Effective communicators know how to restore peace and harmony following conversations that go poorly. Negative incidents can do serious relational damage and make future conversations even more challenging.
To recover from conversational trouble and protect against lasting damage to your underlying relationships, follow these three guidelines:
- Apologize early. Speedy apologies and sincere expressions of remorse can patch up a wide variety of mistakes, minor transgressions, and other interpersonal ills.
- Don’t pass up any conversational repair attempts. Accept all apologies, kind words, or retreats from precarious positions from your conversational partner. Let your partner self-correct.
- Move quickly away from troublesome topics. People love to switch topics, and when necessary, drop a bad topic like a bad habit and find a better one.
Sometimes, the only way to stop a damaging conversation is to extract from it immediately. Don’t let a single conversation inflict irreparable harm on your important relationships. People are more important than a single conversation.
Exit a conversation if any of the following things occur so that you can protect the health of the underlying relationship:
- If multiple damage control attempts fail.
- When you determine that the other party cannot move past the issue that is hijacking the conversation, and when this intransigence is locking the two of you in a destructive loop.
- If you feel like you are at risk of escalating the conversation yourself.
No single conversation is more important than the person you are talking to. Protect your underlying relationships from destructive conversations and you will protect the people you care for the most.