Getting what you want in a conversation is tricky business because resistance is endemic to strategic communication. It is essential to know when to pull back from a conversation that is floundering in order to conserve your goodwill, prevent relational damage, and allow your goal to survive for another day.
Adventures in Wanderland
People chronically underestimate the powerful forces of distraction, confusion, and free will inherent in human communication that often cause conversations to drift away from desired objectives. Conversational goals are vital orientation points because they direct your effort, focus your attention, and help you cut through a haze of trivia, tangents, and distractions. Although having a clear goal doesn’t guarantee that you will achieve your objective, establishing a goal is an indispensable first step to getting what you want.
Clown Dreams
What you want to accomplish is far more important than what you want to say. Smart communicators consistently subordinate their words to their goals in important conversations, even though stifling impulsive urges is often quite challenging. Words serve goals—not the other way around. Stop letting impulsive words obliterate your goals.
Are You in Love With Your Message? Consider Seeing Others.
Even the class clown knows that when a conversation is important, you prepare for it. Preparation is to effective communication like loud is to rock concert—it’s just plain obvious.
But something funny can happen during the preparation phase: We end up falling in love with our message. Once we get the introduction just right, line up our evidence perfectly, and conduct a few flawless rehearsals, we can end up falling head-over-heels in love with our message. U + message = luv 4 ever.