Turning Conflict Into Growth: Mastering the Four Types of Business Conversations

Starting the conversation:

The potential in your business has a gatekeeper: the day-to-day conversations you have in your business. From great ideas never taking or to the changes that promises make, finding our own communication patterns can help us unlock growth. Chuck Wisner, CEO at Wisner Inc., shares about being BOLD and busting through conversational patterns to avoid sabotaging innovation.

Meaningful conversation is rooted in self-development and an open-mindedness to understand others points of view. There are many right choices, even though only one can be chosen at a time. Make the choices, the promises to ourselves, our teams, and our company, work for the future of your company (not against it).

In this episode, you will hear how to identify the cues to pay closer attention, the real power of promises to the bottom like, and slowing down just a little increases chances of success. Jess Dewell talks with Chuck Wisner, CEO at Wisner Inc., about what BOLD companies do to turn conflict into growth.

Host: Jess Dewell

Guest: Chuck Wisner

What You Will Hear:

15:30 Storytelling is foundational to how we experience and interact with the world.

• Everyone has personal stories that shape their beliefs, actions, and relationships, some helpful and some limiting.
• Stories adopted from upbringing and culture can become deeply ingrained, and until examined, they restrict growth and connection.
• Breaking away from harmful personal stories allows for healthier, more successful relationships and opportunities.

16:50 Collaborative conversations require humility and vulnerability to learn from others.

• True collaboration happens when participants are willing to openly share their thought processes and be receptive to others’ perspectives.
• People are generally conditioned to defend their position instead of being curious about differing viewpoints.
• Genuine collaborative dialogue involves the risk of vulnerability, as it may expose our ideas to challenge and disagreement.

22:00 Creative conversations depend on trusting intuition and exploring possibilities.

• Embracing possibility means resisting the urge to immediately judge or settle on action, and instead encouraging wonder and brainstorming.
• Creative problem-solving requires conscious effort to exercise right-brain thinking, intuition, and connecting unconventional ideas.
• Developing trust in our own creative instincts opens avenues for innovation both individually and collaboratively.

24:00 Every commitment and promise shapes what happens next—clarity matters.

• The commitments and promises individuals make directly influence their future outcomes, whether personally or professionally.
• Consciously made promises, with clear expectations and boundaries, help avoid misunderstandings and negative consequences.
• Practicing mindful agreements—clarifying requests, offers, and timelines—results in greater accountability and successful follow-through.

31:25 Conversational bypass is a shortcut that skips important collaboration and creativity.

• Skipping over collaborative and creative discussions in favor of quick decisions ignores valuable ideas and perspectives.
• Rushing to action or assigning responsibilities without exploration often results in missed opportunities and poor decisions.
• The richest and most challenging conversations are often the ones we are most likely to hastily bypass.

36:00 Four essential questions increase awareness in conversation and decision-making.

• Applying four key questions during conversations increases self-awareness and uncovers each participant’s true intentions and desired outcomes.
• Encouraging all voices to share their hoped-for results and motivations helps align the group and clarify the path forward.
• Making unspoken desires explicit allows for a deeper, more purposeful and collaborative decision-making process.

45:25 Power dynamics and standards deeply shape our stories and behaviors.

• Unexamined power dynamics influence the way people express themselves and what they expect from each other.
• Recognizing authority issues, both formal and informal, is crucial to understanding relationship dynamics at work and at home.
• Underlying standards, values, and beliefs—often inherited from upbringing rather than consciously chosen—dictate judgments and actions until reflected upon.

50:30 It is BOLD to learn about our own conversational patterns and bust our own stories.

Resources

• Chuck Wisner on LinkedIn
• The Art of Conscious Conversation
• Activating Hope, Truth, and Better Conversations

Transcript

Chuck Wisner 0:00
We make promises all the time, but in a very sloppy way. So if you make a sloppy promise and it breaks, then you have to revisit and go, did we misunderstand? Did I think one thing and you thought another? And so that’s part of an apology or a complaint to really investigate. Did I screw up or did we have a bad promise?

Announcer 0:35
Designed to break the inertia and refresh your perspective so you can start making moves. Here is your host, an insightful truth teller who serves as the catalyst for getting the right work done and who asks the questions that truly matter, Jess Dewell.

Jess Dewell 0:53
I can’t wait for you to hear this conversation I had with Chuck Wisner. He is a leadership advisor, coach, and author specializing in the art and the impact of conscious conversation. He wrote the book, The Art of Conscious Conversations, a practical guide to making communication more intentional, impactful, and human.

Three things I want to start you off with that you will hear during our discussion is that first we have to learn to pay attention and that opens up so many doors, not only for ourselves and our self-reflection and improvement and development, but also for us to meet others where they are. The second thing is that every promise that we make today may change our tomorrow. There are real outcomes for the promises that we make and accept.

And the third thing is that it’s important to recognize regardless of how fast things are going or how we feel like there may be no time to consciously slow down and take maybe it’s just 15 minutes and ask some curious questions, some opportunities to explore before decisions are made so that you can avoid some of the pitfalls of skipping over that step, like backtracking, having to start over, spending money where we didn’t need to spend money, all those things.

So those are the three topics I’m going to start you with. You are going to hear what Chuck and I share. Our conversation is covering a lot of different things and let me just tell you, it’s right up your alley because you’re here right now.

Thanks for listening to the Bold Business Podcast and enjoy this program. I want to start out with this concept of under pressure. When we show up in our regular selves, sometimes we’re going to conversation and sometimes we’re not.

And depending on our style, we might think ahead or we might show up and feel first and that’s how we start communicating. I really want to, regardless of how we start communicating, I’m sure there’s something we can all do to improve. And I’m specifically thinking about how do we take our strengths right now and how do we apply those to unusual high-pressure or perceived high-pressure situations?

Chuck Wisner 3:12
How do we take our strengths?

Jess Dewell 3:14
I’m assuming we know what those are.

Chuck Wisner 3:21
So when conversations are going well, it’s not a problem. We’re connecting with people. We’re probably not planning a big strategy or things like that.

It’s when things go south a little bit that then we have to pay attention. So it depends on our ability to pay attention. It depends on our ability of how aware we are of our conversational patterns.

Because we all have conversational patterns that we didn’t consciously choose. We adopted them through our families, our cultures, our education, and our life experience. So we have these patterns.

It might have served us when we were 10 or 15 or 20, but maybe they don’t serve us now. So it is paying attention and then understanding conversations in a fresh way so that you have more options to change things up.

Jess Dewell 4:15
So it doesn’t matter what our strengths are. It matters that we can recognize when something is going south and start paying more attention.

Chuck Wisner 4:23
Yeah. Because when something goes south, that’s when we get triggered, an emotional reaction. And we have an emotional reaction that triggers behavior.

Yeah. But there’s a whole bucket load of stuff under that emotional reaction that we generally don’t pay attention to.

Jess Dewell 4:43
Oh my gosh. So what is it, Jess? We’ll still go back to something else in a minute because this is really good in here right now.

Chuck Wisner 4:50
Yeah.

Jess Dewell 4:50
Yeah.

Chuck Wisner 4:50
So it was Proust. He said, our emotions are a physical upheaval of our thinking. So just let that sink in.

Neuroscience is more or less backed up. His poetic rose from hundreds of years ago. When we have an emotion, there’s a story under the emotion that doesn’t often surface, but it is the driver.

Something happens. We get triggered. Then I have a story.

He shouldn’t treat people that way, or life shouldn’t work that way, or she shouldn’t be… That’s the story that’s under our emotion. And that story is based on our beliefs and our mental models and our thinking that if we don’t investigate it, we’ll keep having the same recurring reaction.

Jess Dewell 5:50
Do we learn this by trial and error? Right?

Chuck Wisner 5:57
Yeah. I’d say less than trial and error. It’s once we start paying attention, and we become aware of our triggers, and then we’ll talk about what tools and things.

But once we have those things in place, then it’s practiced. I might say, you know what? I don’t want to do that again to my wife or to my kids or my colleague or my boss, or I don’t want to react that way.

And we do some self-work because we know that our relationship with that person is determined a lot about my own reactions and emotions and thinking. If we say, okay, I don’t want to do that, two days from now, I might do it, but I might catch myself 10 minutes later and go, oh, I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean to say that, or I didn’t mean it that way.

So the practice really brings us to the point where in real time, we can be much more aware and much more conscious about our choice of response.

Jess Dewell 6:58
Is it ever too late to say you’re sorry? Okay. One of those things I was one, I was actually thinking about this the other day of repeating a conversation, going through some notes that I had, and I’m like, oh, that one did, it went sideways.

And there were feelings that were still being felt and held by the other party. So I apologized right then. And then I thought about it.

I’m like, was that too late? Did that show a sign of weakness? And I decided for myself that no, it was me acknowledging that there was something unsaid and I was doing my part to make sure it is said to continue to figure out a way forward together.

Chuck Wisner 7:36
The last thing you said is key because most people think of an apology as I’m sorry. And that’s, I’m not demeaning that, but it’s only part of the game. It’s only part of the dance.

So if you think you had an agreement or a promise or a relationship norms with this person and you broke them, then it’s your job to say, I think, thinking about this, I really, I said some things I’m sorry about, and here’s what I want to say. Here’s how I want to write it. And then the final thing is making a commitment that going forward, you’re making an offer to say I’ll do better in the future.

And that’s a circle of apology. The same is true with a complaint. If you have a complaint that someone else did something and they don’t come to you with an apology, we can make an honorable complaint and say, here’s what I think we agreed to.

Here’s what I think you did on this, on breaking the equation. Let’s talk about this. What went wrong?

Right? So the honor, an honorable complaint and an honorable apology are the same recipe. They’re just coming from different directions.

Jess Dewell 8:45
And here’s what popped into my head. Chuck was, okay. So some of us that are going to feel we’ll go, Ooh, I get this apology thing.

And of course I want to do better next time. And those of us who are more analytical, maybe we’d be like, Ooh, I feel this thing that was out of sync and we didn’t agree to this. And something needs to be done about that.

So I’m hearing two approaches to the world, a more analytical side or a more feeler side, which I could also see showing up in the modalities of learning. Visually, something occurred, verbally, something occurred, emotionally, something occurred. I was just reading something the other day that said, it’s only a joke if everybody finds it funny.

And if somebody takes offense to it, it’s not a joke and it’s very real. And that’s in a broken agreement.

Chuck Wisner 9:34
Yeah. If you’re feeling tight, you need to ask enough questions of yourself and the other person say, if we had a promise, do we have a good promise? One of the conversations in my book is commitment conversations.

We make promises all the time, but in a very sloppy way. So if you make a sloppy promise and it breaks, then you have to revisit and go, did we misunderstand it? I think one thing and you thought another.

And so that’s part of an apology or a complaint to really investigate, did I screw up or did we have a bad promise?

Jess Dewell 10:08
Okay. I want to know what made you decide you needed to write this kind of a book.

Chuck Wisner 10:13
When I studied something called the ontology of language, it sounds all highfalutin, but it really just means who we are because of language, how language shapes our lives, the being of language. When I did this work, it had a profound impact on my life so much so that I ended up changing careers and leaving architecture to do this work. And so there’s that part because it was so personally enlightening that I wanted to share it.

And then I was working for many years with leaders in different companies. And one of my clients who I had for probably five or eight, seven years, we were at the end of our engagement, we were having a cocktail together. And he goes, I love all of our work because it synthesizes linguistics, Peter Senge’s work and Chris Arges’ work out of MIT and Harvard and philosophy of language people, Austin Searle.

So we were touching all these things and he said, I love all this, but I don’t know how to connect the dots. And that stuck with me. And that’s when I decided the way to connect the dots are these four types of conversations because they each have a different lesson, a different practice.

And it only took me five years to do it once I decided to do it. Hey, well, okay.

Jess Dewell 11:36
So that’s interesting. So this was not, was it something that you knew and you worked on from that moment of interest to the completion of the four types or it was it, I know this and I had to walk away and experiment in the world and then bring my findings in. Now I’m curious, how did this start to materialize for you to put those dots together?

Chuck Wisner 12:00
The first thing was, I think I was walking with my wife in the beach because this thing about how do you connect the dots was still churning in my mind. And so at one point, it became clear that in my studies around language, there were types of conversations that are very specific, very much have different things to teach us about communication. And so that became a structure that became, oh, okay, that can hold the book together because all these pieces fit into those categories.

But secondly, I had a story and one of the biggest parts of the book is called storytelling stories we have about ourselves story have about other people. And so I actually hired people to help me. And I burned through three people that were writers, editors, whatever you want to call them, that didn’t work out because they didn’t have my 20 years of knowledge, experience working with folks.

And so I kept having to teach them and then they would maybe frame it in their language and say, no, that’s not the right language. And finally, after the third person said, you know what? She, she quit on me because we had a real literary difference of style and she wanted it to be our book.

And I said, no, this is my book. I’ll give you credit. Anyway, once that died, I said, screw it.

I’m going to write the damn thing myself. I can write this.

Jess Dewell 13:35
The best, the best thing comes to those who take the next step regardless. Huh? So was that the moment when you decided, when did you realize that you found this belief about yourself?

Chuck Wisner 13:46
No, it was why I hired those people because I’ve got this thing.

Jess Dewell 13:51
Do you have any regrets about that process?

Chuck Wisner 13:53
If I had busted my story that I couldn’t write sooner, I wouldn’t have wasted two or three years, but it took all of that to realize, wait a minute. Cause I learned something from each person and I saw the writing process. So it wasn’t quite as scary as I thought, or I had, or cause I was writing stuff and then they would edit or we would work together on it.

I realized I have, I know this material, I can put this together. So it was a slow process of gaining some confidence.

Jess Dewell 14:21
Yeah. Through doing and seeing and having somebody walk and it’s, you’re right. It probably, each of those people brought you something that you needed to learn at the moment you were working with them.

Chuck Wisner 14:33
Yep.

Jess Dewell 14:34
That’s really cool. Okay. So thanks for that.

Chuck Wisner 14:37
Fine.

Jess Dewell 14:38
So I’m going to come back and be like, all right, now I have a question for you. I know we haven’t, we’ve teased this now a couple of times, so we ought to just tell everybody who’s watching and who’s listening to us, Chuck, what are these four types of conversation that are the framework that held your book, that are holding your book together?

Chuck Wisner 14:54
Storytelling. We live through stories. They’re a beautiful thing.

Fiction, movies, TV shows are all stories that feed us in certain ways. We all have personal stories that are based on our beliefs and our experience and our cultures. We doubt it through our families.

So we have personal stories about ourselves. For example, I’m not a good writer or I don’t know how to write. That’s a personal story.

That personal story is very limiting. So it wasn’t until I could bust that story that I was free from it and then do what I needed to do, write the book.

Jess Dewell 15:29
Yeah.

Chuck Wisner 15:29
So we all have personal stories. Some are helpful. Some are harmful.

The harmful ones we should look at. We should look at what is it holding me back? Is it keeping me from doing what I really want to be doing?

We also have stories about other people and how the world works and what should happen and shouldn’t happen. Those are our opinions based on our whole body of beliefs, right? That we, again, that we didn’t often consciously choose.

Okay. So that’s a big part of the conversational learning conversations because if we don’t, if we can’t escape from our own stories and our own judgments, then our ability to create relationships or be in the next conversation, which is collaborative conversations, it’s very limiting. The metaphor I like to think of for collaborative conversations is it’s our ability to listen to absorb other perspectives.

We’re trained to be advocates that work really hard to prove our point or prove our position to win the argument. And productive advocacy is really different. It’s saying, I have a position and someone else might come and they have a position.

So we’re now, we’re two fists trying to prove each other wrong and prove our position correct. But what it takes, collaboration takes opening our hand to reveal the thinking under our position. And guess what?

If you’re opening your hand to reveal your thinking, it takes humility and it’s vulnerable because you’re opening yourself up to someone and say, oh, you’re completely wrong. I have different ideas. I have a different stack, different data.

I have a different concern. But that’s the art of advocacy and inquiry of the collaborative conversation. That balance of dancing back and forth, open hands, open hearts, learning from each other, listening and ideas get shared.

Jess Dewell 17:28
Before we share the third and the fourth one, storytelling, that is going to be the basis and how well we do the rest?

Chuck Wisner 17:37
That is foundation, right? So if I’m locked on stories I can’t write or another story I grew up with from my grandfather, I’m not a big enough man. If I’m locked on those stories that are harmful to me in my life, my ability to navigate relationships in a really lovely way, successful way, is really hampered because I constantly have the doubt and the fear that I’m going to be found out or the lack of confidence.

Jess Dewell 18:06
Does that show up in internal statements of you said you aren’t a writer? Are there other words that if we were just to stop right now and say, I will analyze my language for one day, what else would I be looking for to illuminate where my stories might be today?

Chuck Wisner 18:20
Yeah, all those words, I can’t do it, I shouldn’t do it. Negative judgment we have about ourselves is worthy of investigation.

Announcer 18:36
Feeling stuck? Like what got you here won’t get you there. The pressure to grow is on, yet the path isn’t clear.

Yet, you don’t have to walk that path alone. This is the Bold Business Podcast. Like and subscribe wherever you listen.

Your host, Jess Dewell, is the strategic partner you’ve been looking for. Asking the questions that truly matter. It’s time to break the inertia and get the perspective you need to make your next move.

Jess Dewell 19:12
Okay, so we talked about storytelling. I wanted to make sure that is the foundation and how well we acknowledge, embrace, understand that. Then we can move into being able to do the same for another and have curiosity and inquiry.

Chuck Wisner 19:31
Okay, so let’s imagine you and I are in a really good collaborative conversation. I’m listening to you, absorbing, asking you good questions to understand your position. You’re doing the same.

Can I call you Jess? [Yeah.] Okay.

Jess, you just said something that made me think, changed my mind. I’ve never thought of it that way. That is that, mutual learning part of the collaborative conversation.

Now, if we’re in a really good collaborative conversation, what happens is ideas start being generated. So ideas generate because there is this space of open mind, open heart that no one’s trying to win. No one’s trying to prove their point without being saying, this is just my opinion.

There’s many opinions. Ideas maybe bubble up. With all that experience where we’re in a conversation all of a sudden, oh, wow, we could do this because I hadn’t thought about it.

Jess hasn’t thought about it, but we can actually do this is a new idea surfaces. So that’s part of the creative conversation because in general, we tend to jump to conclusions, tend to jump to action, but giving ourselves permission to wonder about possibilities, wonder what could be different? What is another way to think about this?

What is another answer to the problem? That takes a certain skill because we’re all trained to judge. Someone says, what about this?

And the next person says, oh, we tried that two years ago. It’ll never work. And there goes the creative conversation.

Jess Dewell 21:08
Oh, this is exciting. You have no idea how many conversations in the last 48 hours that are running through my head and going, oh, look, I’m either stopped there or they’re stopped there. It makes sense because we hit the ceiling, the limit, the ability of our collectiveness of everybody that was in the conversation.

Chuck Wisner 21:25
Yeah, absolutely.

Jess Dewell 21:26
Okay. Okay. So is there anything else to say about that creative side about the not jumping to conclusion or solution?

You are actually generating new ideas and letting things emerge.

Chuck Wisner 21:42
Yes. So like the collaborative conversation, relational part to it.

Jess Dewell 21:47
Yeah.

Chuck Wisner 21:47
But then there’s a personal part for all of these. So the personal side of the collaborative conversation is the humility and the vulnerability to open your hand and say, here’s, I have an opinion, but it’s one of a million, but here’s my thinking. The personal side of the creative conversation is learning to trust our intuition, learning to exercise our right brain, our creative thinking, because we’re all so well trained and hooked on our left brain, literal, rational self.

And the right brain actually is Einstein called the left brain, a servant to the right, because the right brain is a big picture thinking outside the box, creative connecting dots that otherwise don’t get connected. So there’s that personal exploration of, do I trust my intuition? Do I allow myself to exercise my creative juices?

Jess Dewell 22:49
Yeah. That’s interesting. I missed, was that still the creative conversation or did we just, okay.

Thank you. Cause I’m like, I don’t think we switched.

Chuck Wisner 22:59
No, that was the personal side of the creative conversation.

Jess Dewell 23:03
Thank you. That’s what I thought. Because, and so in this framework, there are four sections, if you will, and then you have an order, which you’re telling us and you’re talking to us about the order.

And then you’re also saying there’s the self version and then there’s the, I say, the community version or relational, relational. Thank you for that. I was actually looking for.

Chuck Wisner 23:22
And what’s the, so the fourth one is a conversation we’re in every day, whether at work or at home, and it’s called the commitment conversation. And that really is about the promises we make. So every day who’s, am I doing the dishes?

Am I picking up the kids? Who’s making decision in the meeting? Who’s coming to the meeting?

We make promises. Yeah. We love it because it is the action conversation is how we get stuff done with other people.

It’s how we coordinate action. Now it sounds really simple, but it’s incredibly important. Every promise you make, every promise we make can change your tomorrow.

Yes. So if we’re not doing it fully consciously, or we’re not able to make a good promise, we will pay the consequences, whether at work or home. Now to understand it just a little bit, every commitment, every promise, every agreement starts in two ways.

Either someone makes a request of you, Jess, can you help me write this paper for next week? And you help me pick up the kids from school. Every promise starts with a request or an offer.

Jess, let me help you. I can take care of that work this afternoon. So you can go do this other thing.

That’s an offer. Now that’s just the beginning of a very complex dance, the commitment conversation dance. Because as soon as you make a request to me, I have three choices.

I can say yes, I can say no, and I can make a counteroffer. Yes, we are addicted to, and counteroffers we don’t understand. So if we learn about those things, we can do this navigating promises in a much more successful way.

Because our addiction to yes means that we tend to, someone asks us to do something, we say sure. An example would be a drive-by in the office. Jane, the boss, running by Fred’s desk and says, hey, can you get me some slides for Monday’s meeting?

And Fred says, sure, no worries. He works 10 hours over the weekend, gives the slides to Jane on Monday. He looks at our computer and says, this is really not what I wanted.

Yeah. So Fred just said a yes because he wanted to please the boss. He figured he would do a good job, but they didn’t have a real conversation about what the promise meant.

Jess Dewell 25:59
Not what you meant by a sloppy promise when we started our conversation? Okay. Yeah.

Chuck Wisner 26:04
Yeah.

Jess Dewell 26:04
Huh? Okay.

Chuck Wisner 26:05
And it’s exasperated in business because of hierarchies. So there’s more power. You don’t want to say no.

You don’t want to counteroffer. A counteroffer is just saying, let me understand the request. Who’s it for?

What’s the format? What would make it look good? What would you be happy with?

Do you want pictures? Whatever. A few, some questions.

And then I can say, you know what? I can do all those things, but I can’t get it to you by Monday morning. I can get it to you by Monday noon.

That’s a type of a counteroffer. And then they agree or not agree. But if they agree, we have a better promise because I didn’t just go, yeah, sure.

No worries. And so there’s some self-ownership in that. Both ways.

So let’s say for any relationship, whether it’s you and your kids or you and your spouse or you and your boss, there’s authority issues. If you’re making a request, you have the power to say, here’s what I really want. Here’s the timing.

Here’s why I’m doing it. Here’s the problem I’m trying to solve. And if I do that, you have clarity.

You can ask me questions. What about this? What about that?

So we’re in this dance to get clarity, what I’m going to, you’re going to say yes to, or I’m going to say yes to. Then there’s responsibility on the receiver side. If the person asking doesn’t say what it’s about, then you ask the question, let me understand so I can make sure I can fulfill the promise.

Jess Dewell 27:32
Yeah. And this takes actually a level of consciousness. I liked that you talked about we have practices in what we do.

You also said that early in our conversation. And what’s coming to mind to me now is I’m thinking about, okay, so I am a fast thinker and I tend to interrupt people, not because I’m being rude, even though I know it can come across that way. So I’ve always worked on it, which by the way, then that gave me a belief that I didn’t like that I’ve also had to work through.

So it’s interesting to see how some of these things happen. Right. So anyway, so I’m an, I think fast, I can jump ahead and I try and bring everybody with me.

And that happens through interruptions. So not necessarily the best way, definitely things that have worked on or harmful, both in this case, good for the knowledge, bad for the belief that holds me back. And yet at the same point in time, what I recognize is I hear something and I want to, I’ve already seen a lot of the things, but I forget that other people have their own journey along with me.

So not interrupting and slowing down is very important, especially if somebody is listening or watching, it can be a hard thing to learn, to let the rest of the world catch up to us.

Chuck Wisner 28:47
There’s a name for that.

Jess Dewell 28:49
Oh, there is? No way. Okay.

I want to know this, Chuck. What is it?

Chuck Wisner 28:53
Called the background of obviousness.

Jess Dewell 28:56
The background of obviousness. I want to know. Okay.

Yeah. So does that mean I’m assuming I know what’s obviously available and understood by everybody?

Chuck Wisner 29:10
Yes, you have it right. Okay. There’s two parts.

The first part is you forget what is obvious to you. You forget is obvious, isn’t obvious to the rest of the world. So the first part is realizing that you, let’s say a business example, in your executive, you have access to many conversations and a lot of information, like you might have access to the finance and the HR and stuff, but someone a level down or two levels doesn’t have that contextual sort of information.

But in your mind, this is clear as clear as anything. Why don’t they get it? Right.

But they don’t have the access to it. And so that is a huge leadership mistake that is made all the time.

Jess Dewell 29:58
Yeah. And I agree with you.

Chuck Wisner 30:00
I tell a story in my book about asking my kids to rake the leaves in the yard. I’ll pay you each five bucks. Then I’m going to go to the hardware store and pick up some things.

And I came back and they were so excited. They had their hands out for their five bucks and there were piles of leaves all over the yard and they didn’t do the cellar windows. What are you talking about?

You didn’t do a good job. What my idea was a good job was they didn’t share that. They didn’t have 25 years of experience to know what a good raked yard looked like.

So they cry, I’m upset. And it’s like, that was just stupid on my part.

Jess Dewell 30:40
Fair. And I think that I appreciate you sharing that kind of a story too. So then there was another way, right?

So I shared what I did. Another thing that I see a lot, especially in the companies I work with, and I’m guessing you have seen this too, which is we get stuck in the ability to go from a point to another point. And we’re looking for agreement on all the points without any exploration or understanding or care if there might be another different improved opportunity along the way.

Chuck Wisner 31:11
There’s a name for that too.

Jess Dewell 31:12
Oh, I have no doubt.

Chuck Wisner 31:18
I coined this phrase. This is called the conversational bypass. So we love our stories.

We get addicted to our stories. Our ego is constantly telling us, no, you’re right. You should go fight for your position.

And we love the action conversation. We love, okay, who’s going to do what by when? So we’re in a meeting, we’re sharing ideas, a couple of points are made, and then the person in the room with the most stripes or the person in the room with the loudest voice or the most aggressive or whatever the dynamics are says, okay, what are we going to do?

Because, okay, let’s decide who’s doing what by when. What that is, we’re bypassing collaboration, learning from each other, looking at different perspectives, considering different perspectives, and we’re missing the work of creative possibilities, wondering what else is possible. So we just skip over those two and they’re the hardest conversations and they’re the most juiciest conversations.

Jess Dewell 32:22
Yes. And I, and when I will tell you, I’m like, but there’s something else here. We haven’t found it yet.

The conversational bypass. And it’s not the positive, like in the infomercials, but wait, there’s more, buy now and get this new. It’s the, oh, that feels a little icky.

Oh, my voice doesn’t matter. New stories or reinforcing old ones would be one outcome.

Chuck Wisner 32:47
Exactly. Because we’re not doing the exploration.

Jess Dewell 32:49
Yeah. And the relational pieces of ourselves and how we do our work here or- Relational pieces of our, how we live and develop and exist together under the same roof.

Chuck Wisner 33:00
Absolutely. A big part of that is authority issues, power issues, whether it’s in a family, parent, child, friends, colleagues, or in a hierarchy with bosses. There’s always power issues in every conversation.

Some, some friends, we give their voice more authority than we give other friends or some friends we speak to in a particular way. And we speak to other friends in another way because of how we position them as far as opinion of who they are. Now I’ve had plenty of executives say, we don’t have time for this.

There’s a cost. The cost is decisions that haven’t been well vetted, missed opportunities, missed possibilities. And if you make a bad decision or not well vetted decision, you think of the rework that has to be done.

Now we have to backtrack. Now we have to redo what we did because we didn’t consider certain information. There’s a cost there.

And I’m not talking about to do these conversations, you have to do an offsite every week for half day. It does take 15 minutes to say, what are all the different perspectives around the room?

Jess Dewell 34:11
I appreciate you bringing that up because that was the thing I wanted to jump to at the beginning. We know we’re pressed for time. We know there’s so many people that are overscheduled and have all these commitments because of all of these different reasons.

And if we don’t have the time, it’s the thing that can cause us the most harm as an individual, as a dynamic team, and then as a dynamic, flexible company. And that hurts us in our future. So I heard you say it, not offsites necessarily needed all the time.

Why do that all the time when you could do it in 15 minutes?

Chuck Wisner 34:49
Yeah. And just one practice I give leaders is just start being the person that says, okay, let’s slow things down a little bit. Let’s hear about the different perspectives in the room.

Let’s chew on them. Let’s ask each other good questions. Let’s learn from each other.

We might have an idea in mind of what we should do, but can we take 10 minutes, 15 minutes? This whiteboard, crazy ideas, no judgment though. You can’t have a brainstorm with judgment interfering them.

Just whatever, just put them up there.

Jess Dewell 35:22
It sounds like our baseline is how can we get the minimum number of sloppy promises to as close to zero as possible?

Chuck Wisner 35:29
Absolutely.

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Chuck Wisner 36:02
One thing that’s a thread throughout the book are these four questions that I consider essential for each conversation. If people take away these four questions, it can help change their conversations because they’re relevant to investigate our own thinking, relevant to inquire into other people and bring into a conversation in a healthy way. I’ll just tell you the four right off the top and then we can talk about each one.

Jess Dewell 36:35
Let’s do it.

Chuck Wisner 36:36
The first one is if we’re in a dialogue about solving a problem or trying to come up with a schedule or whatever we’re doing, embedded in your thinking and embedded in my thinking are generally desires that go unspoken. What do I want out of this conversation? Or what do we want to get out of this meeting?

And I’ll guarantee you, if I went into a team and I had 10 people, the way that meetings happen and the dysfunction of all that, we’d know too. If I would stop and say, wait a minute, let me hear from everybody in the room here. What are we trying to accomplish here?

What is our desire? And what is a desired end result that we’d all be happy with? We’d probably get at least eight or nine different answers.

Jess Dewell 37:16
I agree with you. And that’s my experience too, when we slow down just a little. If we didn’t, would that also be a problem?

Chuck Wisner 37:27
If we didn’t what?

Jess Dewell 37:28
If we didn’t have a whole bunch of different desires of outcomes, when we were asked that question, what do we want here?

Chuck Wisner 37:36
No, that’d be great. That means we have some alignment.

Jess Dewell 37:39
Okay. So there are times where we’ll make sure how close are we and are the way we’re doing our work here is that would be an indication of what? A solid culture?

We are in alignment of what our work is together? A role in that?

Chuck Wisner 37:55
So I would say more specifically, are we aligned around what we’re trying to accomplish and what the good outcome would look like?

Jess Dewell 38:02
Okay.

Chuck Wisner 38:03
Right?

Jess Dewell 38:03
Yeah.

Chuck Wisner 38:03
That’s that piece. Desires are a beautiful thing. They help us.

They inspire us. They help us create goals. They help us get aligned.

But personally, they’re also a trap because if we take a story we have, I should be the next VP and it’s not aligned with reality, that desire is a problem. Okay. So often desires are not aligned with reality, which has caused us pain and suffering.

Jess Dewell 38:37
So I should let go of the fact I want to be, play professional basketball. I did want to do that once upon a time in my world, but I grew up. I appreciate you bringing that up.

And I know I’m being cheeky about it.

Chuck Wisner 38:52
No, it’s fine. It’s very subtle. A lot of people who are upset or are suffering, do you know Katie Byron, the teacher, Katie?

Katie’s work, is it true? So someone will say, men shouldn’t treat women that way. I can say that’s a desire she has, but it’s not the truth.

And it doesn’t line with reality because men do treat women badly or many men treat women badly, not all men. So that’s an example of where it can play out in a really damaging way, because that person who’s saying it shouldn’t happen is, and I’m not denying her suffering. I’m not denying her care of it shouldn’t happen, has her in a battle with reality.

Jess Dewell 39:40
And okay, that’s really interesting. So are you in any way, a history buff? Because I am just enough to pull things out of history to bring to this conversation, but not detailed enough to know that they really fit here.

Let’s try. So I’m going to go back one step further. I was thinking about this concept of suffering and can we make a difference and where our ancestors are coming before us?

And we’re going to stick on the women of this just because this is what was in my mind, whether we have Rosa Parks. I just read a Rosa Parks quote today, and it was something about change what you can. And so I thought that was interesting.

And then if I go a little bit further, then there’s Eleanor Roosevelt said something like, you can do whatever you dream of if you believe in them. I know that’s not her exact quote, but that’s going that. And then I was actually like, Oh, let’s go back a little further.

By the way, it’s interesting that all happened to be women here in this. So I’m like, Hey, what an interesting conversation that came up. And I’m thinking about what Sojourner Truth said, I can do any work a man can.

And in one of her essays that, and now we come full circle back to what it is here. And so now I want to know, we come from, and this is true in any topic. I’m just, we’re just picking this one because you brought it up and I have some examples for it, anything.

So in what you’re saying, I want to honor that we do have change that has occurred or not occurred and been desired over the course of history from those who came before us. And we can embrace that yet. Our dreams may not be with today’s reality.

We may have to say, Hey, what part of our dream meets this reality? Would that be what you’re saying?

Chuck Wisner 41:28
Yeah. I’m going to just refine that a Please do.

Jess Dewell 41:32
I didn’t know if this would even make any sense here.

Chuck Wisner 41:34
I think I can connect the dots. Okay. One of my favorite things to do.

Yes. Accepting reality doesn’t mean we lay down and become a couch potato. Okay.

We say, Oh, it’s never going to work. Men are always going to treat women that way. We’re screwed.

Jess Dewell 41:53
Okay. Yep.

Chuck Wisner 41:54
Or the other, your other examples, boy, historically this is the case, but I really care deeply about X.

Jess Dewell 42:02
Yeah.

Chuck Wisner 42:03
Right? So accepting reality doesn’t mean we lay down and do nothing and become resigned. Right? It, but it wakes us up to reality so that we can be an agent for change without the pain and suffering when we fight reality.

Jess Dewell 42:26
And that that’s interesting because that comes back to what the stories and the culture we were told.

Chuck Wisner 42:31
Right.

Jess Dewell 42:32
I actually have stories related to that, that definitely have created pain and suffering some because I refused to look at it. And some, because I looked a little too close and didn’t recognize there was another way because I did solution in the action. Interesting.

Chuck Wisner 42:50
Yep.

Jess Dewell 42:51
Okay. So this is where, okay. So Chuck and I are just having this conversation about how do we just pick a thing that can relate to both of us and may relate to neither of us and actually be thoughtful about it and actually work with this question.

What do we want? And then I really like your refinement that you added Chuck, when you were saying, be the agent of change without suffering.

Chuck Wisner 43:14
Yes.

Jess Dewell 43:15
Yeah.

Chuck Wisner 43:15
The acceptance of reality is actually freeing. Yeah. Nobody wins a battle with reality, right? No.

Jess Dewell 43:24
True. I can experience one, just zero, higher than that, but that’s what I’ll say.

Chuck Wisner 43:31
It’s freeing because you go, okay, that’s reality, but that doesn’t mean I have to give up a passion I have, or that doesn’t mean I can’t fight, but I’ll be more in a more effective fighter by doing it.

Jess Dewell 43:42
Yes. I like that a lot. And then, and you’re able to choose and discern and think and listen and ask better questions and learn why other people think that they’re thinking and what is driving them to back to your open-handed conversation.

So that the slowing down. Okay. I think we can stay here all day.

Do you want to tell me the next three questions?

Chuck Wisner 44:05
Yeah. Yeah. That’s a deep one. Sometimes it gets brushed aside without understanding the depth of the power of how our unexplored desires create suffering for us.

Jess Dewell 44:18
Yeah.

Chuck Wisner 44:18
So the second one is time-based. It’s for every judgment we have, or every strong opinion we have that we’re holding with a fist, we have a concern. I don’t want tomorrow to feel like today.

I don’t want them to do that next week, what they did to me today. Or I don’t want to make the same mistake in two weeks that we made last week. Right?

So we have a concern. That’s not complex, except that we often don’t bring them to the forefront of a conversation, especially a difficult conversation.

Jess Dewell 44:51
Okay.

Chuck Wisner 44:52
In a difficult conversation, sometimes saying, let me help you understand what my concerns are, is very different than fighting about who’s right and who’s wrong. Right? They might have different concerns, but it’s a way of opening the conversation. Right?

Jess Dewell 45:10
Yeah. It’s built-in curiosity. If I’m sharing mine, maybe I go one step further and invite you, Chuck, to add your concerns as well.

Chuck Wisner 45:21
Concerns. Okay.

Jess Dewell 45:25
It’ll come, pop it in anywhere, anytime.

Chuck Wisner 45:27
It’ll pop back. The third one is what we mentioned before, authority. So every conversation, every judgment, every opinion you have, there are power issues that we aren’t often conscious of.

The power that someone has, the powers of someone’s voice has over me, the worries of someone, what if someone thinks of me, all of those are power authority issues. Our concerns about, will I be liked? Will I not be liked?

Those are all power issues. It plays out everywhere. Parents, children, colleagues, bosses, spouses, because then if there is, you have to understand the context.

Did I create the power imbalance? Am I not claiming my power? Am I stuck in a hierarchy with a bunch of jerks that I can’t do anything about because they’re my boss?

If I’m aware of that, it might say, you know what? I’m not going to stick in this job forever because I just can’t live in this culture.

Jess Dewell 46:29
Right.

Chuck Wisner 46:30
So really important to be aware of the context.

Jess Dewell 46:33
Yeah. And are we telling ourselves in this reality? The reality of, okay.

Chuck Wisner 46:40
Yeah. And the last one is standards. And the word, I use the word standards. It’s a umbrella word that includes all of our values, all of our beliefs, good, bad, wrong.

Every judgment we have, there’s a standard underneath, hiding underneath that mostly we did not consciously choose. You adopted standards from your family, your culture, your experience, people you grew up with. We have them.

We hold them dearly because they help us navigate the world, but they often in conflict, we forget to say, are we in the same page? Here’s what I think good would look like, or here’s why this matters to me. The battle that we’re in or the defensive postures that we have.

Jess Dewell 47:32
Yeah. Okay. So having done this work, having had this journey, not an easy journey.

And by the way, for the deaf, this is amazing. And only now I’m like, it only took you five years to do this. So I’m in awe, Chuck.

Um, so is there something profound that happened to you or that you witnessed from this work being applied? And it could be a little profound comes in all shapes and sizes. I’ve changed the world, but something to be incredibly profound beauty can be anywhere.

Chuck Wisner 48:07
I say specifically there’s my ability to learn to bust stories that weren’t serving me well is it was really, it’s such an incredible sort of life-changing practice. I mentioned earlier about growing up being told I wasn’t a big enough man. That was something that was told to me by my grandfather because I didn’t, I was behaving in ways that he didn’t think were manly enough.

I was a little kid and he kept telling me if I didn’t want to kill the deer, or I cried, or I showed some emotions, and he was saying, Oh, be a big, be a bigger man. You’re not a big enough man. I adopted that story.

He was the authority figure. I grew up with that internal dialogue until I was able to bust it. And I bet I was 30.

So that kind of dramatic letting go of unnecessary old stories, because guess what? That was his standard of what a man was. And then I got to say, wait a minute, that’s not my standard.

Here’s what my standard is. And by the way, here are the facts. I’m six feet tall.

I have two young sons. I have a happy marriage. I’m an architect.

And then I think the other part is just this, when we start looking at our own personal stories and reactions and emotions and things, there’s a freeing element to all of this that first, it looks really scary because it takes courage to open your hand. Oh, by the way, the four questions are a great way to open your hand.

Jess Dewell 49:47
Oh yeah. So listening only, what he did was he had his hand and he had question one and he opened one finger. He was talking question two and he opened his second finger.

If you actually do this from a fist and unfurl each of your fingers, you now have an open hand.

Chuck Wisner 50:03
That’s right. And you’re revealing your deeper thinking, right? So when you first do this work, it can be really scary.

It’s full of judgments and negativity and curse words and she’s this freaking idiot. Right? When we do the work, it’s scary at first, but eventually it’s freeing because you can find your baseline of what really matters to you.

Jess Dewell 50:27
So it sounds like there’s a little bit of boldness in here, Chuck. I want to know what makes it bold. What makes it bold to learn about our own conversational patterns and bust our own stories?

Chuck Wisner 50:39
Yeah, it makes it bold because it takes a lot of courage to do that. To look at your own crap, the stories that aren’t serving you, the standards you adopted that aren’t necessarily, you don’t have to give them up, but you shouldn’t suffer for them. I’ve done some work with women’s groups.

How many of you have a story in your head that if you leave the house and all the beds aren’t made, you’re a bad mom or a bad wife and most tans go up? No judgment on my part. I’m asking you a question to say, and where did you learn that standard?

Who taught you that was what it meant? It’s just an investigation, but you might go, oh, my mother drummed that in me since I was five years old, whatever. Now you don’t have to give it up, but now there might be days where you go and you don’t make the beds, but you don’t suffer.

You’re free. You go, oh, yeah, that doesn’t today.

Announcer 51:51
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