August 2, 2010What do you do when you get choked up during a critical conversation?
I love the Crucial Conversations team, and agree with most of their advice. Their recent response to a post from someone who gets choked up during important conversations was practical and useful. Phrases like
- Excuse me while I collect myself
are useful to have handy when emotion rises.
They add phrases such as,
- I’ve noticed that I’m getting a little emotional here. Could we take five minutes?
and
- I’ve noticed that we seem to be debating this issue. I’ve been putting my point forward—perhaps too strongly. I’d like to turn that around and ask more questions so that I can understand your points clearly. Would that be okay?
Where I differ from this particular advice is when they talk about controlling emotions. We get emotional because we have been controlling our emotion for far too long. There is power in emotion. Instead of letting the emotion control us or instead of pretending we don’t feel when we do, I recommend expressing emotion in balance with logic and will.
Here’s an article I wrote about making friends with our emotional nature so we can align and harness the power of our emotion instead of explode or suppress it. Emotional Map: How to Speak Strong when you are unsure of how you feel
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