Difficult Conversations for Introverts: How to Prepare
By Sofia Navarro · Finding Your Voice
How do introverts handle difficult conversations? Prepare the first sentence, not a script: what you want to talk about, why it matters to you, and what you are asking for. Book a time rather than ambushing anyone, give yourself a minute of distance beforehand, and use pauses to think. The conversation is usually less painful than the forecast, and you come across better than you feel.
Being an introvert is not a handicap in a difficult conversation. Several things many introverts already prefer, such as preparing before they speak, listening more than they talk, and thinking before they answer, are exactly what a hard conversation needs. The difficulty usually sits earlier: in the days of dread before it, and in the first ten seconds of starting it.
The forecast is worse than the conversation
Most of the cost of a difficult conversation is paid before it happens, and research on ordinary conversations suggests the forecast is reliably too gloomy.
When Nicholas Epley and Juliana Schroeder asked commuters to talk to a stranger, keep to themselves, or do as they normally would, talking turned out to be the more positive experience, while people predicting the same journey expected it to be worse.1 Erica Boothby and colleagues found that after a conversation people consistently underestimate how much the other person liked them. The gap was larger in shyer people, and it was carried by their own critical thoughts about how they had come across.2
Neither study is about a hard conversation, and a hard conversation can go badly. But both point the same way: the voice that says this will be unbearable, and that you will come across badly, is a poor forecaster.
Prepare the first sentence, not a script
A full script is brittle. The other person will not follow it, and the moment they leave it you are improvising anyway, now with a script in your head competing for your attention. What is worth preparing is the opening, because it is the hardest part to start and the part you control completely.
A good opening sentence does three things: it names the topic, says why it matters to you, and says what you want.
"I want to talk about how the handover went last week. It left me redoing a lot of the work, and I'd like us to agree how we split it from now on."
Write it down. Say it out loud three or four times, until it stops sounding like a speech. Then prepare two more things: the one fact you need in hand (a date, a number, an example), and the outcome you would accept if you cannot get the one you want.
Choose the time and the setting
Do not ambush, and do not let yourself be ambushed. Ask for the conversation: "Can we take twenty minutes on Thursday about the handover?" It gives the other person time to think, and it gives you a fixed point instead of an open-ended dread.
Pick a setting that helps you: a one-to-one rather than a meeting, somewhere private. Some people find a walk easier than facing someone across a desk. What does not work is moving the whole thing into email to avoid the discomfort. Tone is the first thing lost in writing, and a hard message read alone often lands harsher than the same words said kindly.
Give yourself distance before you start
In the five minutes before, the useful move is to step back from your feelings rather than argue with them. Ethan Kross and colleagues asked people to reflect on their feelings before a stressful speaking task, either in the first person ("why do I feel this way?") or using their own name and "you". The second way gave them distance: they gave better speeches, felt less shame afterwards, and people high in social anxiety benefited as much as anyone.3
In practice that sounds like: "Sam, you're nervous because you care how this goes. You know what you want to say. Say the first sentence, then listen."
You are allowed to think
If you prefer to think before you answer, a difficult conversation is where that pays. You do not owe an instant reply. "Let me think about that for a second" is a complete sentence, and a few seconds of silence while you think reads as care, not weakness.
It also helps to know that you look calmer than you feel. Kenneth Savitsky and Thomas Gilovich found that nervous speakers overestimate how visible their nerves are to the people watching.4
Listen to the conversation you are actually in
Hard conversations go wrong when both people answer the conversation they rehearsed instead of the one happening. Your preparation covered your half. Their half is new information, so ask about it before you answer it: "What did the handover look like from your side?" often changes what the problem turns out to be.
End with something concrete
Close by saying what was agreed, in one sentence, and who does what next. If writing comes easier to you than speaking, this is the place to use it: a short note afterwards that sums up the agreement is useful to both of you, and it uses your preference for writing without using it to avoid the conversation itself.
If it goes badly
Some conversations do not land the first time. If it turns heated, it is fine to stop: "I don't think we'll solve this right now. Can we pick it up tomorrow?" Coming back to it is not failure. Avoiding it for six months is.
If the hard conversation is feedback you have to give, how to give feedback someone can use covers making it specific. If what stops you is the physical side of nerves, nerves before you speak covers the two things that help.
References
- Epley, N., & Schroeder, J. (2014). Mistakenly seeking solitude. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(5), 1980–1999. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0037323
- Boothby, E. J., Cooney, G., Sandstrom, G. M., & Clark, M. S. (2018). The liking gap in conversations: do people like us more than we think?. Psychological Science, 29(11), 1742–1756. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797618783714
- Kross, E., Bruehlman-Senecal, E., Park, J., Burson, A., Dougherty, A., Shablack, H., Bremner, R., Moser, J., & Ayduk, O. (2014). Self-talk as a regulatory mechanism: how you do it matters. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 106(2), 304–324. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0035173
- Savitsky, K., & Gilovich, T. (2003). The illusion of transparency and the alleviation of speech anxiety. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 39(6), 618–625. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0022-1031(03)00056-8