Crucial Conversations (Third Edition) Audiobook By Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, Emily Gregory cover art

Crucial Conversations (Third Edition)

Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High

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Crucial Conversations (Third Edition)

By: Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, Ron McMillan, Al Switzler, Emily Gregory
Narrated by: Emily Gregory, Joseph Grenny
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About this listen

The book that revolutionized business communications has been updated for today's workplace. Crucial Conversations provides powerful skills to ensure every conversation - especially difficult ones - leads to the results you want. Written in an engaging and witty style, it teaches listeners how to be persuasive rather than abrasive, how to get back to productive dialogue when others blow up or clam up, and it offers powerful skills for mastering high-stakes conversations, regardless of the topic or person.

This new edition addresses issues that have arisen in recent years. You'll learn how to: respond when someone initiates a crucial conversation with you; identify and address the lag time between identifying a problem and discussing it; and communicate more effectively across digital mediums.

When stakes are high and emotions run strong, you have three choices: avoid a crucial conversation and suffer the consequences; handle the conversation poorly and suffer the consequences; or apply the lessons and strategies of Crucial Conversations and improve relationships and results. Whether they take place at work or at home, crucial conversations have a profound impact on your career, your happiness, and your future. With the skills you learn in this book, you'll never have to worry about the outcome of a crucial conversation again.

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Career Success Decision-Making & Problem Solving Career Business Inspiring Career Development Self Development Business

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Awesome book

Awesome book, and extremely useful. I Can definitely see how this will be useful both in work and in life. If I had to summarize what I learned from it:
- Crucial conversations are categorized as the convos in which both stakes and emotions are high. In these conversations, you always want to have an open shared pool of meaning, in that everybody feels safe contributing their facts and opinions to this shared pool. Otherwise, people either stay silent and let resentment build, and/or snap and turn to violence in the way they speak to each other, making it even more emotional.
- People often don’t contribute to this shared pool of meaning because they don’t feel safe doing so - they might think that doing so will result in backlash from some of the others present (The Fool’s Choice), and stick with the safe status who of not saying anything. Alternatively, they might contribute in an aggressive manner, getting defensive and using ad hominem. This is also not ideal.
- People will often craft stories to explain to themselves why they chose Silence or Violence - the stories usually are either Villain (they paint the other person as evil/a bad person to justify their choice), Victim (they’re just a victim here, so people shouldn’t blame them for anything), or Helpless (there’s nothing they could have done to fix the situation anyways, which is why they didn’t try). These convenient stories help them justify their actions, without forcing them to come to terms with their involvement in the issues. This is one of the most valuable things from the book, IMO - to use this to recognize when you’re falling into one of these patterns.
- If you start from a place where you try to see the other person as a good human being / give them the benefit of the doubt (“Start with Heart”), your conversation is much more likely to have a higher degree of psychological safety, and people will be much more likely to contribute to the shared pool of meaning. This is because your benefit of the doubt will show in everything you say, and it will make the other person much less defensive.
- When having a disagreement, rather than jumping straight into the areas you disagree in, start with the areas you agree on and emphasize those, and then move to your disagreements. When talking about your disagreements, don’t jump to any conclusions / stories about what happened, especially as it relates to the other persons character - try to start with the facts and ground everything in those facts, and then use that to justify why you came ti a particular conclusion, but don’t treat your conclusion as fact - leave room for the other person to “State their Path” as well, to explain why they saw the situation the way that they did.

There are probably other ones that I’m forgetting as well. The main things I got out of this were that you should lead all of these difficult convos with empathy, give benefit of the doubt, realize that the other person probably isn’t as bad as you think they are, speaking up likely isn’t going to be as disastrous as you think it is, and make sure everybody feels safe to talk about whatever it is that you need to talk about. A lot of the book is basically providing concrete guidance on how to put those principles into action in your daily life. I highly recommend it.

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Should be a part of every school's curriculum

Skills learned herr should be taught in our schools. Imagine what the world would be like.

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Skills lacking

This book covers basic skills that are not evident to you before it kisses you on the forehead are presents themselves. Then you say "Yeah - this makes sense. Why didn't I see this before?"
Highly recommended!

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Loved everything about it

As the head of a 15 person team, this was just the message that I need to help my own continuous improvement in my approach to engaging in more productive dialogue. Really enjoyed the audiobook performance and (VERY!) highly recommend it to other leaders.

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Enlightening

This book taught me so much about myself and has helped me prepare for some crucial conversations I need to have. Incredibly valuable. I highly recommend!

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A SUPER Must Read

I loved how the book described steps/tools to use and gave life examples. It helped me visualize better how to handle my conversations at work and in my personal life. Guess what? The tools work and I have seen better communication occur in me with others as a result. I will be conducting as a training with my staff and ministry group at church.

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Excellent Book!!

Everyone who ever interacts with anyone could benefit from this book! So much practical advice.

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A must for everyone

This is a must read for everyone that works or interacts with other people; in essence everyone.

Really powerful and actionable results. Easy to understand and put to practice, but deep enough that require practice and mindfulness to Master

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Very good advice

I highly enjoyed this book. This had many great insights into how to make changes into the way you communicate in multiple situations. I really liked how it takes about being aware of staying in the main topic and not falling into the trap of being swayed into a side topic. When these tools are properly utilized you can really have a boost of confidence when conversations with difficult people.

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You Saved Me

I loved everything and ready to use want I learned from this book and authors

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