Transcripts

Kerry Patterson:
The reason people don't like to do it typically is because they move silence to violence.They hold it inside until they become angry.

Kerry Patterson, author of the book Crucial Confrontation…

It would be like taking out a bowl full of cottage cheese that's already gone rancid, sticking it on your counter and coming back a week later hoping it got better. It gets worse inside and so the silence, eventually when we do speak, it comes out as violence. That violence of course then gives us a warning that says, " Oh don't confront again because next time you confront there will be another battle." It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But Kerry says effective confrontation doesn't require a battle. And he's researched and studied this whole subject of effective confrontation a lot.

In fact, we've observed tens of thousands of people of which hundreds were very effective and never got into battle - they didn't walk away, they didn't sugar-coat, they stepped up and said, "Can we talk." Now that skill, that capacity to hold that confrontation makes all the difference.

It's very empowering, says Kerry, to realize that you could confront just about anybody, with just about anything and not have it turn into a big fight. It's all in how you do it.

More often than not when you describe it in a non-confrontive(sic) way, the other individual comes around and the problem is solved in the first sentence or two. Most problems that we have come because we come in charged, reloaded for bear, angry and attacking. The other person becomes defensive and it's a downward spiral from that point on.

For transcripts visit our website: somethingyoushouldknow.net - I'm Mike Carruthers and that's Something You Should Know.