How To Have Crucial Conversations

Learn how to prevent your high-stakes conversations from turning into shouting matches and turn them into positive and solution-oriented conversations instead.

Hi there fellow reader! 👋

Welcome to The One Percent Better Club 📚 - your weekly dose of brilliant ideas from the world’s best nonfiction books that are going to help you be one percent better today than you were yesterday! This week, I’m talking about the book Crucial Conversations. So if you’re ready for that one percent upgrade, then let's get started! 🚀

One Sentence Summary:

Crucial Conversations will help you prevent your high-stakes conversations from turning into shouting matches and will help you turn them into positive and solution-oriented conversations instead.

Who Do I Think Should Read This 📕 Summary? 🤔

• Anyone whose job requires them to deal with other people frequently.

• Anyone who wants to be better at having difficult conversations in their lives.

• Anyone who wants to be seen as an amazing communicator.

Why You Should Read Crucial Conversations:

Every single day, you have dozens of conversations with people.

Some conversations are easy-going. But some conversations are crucial.

What’s a crucial conversation, you ask?

According to the book Crucial Conversations,

“A crucial conversation is any conversation between two or more people where (1) stakes are high, (2) opinions vary, and (3) emotions run strong.”

Common crucial conversations involve…

• Asking a friend to repay a loan.

• Talking to a team member about how they’re not contributing enough.

• Or confronting a loved one about a substance abuse problem.

Unfortunately, crucial conversations are extremely difficult to navigate.

As a result, they’re often avoided.

However, no matter how crucial the conversation is, crucial conversations should always be confronted.

Why? Because people who learn to successfully handle crucial conversations better succeed in both their private and public lives.

According to surveys of more than 20,000 people in various companies, those who mastered crucial conversations are better able to tackle challenges and thus often become the opinion leaders in their organizations.

In addition, couples who can handle such conversations are more likely to stay together. In fact, couples can reduce their chances of breaking up by up to 50%!

So don’t turn away from crucial conversations. 

Instead, learn how to handle them in an effective manner.

But the question is how?

Luckily, for us, the authors of Crucial Conversations lay out the exact framework you need to follow in order to have healthy and fruitful conversations.

Here are the 6 best ideas the authors give in their book Crucial Conversations:

Let’s go!