or angry.
Use AI for Role-Playing – AI tools can help you practice difficult discussions by simulating different responses and emotional reactions. These “you” statements give an impression of being brutally honest when, in reality, they simply attack the other person’s character. This stance, as well as these phrases, leads to defensiveness and can potentially disrupt another’s sense of worthiness. In short, they turn the interaction into a “I win, you lose” game.
Talk about how to keep communication open as you go forward. On your video call, speak clearly at a conversational pace. Ensure that your sentences land, and your tone comes down at the end – to ensure that you come across with some gravitas and certainty. If you allow your voice to continually go up at the end, then it can seem like you are uncertain or not valuing what you are saying.
Use empathy, slow down, and try to take their point of view. Catch yourself before you react defensively to anything you hear. No matter what the purpose of the upcoming Big Talk, some things don’t change, and some communication strategies can almost always help. Here are seven basic ideas, elaborated where possible, about how to keep your difficult conversations open, clear, directed, and productive.
With video calls, there can be a slight delay, so that time could be extended by a couple of seconds. Pauses between speaking also tend to feel longer than they actually are, especially on video calls. Embrace the uncomfortable silence and wait a few seconds longer than you feel like you should before you interject or prompt for a response. Nonverbal cues are just as important as the words that are said in a conversation, so using video is an absolute requirement. Being on video also holds you accountable to stay fully present in the conversation. Consider using the blur background feature to keep the focus solely on each person, rather than what’s in view around them.
Dr. Marshall Rosenberg’s work on nonviolent communication is also helpful for navigating difficult conversations in a healthy and productive way. I talked about this approach to effective communication in a previous post. Navigating difficult conversations with finesse involves mastering key skills that facilitate constructive dialogue and mutual understanding.
Not only will this help with dealing with workplace conflict, but it will also help with streamlining internal communication within your business. As mentioned, one thing that’s hardest to replicate virtually, is strong eye contact. Good eye contact can help us come across as confident and allows us to gauge the attention of our listeners – but this can be tough when speaking virtually. This way, you’re prioritising the listeners’ experience, as they will feel like you are giving them direct eye contact. Michael Grinder, five skills that are going to help you have virtual difficult conversations.
You don’t need to bulldoze the other person into agreeing with you or apologizing. You could also say something like, “This is tough for me to say,” or “I want to make sure I’m understanding you” to be fully transparent about where you are during the conversation. If all else fails, ask if you can take five minutes to cool down and then come back together to talk more. It’s important to note that not every conversation will go as you hope.
Difficult conversations often have to happen because better conversations didn’t. Don’t mix up showing the empathy when you’re doing your job. See, if I finish all of my negative information and it’s done, now as a boss and as someone who’s looked at his performance we’re clear about that. The Harvard Business Review says, we’ve got to make eye contact. You have to be clear about what is the purpose of this interaction.
Over my years as a mediator, I’ve picked up a few tips that may be useful for those of us now spending more of our time dealing with difficult conversation in the virtual world. Help your team master group dynamics, move from reactive to proactive, and make difficult conversations easier — learn more about Freedom Through Perception, my half-day training for groups of 10 or fewer. But when we leave issues unaddressed, they rarely disappear. Avoiding difficult conversations entirely can lead to a breakdown in communication and trust and possibly even resentment.
Stay focused on the current issue at hand and only that issue. You could say something like, “This might be hard to hear, and I’m nervous to bring it up, but I think it’s important.” This type of clear statement helps create room for mutual respect and openness. Hard conversations are often physical before they’re verbal. The confirmation bias gap is the difference between how Americans judge others’ information habits and how they judge their own.