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If you're worried about broaching a difficult subject with your partner or your team member and you go online looking for advice, you're likely to come across the same exact tip again and again. Therapists, coaches, and academics all offer the same suggestion: use the formula "When you do X, it makes me feel Y" to kick off the conversation.
"Use the premise of 'when you do [x], i feel [y]' to neutralize the blame game and express yourself clearly," instructs one PhD psychologist, for example. The idea, explains another coach, is to center your feelings and head off defensiveness: "No-one can argue with how you feel about something, as they are your feelings."
All of which sounds sensible enough, but as someone coming up on 15 years of marriage, I've always found this advice to be essentially useless. Despite the careful phrasing, the underlying tone of accusation comes through loud and clear, emotions get heated anyway, and the conversation is often derailed.
Are my husband and I just doing something wrong? Is our marriage rockier than I thought? I was relieved to learn recently that the problem likely isn't us. Even better, the news that this formula is actually deeply flawed comes from some of the most respected couples therapists around, John and Julie Gottman. And happily, they also suggest a better way to start difficult conversations.
If you've never heard of the Gottmans, they are long-married psychologists and the founders of The Gottman Institute, which researches evidence-based approaches to couples therapy. John Gottman is famous for claiming to be able to predict divorce with 90 percent accuracy (contempt for your partner is a really bad sign). Their books are classics in the field.
All of which is a long-winded way of saying the Gottmans are probably among the best-known couples therapists in America. They have a new book with the self-explanatory titled book coming out, Fight Right, and they've been doing the usual string of media appearances to promote it.
Among them was a recent interview with UC Berkeley's Greater Good Science Center where they shared some of the key takeaways from the book. To my relief, one of them is that it is time to finally retire the old "When you do X, it makes me feel Y" script.
In the interview, John Gottman agrees with those peddling this advice that how you start a contentious conversation is hugely important. "The first three minutes of a conflict determine how it's going to go 96 percent of the time," he asserts. But he disagrees with conventional wisdom on how to best open a dialogue.
"People used to say, 'If you're going to be a great listener, what you have to say is something like, "When you do X, I feel Y."' That is a really bad startup because it starts with 'you.' If you start with that statement, you create defensiveness--because nobody can hear that kind of statement," he explains.
"When you do X, I feel Y" tries to dress up criticism as self-analysis. But very few people are fooled by this charade. Turns out my husband and I aren't weird in this after all.
What works better? Gottman's advice is to genuinely focus on your feelings and your concrete ask rather than your partner's shortcomings.
"We urge people to begin with a gentler way of starting a conversation about an area of conflict. To start by talking about themselves and what they feel, and expressing a positive need, and sticking to a situation rather than describing their partner and blaming the relationship problem on some trait of the partner," he recommends.
This echoes some of my favorite communication advice of all time. Sadly, I can't figure out where it originated, but it's a bit of wisdom that has averted dozens of fights in my home: "A complaint is merely a poorly worded request." Next time you're about to ask your better half to change some behavior, try adding "this is a request, not a complaint" to the beginning and see what happens.
The Gottmans seem to agree with the underlying principle. When you're unhappy with other people's behavior and keen to have a constructive dialogue to fix it rather than an emotional clash, forget the old scripts. You'll have better results talking about your own feelings and making a concrete request.
Interested in learning more? The interview provides many more interesting tidbits or you could pick up the book itself.
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