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Better Conversations for Stronger Relationships: Insights from an Experimental Leader

Hi, everybody. I’m Melanie Parish, the host of the experimental leader podcast. I am excited to be here with you today. And this is going to be a really short podcast. Today, I just wanted to share some thoughts I’ve been having about relationships, I had a relationship with, I have a relationship with a vendor, and I got an A text because I text people because I’m busy.

And they know they can find me on text. And they wanted to change our business arrangement. And I got sort of like, confused as to why because it seemed like that wasn’t going to give me what I wanted. And I was pretty happy. And I said, Well, next time we’re together, let’s have a conversation about it. And then I went off by myself.

And I was like, gosh, you know, maybe they have another client or something, I made up all sorts of things about, you know, how they were trying to meet their own needs. And I thought, well, I just can’t tolerate this suggestion that they made is not going to work for me. And I thought, gosh, that’s too bad. I’m gonna have to find somebody else, and blah, blah, blah.

Anyway, when I actually talked to them, and I said, What’s the problem that you’re trying to solve? They said, well, we just really want to make you happy. And you gave us this constraint. And that constraint, and we just can’t do it with this. And that, and I realized, their solution that they were proposing was really all about trying to meet my needs, like it was really about trying to make me happy as a client.

And, and so I was so glad that we had that conversation. And I actually started the conversation by saying, Gosh, I’ve been so wildly happy with you guys. And they were like, Oh, we didn’t even know you’re happy.

And, and it just really made me think a lot about relationships and how, you know, we all have feelings, in business relationships, I’m not even talking about personal relationships.

We all have feelings, and, and we, and then we don’t know what the other person’s feeling. And we sometimes don’t even know how to ask like, Hey, how’s this working for you? And, and those are such important conversations for us to have.

It’s so important for us to have conversations with the people that we do business with, that we’re in relationships with even our employees, staff, members, our teams, to say, how’s this working for you? How’s it going? And if people start to make suggestions, then why are they making the suggestion to ask what’s the problem? We’re trying to solve with the suggestion? Because we get so much information when we ask those questions. It really improves the quality of our conversations. And we’re able to understand where the other person is coming from.

So this is the end of the podcasts, there’s not going to be any more. But I just wanted to challenge you. If you’re having any friction in your life. Look at what are they trying to do? And what’s not working? Or what is working? Or what do you hope would work better? I really want to challenge you to go and focus on better conversations in your relationships, to try to clear out the parts that you don’t know find out what people are really thinking. Most of us don’t want to impose our will on others, that sort of sociopathic behavior. So we want to find out what other people are thinking and how we can collaborate better together.

 

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