The Meta-Conversation

Have you ever struggled to make a certain conversation productive? Maybe you’d like to give your coworker critical feedback that he definitely needs to hear, but you can’t bear to do it because you know he’ll immediately ball up like a porcupine and shoot quills at you while defending himself to the death. Maybe it’s discussing your upcoming wedding plans with your mom because you can’t agree on whether your second cousin twice removed (and other family in that relationship sphere) should be invited, so the conversation always ends the same way, with you threatening to elope and your mom calling you the ungrateful black sheep of the family. Maybe it’s you and your team not being able to discuss any problem without it entering a spiraling swirl of negativity, as if everyone were engaged in a competition to one-up each other on describing how f-ed up everything is. In those situations, it seems like you just can’t win. Every time you get together to try and make progress, you just go around in circles, feeling more and more frustrated and dejected. You start to dread having to talk to this person (or group of people). Eventually, you stop trying, so the relationship devolves into active avoidance. <a href="https://medium.com/the-year-of-the-looking-glass/the-meta-conversation-9f9abe16c6ac">Visit Now</a>