Hacker News Reader

I recently read "Difficult Conversations", a great book. There are ways to communicate with others that will be constructive.

for example, when talking about what happened, there are three stories - your story, their story, and the shared story. If you are a "nice" guy, you might not tell your story. If the other person is afraid of conflict, they might not share their story. You need to both be assertive/curious to get to discussing the this-is-what's-going-on shared story, like from a third person point of view. Then the discussion could get on track.

Conflict arises from differing or unmet expectations.

So the easiest way to eliminate a lot of issues is clearly agree and define expectations up front.

There is a reason a whole branch of project management is called Expectation Management.

Just be yourself; life is too short for pretending to be someone else

That was kind of the point of the article. But being yourself is also easier said than done. First, you need to know yourself and not everyone has that figured out (I, for one, am still learning).

Retired now. I could be pretty blunt and direct, but I was always nice. In hindsight, it was strange to see a group of people who did not like me because I was nice or that other people liked me.

The Cost of Being "Nice"