Have the Messy Conversation
What a week. Looking back, I’m able to breathe a huge sigh of — well, it’s almost of relief — that the week is over and a new one has begun. So far, this one feels like it’s going to be much more “normal” — by which I mean productive, flowing, filled with me accomplishing tasks, connecting with people, doing what needs to be done without any sense of fatigue or overwhelm. It’s been a while. And last week felt particularly draining because, even though I was physically better than the preceding weeks, I forced myself to have some messy conversations.
You see, over the past month a few things have been forcibly brought to my attention. Some of these have revolved around my family life, some have been about my expectations and how they are — or aren’t — being met, some have been about what I actually need in my life. Now, you’ll recall that I made a commitment a while back (before I got sick) to endeavour to move through my days without complaining. One of my colleagues helped me out with this by suggesting that oftentimes a complaint is merely an unskilled way of making a request. So I’ve been framing what would otherwise be complaints as requests, trying to be as nice as I can when making these. And then last week, I hit a glitch.
What I noticed last week is that some of my requests were such that I knew they would be met with resistance, for various reasons. And I found myself doing a bit of a “pre-conversation cleaning up” sounded something like this: “I can’t ask for that particular thing, that’s too demanding. I need to be kinder, softer, gentler. I need to be understanding.” “Wait a minute, I AM being understanding, I can’t sugar-coat this! I’m angry and I need to be honest about this.” “But being honest isn’t going to help, it’s just going to make the conversation more difficult than it needs to be.” You can see how this was going. The thing is, by engaging in this mental pre-conversaation clean-up, I was using up energy, tiring myself out AND not getting the issue at hand dealt with. So eventually, I dispensed with the clean-up, and dove into the messy conversation. Here’s what I learned.
Sometimes, having the messy conversation — however painful it might be — actually serves better and results in an ultimately better outcome. My sense is that this stems from the authenticity of the conversation. As messy as it is, as difficult as it is, there’s a way in which the “real-factor” overrides the messiness and — assuming you can push through — results in a better outcome. Don’t get me wrong. The conversations were absolutely difficult. There were definitely times when I wanted to stop and “clean things up” before I kept moving ahead. But I forced myself to stay in the mess, knowing somehow that it would get cleaned up eventually, AND that there was a realness that was serving my relationship better than a “clean” conversation would.
Bottom-line: sometimes it’s better to dive into the messy and push your way through to an outcome that works for all.