Crucial Conversations

If you’ve been avoiding having a difficult conversation, this book is for you.

It provides a step-by-step guide for preparing to have difficult conversations and navigating the waters once you’re in them, both personally and professionally. You’ll learn to see your own defensive barriers to communicating well (defensiveness to silence) and how to apply strategies for overcoming these obstacles and creating a safe and productive environment.

It’s a valuable resource you’ll come back to again and again, because people are complex, and communication is the bridge to building trust. 

This is not a book about meetings per se, but a book about effective conversations. Clearly, conversation is at the heart of meetings. The book provides many tips for improving interpersonal communication. So many of the learnings from this book can be applied to meeting leaders and meeting attendees alike. It is easy to read and definitely a good complement to your more traditional meetings books.

Crucial Conversations is the best-selling guidebook on ways to handle difficult conversations. It provides practical advice for engaging with people in the most critical of human interactions. The advice builds on empirical data while illustrating the principles with real-life examples. An extensive questionnaire helps the reader self-evaluate their competence with conflictual situations.

Everyone needs this book. How I wish I knew these techniques when my first marriage was falling apart.

Another great book about communicating despite anxiety is Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High. This is a great tool to help readers understand and get along with other people better during difficult and critical situations. This book is a personal favorite of mine.  It is packed with practical, insightful examples of conversations likely to arise in the personal or professional life of driven, intelligent people. 

Skilled communication is more vital than ever in a pandemic, post-pandemic, and Zoom world. Crucial Conversations has been and continues to be a best seller because it offers practical and powerful skills to help people work through tough conversations they typically dread. I first picked up this book when I was facing a crucial conversation with a co-worker. But after digging in I quickly realized how this book should be considered mandatory reading for every negotiator. The focus on specific skills and techniques to make conversations better is sure to come in handy in virtually all negotiations no matter what… show more.

I live in the world of high conflict and teaching others how to deal with it. So, I create methods and collect other people’s methods to improve my own work, and this is one of the ones that is mentioned a lot. I like the detail of this step-by-step method and the book’s numerous examples (which is when we learn the most). They talk about starting with heart, and really looking at yourself—which is crucial! Avoiding the fool’s choice of speaking up in difficult situations or remaining silent is addressed, so that the reader gains confidence that they can deal… show more.

This is the most “practical” book on my list and one of the most important. Most of the stresses we face in life come down to conflicts with the most important people in our lives — our family, friends, and colleagues. And when we avoid dealing with those conflicts, we sow the seeds of resentment, anxiety, and hard feelings. Unfortunately, precious few of us have been schooled in how to communicate effectively and kindly in high-stakes situations. Not only does this book lay out the “devices” people employ in such conversations, but it inspires readers to keep in mind what… show more.