Attendance: Chris, Vora, Chaitali, Aaron, Alex
Crucial Conversations was a very interesting read and also a very interesting book to discuss. The book challenges readers to take on the crucial conversations in their lives with more tact. The key points of the book are learning to recognize when you are in a crucial conversation, and the skills for handling these conversations once you are in them.
One of the things that really helped with the meeting is that the authors have gone out of their way to post discussion questions and role plays on their website. You’d be surprised how few authors actually do that. I simply adapted most of the questions from the authors list and made sure we were hitting the key points of the book.
Our discussion questions:
1) What is the overall central idea or premise behind Crucial Conversations? What are some of the problems or issues are raised?
2) What’s the meaning of the expression “Start with Heart”? Why is it important to Start with the Heart?
3) What are some of the ways that you can tell a conversation has turned critical? How do people typically react when they find themselves in a critical conversation?
4) Why are Mutual Respect and Mutual Purpose essential to having dialogue? What are three fundamental techniques you can use to build Mutual Purpose and Mutual Respect into dialogue?
Pause for contrast role play?
5) What role do stories play in creating emotions? What are the Victim, Villain, and Helpless stories? When we’re feeling upset, why is it important to get back to the facts?
6) In order to make it safe for others to hear our views, why start with the facts? Why not start with our story? Why share our story at all? How should we share our story?
State your path role play?
7) When others start to attack us verbally, what part of their path to Action do they typically share?
8) What does it mean to ‘explore others’ paths and why should we do this? What are the listening tools we can use to build safety?
9) Once we have gotten another to explore his or her path, the authors suggest we return to our ABC’s. What exactly are our ABC’s?
Explore others paths role play?
10) What two principles are most helpful to keep in mind when you’re just beginning to apply the crucial conversations skills to your every-day conversations?
