Quote
“The single most important thing you can do is to shift your internal stance from 'I understand' to 'Help me understand.'”— Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton & Sheila Heen, in Difficult Conversations (1999) · Difficult Conversations →
Why it was said
Stone, Patton and Heen distil years of work at the Harvard Negotiation Project into this instruction. It comes after the analysis of the three conversations and before the practical chapters on how to begin.
What it actually means
Most people enter a difficult conversation to deliver a verdict, and the other person, cast as the audience, defends. The shift the authors describe is not politeness; it is accuracy, because the other person holds half the information and will not hand it to a judge. 'Help me understand' is the sentence that turns a delivery into an exchange, and it has to be meant.
How to use it
- 1Open your next hard conversation with one thing you genuinely do not know and want to.
- 2Write the opening from the story a neutral observer would tell, then ask for theirs before yours.