Why we avoid having difficult conversations and how to stop

Transcripts were done with AI and may contain a few minor edits for readability (removed filler words and repeated words). Enjoy!

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**Jump to a moment:**

• [01:49] There’s no avoiding a difficult conversation
• [04:59] The two drivers of avoidance: feeling and environment
• [08:20] The SCARF model
• [15:26] Worthiness, not confidence
• [17:49] Paying attention to meaning
• [24:15] The energy behind the meaning
• [26:40] Becoming the person who has difficult conversations

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**DAVID**

Hello and welcome to the second episode of the Pattern Room podcast. I’m David, I am your host, and in today’s episode I want to share with you a few insights that I have on why we avoid having difficult conversations, and how we can maybe change that and avoid it less and less, until we avoid it no more. And, as usual, I have my Kindle Scribe, I have some notes and some questions, and I’m going to share it all with you.

[00:45] Why we avoid things in general

Let’s start with the idea, or the question, of why we avoid things in general. We do that because we tend to avoid conflict. We don’t like conflict, and whatever can lead to conflict, we try to avoid. But more than that, we tend to avoid the things that are unpleasant, and by doing so we want pleasant things in our lives. There are certain levels of how much we can deal with the things that are unpleasant, but when the level is too high for us and we can’t deal with it, then we go into this avoiding mode and we start avoiding things. Especially with the conversations that we have, that’s a bit more tricky to deal with, because you have to have them.

[01:49] There’s no avoiding a difficult conversation

There’s no avoiding a difficult conversation the way there is with, say, booking a flight and going somewhere so you can enjoy a week of vacation. You can avoid that, because maybe you’ve discovered that there’s something about the location that you don’t like anymore, and you decide, okay, I don’t like that, it’s unpleasant to go there, so I’m going to avoid going there. But when it comes to difficult conversations, it’s quite hard to do that. It’s quite hard to avoid them. You need to have them, and it comes down to basically two reasons that I’m going to share with you in a second.

[02:31] The imagined future, and how childhood shapes avoidance

When it comes to avoiding things, we do it because in our mind something will happen if we don’t avoid it. We have this imagined future, and whenever we switch into that imagined future in our mind, we want to postpone it as much as possible. We do this avoiding because when that imagined future happens, and we imagine it’s going to be unpleasant, we imagine some sort of conflict there. We imagine being in conflict with the person we’re supposed to have the conversation with.

And based on how you are as a person, and also based on what happened in your childhood, I’m going to give you an example there, you may avoid that conversation with all the resources you have available.

Specifically about the childhood piece: for example, if when you were young you had parents who punished you whenever you weren’t doing something they expected you to do, that created conflict through that punishment, and you were trying to avoid the conflict and the punishment by doing what you were supposed to do. And whenever you weren’t able to do that, you would have created this unpleasant experience in your life. And that same kind of behavior, if it wasn’t solved in childhood or early adulthood, you repeat now, in the present moment, when you’re an adult, and you do that with every opportunity you have. It’s as simple as that.

Basically, we’re doing this avoidance because we’re trying not to experience the unpleasant. We’re trying to avoid unpleasant as much as possible, so we’re using all the resources we have available.

[04:59] The two drivers of avoidance: feeling and environment

So when it comes to avoiding things in general, and this also applies to having conversations that are unpleasant, there are two things involved: the feeling connected to the thing we consider unpleasant, and the environment. Because the environment changes everything.

You may notice in your life that you’re able to have a difficult conversation at home, but you avoid, as much as possible, having the same conversation at work, because it’s a different environment, and that environment changes everything.

Maybe you’ve been with your family for I don’t know, 20-30 years, maybe you’ve been with your partner for 5-10 years, and through that time you created familiarity, and through that familiarity you feel safe and comfortable having the difficult conversation. But when it comes to work, these aspects that are part of the environment may not be present. Maybe there’s a new job you’ve just gotten, and in that job, in that environment, you haven’t had the time to create the safety you need so you can have the difficult conversations.

Maybe for some people that safety isn’t needed, but for some people it is needed, and you need that safety to have the difficult conversation. And when the safety isn’t there, you avoid the conversation.

It makes sense for another reason too: maybe you simply don’t like the manager that you have, and because you don’t like the manager, you’re going to do your best to avoid the conversations you have to have with your manager. And through these mechanisms, or through the things that are part of us, we’re going to avoid or engage with the experiences that are given to us.

[07:18] The feeling, revisited

Going back to the two elements, environment was one of them, the other was the feeling connected to the thing you’re trying to avoid, when it comes to difficult conversations, that feeling can be connected to many, many things. It can be connected to what the environment expects from you. If you’re at work, and the environment expects you to deliver certain results, and that’s not happening, then, based on your ability to deliver or not, you know you’re going to have to have a conversation. And that may be pleasant or unpleasant, and based on that, you’re going to avoid or engage with the conversation.

So that feeling can also be connected to how safe you feel in that environment, as I said earlier. It can also be connected to how much you like or dislike those around you.

[08:20] The SCARF model

And while I’m speaking about this, it makes me think of the acronym SCARF. I think I first read about it in the book Your Brain at Work, by Dr. David Rock. SCARF, the acronym basically stands for, let’s see if I remember this correctly, Certainty, Status, Autonomy, Relatedness, and Fairness, not necessarily in that order. Basically, these five elements describe the needs that we have in various environments, and the more these needs are fulfilled, the safer we feel.

Take autonomy, for example: how autonomous you feel at work. If that’s a strong part of you, you may use it to better manage difficult conversations, or to avoid them, if that autonomous part of you isn’t satisfied, isn’t fulfilled.

When it comes to avoiding these difficult conversations we’re supposed to have, especially at work, that’s when we experience this feeling of unease when we have to have conversations with other people, because we feel judged if we don’t have the conversation the way we’re supposed to. We feel judged, we feel punished, we feel like we’re not going to get the thing we’re supposed to get, that can be a raise, that can be an opportunity, that can be whatever.

It’s this complex set of things, this big puzzle, and when it comes to our personal life, it’s not there anymore in the same way. If you’re with friends, you can have a difficult conversation, and avoiding it isn’t such an intense feeling. You can be with your family and have a difficult conversation, and avoiding it isn’t such an intense feeling, compared to how that feels at work.

The more you understand these parts of yourself that come to the surface when you’re supposed to have a difficult conversation, the better you’ll deal with having difficult conversations without avoiding them. And whenever these parts of you come to the surface, they come through your feelings.

[11:20] Client story: avoiding the price conversation

I remember having a coaching conversation with a client, maybe five or six months ago, so not that far back. She was having difficulty having conversations with her clients when it came to negotiating price. She had a price in mind for what she was selling, but she was avoiding it like crazy: “I’m not going to tell them how much this costs, and if they ask me, I’m going to try to avoid it as much as possible until they’re certain they want to buy it, and then I’ll eventually tell them the price. And if they try to negotiate, I’ll just say yes, pay whatever you want.”

She was doing that because she was having a hard time dealing with a conflict that might appear in that conversation about price. In her mind, that conversation was so real, it was basically present in, or supposed to happen in, every conversation about the products she was selling. It wasn’t confidence, it wasn’t self-trust, it wasn’t a lack of knowledge about her business, her products, or her services. It was nothing like that. It was just the avoidance of the unpleasant conversation about price, because in her mind, dealing with that conversation was too much. It was too much.

And in order to lower that intensity, in order to lower the value we give to that imagined future in our mind, there are a few things we can do. It goes back to the meaning we set on the imagined future. Because the way you imagine the future in your mind, you set a meaning to it.

In the example I gave you before, with the client who has a business and was having a hard time having the conversation about price: she was imagining that future in such a way that the meaning was creating the conflict before it was happening. The conflict was always present in her mind, because of the meaning she was giving to the experience.

In that situation, the meaning was: “I’m going to avoid this part of the conversation, because they’re going to ask about the price, and there’s something inside of me that says whenever I have to speak about the price, something will go wrong, and I’ll eventually have to agree with whatever price they’re suggesting.” And it can go as deep as: “I’m not worthy of the price I set for myself. I’m not worthy of selling my products. I’m not worthy of building this business.”

[15:26] Worthiness, not confidence

It’s not a matter of self-confidence, it’s a matter of, am I worthy of having this as an experience, as part of my life, as something I can build and have from now on? And that feeling of worthiness has nothing to do with the present moment, unfortunately. Because if it were just a matter of the present moment, am I worthy, right now, of having this thing in my life, then the answer is yes. If you spend time with yourself and deal with the question of am I worthy right now, there’s no answer that says no, there’s no reason for you to say no.

But if you start approaching your past, then all these experiences from your past come up, and along with them you start feeling things connected to how you felt back then. And because that sensation is questioned, it raises another uncertainty, and that becomes another thing that’s unpleasant to deal with. And through that, we go back to creating conflict and avoiding it, switching our attention to the things that are pleasant. This whole puzzle we’re dealing with happens in an unconscious setting, because we’re not aware of any of it.

[17:49] Paying attention to meaning

So to better manage the things we’re trying to avoid, and to get better at dealing with this mechanism of avoidance, we have to pay attention to the meaning we put on that imagined future. Because when we become aware of that meaning, we can change the experience through that awareness. We can finally understand the steps we’re taking to get there, because otherwise those steps are happening anyway, we’re just not aware of them. And we’re going to keep doing that until the avoidance stops.

And the question is, okay, when does it stop? Do I just have to put this change of meaning into practice and it will eventually stop?

I’d say the avoidance stops, or you become much better equipped to deal with it, especially when it comes to difficult conversations, when the meaning we put on two things changes: the feeling, and the environment. As I said earlier, the feeling and the environment are two important parts of how we look at what’s happening to us, and of how pleasant or unpleasant the conversation we have to have feels in our minds.

[19:44] Changing the meaning of the feeling

When I say the avoidance will stop when we change the meaning we put on the feeling, I mean this: whatever feeling you feel when you imagine that conversation, it comes with a meaning attached to it. If you start to feel uneasy, you may put the meaning of “anxiety” on it. You may put a feeling of safety on it, or all these meanings that are, in a way, negative.

Changing the meaning of that feeling means letting the feeling manifest without putting a tag on it, without naming it. Naming it will help, because through that naming, you create some sort of control in your mind, and with that control you believe you’re better equipped to deal with it. But what I’m trying to say is, don’t put that tag on it as soon as it comes up, because we do that unconsciously. As soon as we start feeling something, we put a tag on it, because we want to name it so we can deal with it. Don’t do that. Let it come to the surface, and try to find the positive meaning to put on that emotion, on that feeling.

[21:43] Changing the meaning of the environment

You should do the same thing with the environment. Whenever the difficult conversation comes up, and you realize where you have to have it, whether it’s with a friend, a colleague, or your life partner, try to visualize the environment, and understand the meaning you would usually put on it. Then figure out if that meaning helps you, because it may not. It may help create this uneasiness and expand the intensity of the emotions you automatically attach to whatever you experience. Try to change the meaning of that environment.

And again, this is all happening in your head. It’s not, in any way, connected to the actual experience. But because you’re spending a lot of time in your mind with what should happen, or what will happen, without it actually happening, when you spend too much time with it in your mind, that will, in a way, create the experience, or help build parts of the experience you’ll eventually have. And when I encourage you to change the meaning, through that adjustment you’ll also adjust the actual experience you’ll have when you reach that moment.

So change the meaning that you put automatically on these experiences connected to difficult conversations, and the experiences will change.

[24:15] The energy behind the meaning

I’m looking at my notes, and I have one last thing here, there’s a question that goes like this: what can someone do to be less avoidant? I’ve already shared with you this idea of changing the meaning, but I have one more thing to share, and that’s connected to the energy behind the meaning.

Whenever you set a new meaning, and you’ll realize this once you become practical about changing a meaning, you’ll notice there’s an energy behind it. Because when you become aware of the meaning you set automatically, and you try to change that, you should start to feel different in your body. You should start to feel different in a way that’s uncomfortable, I think, but also positive.

Because if you’ve been avoidant for years, and through that avoidant experience you’ve felt anxiety in your body, now, if you change the meaning, because you start believing that your boss, for example, doesn’t want to punish you through that conversation, they’re just trying to guide you, to help you understand things differently, when you put that meaning on the difficult conversation, you should start feeling differently. That anxiety shouldn’t be there anymore. There should be some sort of excitement, some sort of curiosity, some sort of openness to how your boss is trying to help you and guide you toward understanding the new things they believe you should understand.

And even though that feeling is curiosity and openness, there’s going to be an uneasiness, or a kind of unfamiliarity, attached to that feeling, because there’s something new about it. You haven’t approached things like this in a while, or maybe never. I’d like you to pay attention to that too, because through that feeling, you start to build another set of behaviors, and another reality connected to what it means to have difficult conversations.

[26:40] Becoming the person who has difficult conversations

And it’s, in fact, not a matter of how do I avoid having difficult conversations, but how do I become the person who has difficult conversations, while also feeling optimistic about it, while also feeling open-minded about it, while also feeling like I can deal with this difficult conversation.

When you reframe things like that, when you see yourself as the person who is able to deal with a difficult conversation and not avoid it, we’re actually talking about becoming that person. It’s not about having a set of skills through which you avoid difficult conversations, it’s about becoming the person who can have difficult conversations.

[27:44] Outro

And that was it for the things I wanted to share with you in this episode. I hope it was valuable, I hope you got at least one small thing from it that you can take with you, both in your personal life and in your professional life.

If you found any value in this episode, just reach out and share with me what you learned, I love reading about that. And if you have any other kind of feedback, just share that with me as well.

That was it, I’ll be sharing more knowledge and more insights with you in the next episode. Bye bye.