S4 E30 BONUS: Coaching, Teaching, & Classroom Management Strategies Sparked From My Conversation with Dr. Katy Anthes (❤️Olivia Wahl)

Practical Strategies to Stop Avoiding Difficult Conversations

In this S4E30 bonus episode, I reflect on my conversation with Dr. Katy Anthes about her Forward Framework for moving from polarization to progress. Drawing from the classic book Difficult Conversations, I consider the gap between intentions and impact, explaining why we often misinterpret others' motives and how avoiding difficult conversations damages relationships.

Learn practical strategies for:
➡️recognizing your contribution to conflicts,
➡️understanding your emotions,
➡️and addressing issues directly to create meaningful progress.

Whether you're an educator, parent, or leader, these evidence-based techniques will transform how you approach challenging conversations and build stronger connections.

📚 Featured Book: Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen

00:00 - Introduction: Moving from Polarized Mindsets to Progress
01:00 - The Schoolutions: Coaching and Teaching Strategies Podcast
01:40 - Dr. Katy Anthes's Forward Framework
02:10 - "Difficult Conversations": A Classic Resource
03:00 - Why Assumptions About Intentions Are Often Wrong
04:00 - How We Assume Intentions from Impact
05:30 - Digital Communication and Misinterpreting Intentions
07:00 - How Accusing Others Creates Defensiveness
08:30 - The Toxicity of Avoiding Difficult Conversations
10:00 - Tools for Spotting Your Contribution: Role Reversal
11:00 - The Observer's Insight Technique
12:00 - Understanding Your Own Emotions
14:00 - Final Thoughts: Being Understood vs. Being Right
14:30 - Outro and Contact Information

#DifficultConversations #IntentionsVsImpact #ConflictResolution #EducationPodcast #CommunicationSkills #ForwardFramework #EmotionalIntelligence #LeadershipDevelopment #TeachingStrategies #ParentingTips #WorkplaceRelationships #PersonalGrowth #AssumedIntentions #ProfessionalDevelopment #EducatorResources

Check out my full S4E30 interview with Dr. Katy Anthes! 

When coaches, teachers, administrators, and families work hand in hand, it fosters a school atmosphere where everyone is inspired, and every student is fully engaged in their learning journey.

New episodes are released every Monday, with a bonus solo episode on Fridays featuring research-backed coaching and teaching strategies you can apply right away to better serve the children in your care.

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When coaches, teachers, administrators, and families work hand in hand, it fosters a school atmosphere where everyone is inspired and every student is fully engaged in their learning journey.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hi there. I'm so glad you're here. Your time is precious, and because of that, I want to let you know right away what you'll gain by listening to the very last second of this episode. My conversation with Dr. Katy Anthes, focused on her Forward Framework that can help all of us move from polarized mindsets to progress.

In this bonus episode, I highlight why effective communication during difficult conversations requires recognizing the gap between intentions and impact, avoiding assumptions about others' motives, and addressing issues directly to move from polarization to progress, you'll learn why we often misinterpret intentions based on impact, why avoiding difficult conversations is harmful.

And why understanding our own emotions is challenging, but essential. Stay with me. I'm so happy to have you as a listener today. This is Schoolutions: [00:01:00] Coaching and Teaching Strategies, the podcast that extends education beyond the classroom. A show that offers educators and caregivers strategies to try right away and ensure every student receives the inspiration and support they need to thrive.

I am Olivia Wahl, and this is a bonus episode. It's an accompaniment to S4E30 with Dr. Katy Anthes. Katy talked about her Forward Framework, and that framework has profound impacts to help us move from being polarized to progressing and nudging forward in conversation together. So the book I wanted to lean on for this episode is an oldie book, goodie on my bookshelf.

My book is so fragile at this point from being read over and over that every time I open it, I'm worried a page will just fall out of the book. The pages themselves are browned on the edges, and I've had this [00:02:00] book since 1999. Um, I have my old notes still in it, but I went back to this and put some fresh blue post-its on pages that really are resonating right now in the moment.

This book is called Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most. It's by Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, and Sheila Heen. And I want to focus on the idea of intentions versus impact. Page 46 - “The first mistake are assumptions about intentions are often wrong. What they say is that when we're exploring mistakes, “it requires us to understand how our minds work when devising stories about what others intend, and we have to learn and recognize the set of questionable assumptions upon which these stories are built.

And then they illuminate the problem. “While, we care deeply about other people's intentions toward [00:03:00] us. We don't actually know what their intentions are. We can't. Other people's intentions exist only in their hearts and minds. They are invisible to us. However, real and right are assumptions about other people's intentions may seem to us they're often incomplete or just plain wrong.”

So when I read that, I think about again, that concept of intent versus impact, but also I think about an activity that I learned from Toni Cameron and Lucy West and their book Agents of Change. That idea of fact versus fiction. When someone doesn't show up, when they say they're going to, or when a colleague of ours comes with nothing in hand to a meeting, we have to be so careful about our assumptions.

What's the story we're telling ourselves about why someone chose to behave the way they did? And then they go on to say that “we [00:04:00] assume intentions from the impact on us. That much of the first mistake can be traced to one basic error. We make an attribution about another person's intentions based on the impact of their actions on us. We feel hurt, therefore, they intended to hurt us. We feel slighted. Therefore they intended to slight us. Our thinking is so automatic that we aren't even aware that our conclusion is only an assumption. We're so taken in by our story about what they intended that we can't imagine how they could have intended anything else, and we assume the worst. The conclusions we draw about the intentions based on the impact of others' actions on us are rarely charitable.”

They give the example “when a friend shows up late to the movie, we don't think, gee, I’ll bet he ran into someone in need. More likely we think, jerk. He doesn't care [00:05:00] about making me miss the beginning of the movie or when we've been hurt by someone else's behavior we assume the worst.”

We attribute intentions to others all the time. This dates the book, but I also love it “with business and even personal relationships increasingly conducted via email, voicemail, faxes, and conference calls, which AKA, that would be zoom for us now, but we often have to read between the lines or figure out what people really mean.”

I would add texts into that mix and they point out without the tone of voice to guide us. It's so easy to assume the worst. They illuminate “our human quality, that we treat ourselves more charitably. And what's ironic and all too human about our tendency to attribute bad intentions to others is how differently we treat ourselves.”

“That when we are the ones acting, we know that much of the time, we don't intend to annoy, offend, or upstage [00:06:00] others, we're wrapped up in our own worries and often are totally unaware that we're having any negative impact on others. When we're the ones acted upon. However, our story too easily slides into the one about bad intentions and bad character, and they also point out why getting intentions wrong is costly, that intentions matter. And guessing wrong is hazardous to our relationships.”

They write about the assumption between bad intentions and bad character. They say “that perhaps the biggest danger of assuming the other person had bad intentions is that we easily jump from, they had bad intentions to, they are a bad person.”

We have to be so careful to not settle into judgments about people's character because those will affect not only any conversation we might have, but it could impact the entire relationship.

Sadly, once we think we figured someone out, we see all of [00:07:00] their actions through that lens. And even if we don't share our view with them, the impact remains. And this is where people talking behind other people's backs comes into play. Because the worse our view of the other person's character, it's easier to justify to ourselves avoiding them or saying nasty things behind their back.

And I thought this section was also a perfect connection with my conversation with Katy. On page 49: “Accusing people of bad intentions creates defensiveness of course, that our assumptions about other people's intentions can have a significant impact on our conversations. And interestingly, when we think we're sharing our heard or frustration, anger, confusion, we're trying to begin a conversation that will end in greater understanding.

But often what the other person feels and thinks is that we're trying to provoke, accuse, or malign them. And fascinatingly, they make the same [00:08:00] mistake and leap into judging our intentions. And so why are we surprised when the person that we're addressing tries to defend themselves or attack back. From their point of view, they're defending themselves from false accusations. From our point of view they're just being defensive. We are right. They just aren't big enough to admit it. The result is a mess. No one learns anything. No one apologizes. Nothing changes.”

And then I jump ahead to avoiding the older I get, the more I try to have difficult conversations because I know avoiding the conversations just makes it so much worse. And they explain that “a particularly problematic form of avoiding is complaining to a third party instead of to the person with whom you're upset. And there's so many reasons this is toxic. It's toxic in any work environment. It's toxic with children, and at the time it may make you [00:09:00] feel better, but it puts the third party in the middle with no good way to help.”

They can't speak for you, and if they try, the other person may get the idea that the problem's so terrible that you can't discuss it directly. And on the other hand, if they keep quiet, the third party's burdened with only your partisan and incomplete version of the story. Then I just wanna give a caveat because they expressed that it, it's not to say that it's not okay to get advice from a friend about how to conduct a difficult conversation, but then there's an accountability factor that you need to go back and report to that friend about any change in your feelings as a result of having the difficult conversation, so they're not left with an unbalanced story.

I think this is powerful because we can model this for our children. I often say to my own boys that if someone is talking to you about someone else, they're doing the exact same thing about you to other people. And so owning that behavior and [00:10:00] letting them know you're willing to be a sounding board and a thought partner for how a difficult conversation can go and that you wanna hear back after that conversation happens.

I love that idea. I love that shift there. Instead of being a third party that has to hold on to all of these negative feelings and things being said about other people and truly holding onto a false narrative in most cases. And they offer two tools for spotting contribution. They say, if you are still unable to see your contribution, try one of the following two approaches, and I do this all the time, one of them is role reversal.

This is very, very helpful for me - asking myself, what would they say I'm contributing. “I have to pretend I'm the other person and answer the question in the first-person using pronouns such as I, me and my, I need to see myself through someone else's eyes to help myself understand what I'm doing to feed the system.”

There's [00:11:00] also a tool they offer called The Observer's Insight, and they say, “step back and look at the problem from the perspective of a disinterested observer. Imagine that you're a consultant called in to help the people in this situation better understand why they're getting stuck. How would you describe in a neutral, non-judgmental way what each person is contributing? If you have trouble getting out of your own shoes in this way, ask a friend to try for you. If what your friend comes up with surprises, you don't reject it immediately. Rather imagine that it is true. Ask how that could be and what it would mean.”

And I was having a conversation with a teacher just yesterday and she was saying how often the advice she offers her students after it's given, she realizes, ah, maybe I should do that myself. And it's fascinating how when you step away from being inside your own [00:12:00] mind, you can be so much more impartial. So I love those two tools for adults and children alike. And then it's also so important to have our feelings. They matter, and they're often at the heart of the difficult conversation we have to have.

And this is beautiful. They say “feelings of course, are part of what makes good relationships, so rich and satisfying. Feelings like passion and pride, silliness and warmth, and even jealousy, disappointment and anger let us know we are fully alive.”

But then it's important to remember why we cannot let feelings hide on page 91 they say, “most of us assume that knowing how we feel is no more complicated than knowing whether we're hot or cold. We just know. But in fact, we often don't know how we feel.”

I thought this was so interesting, “Many of us know our own emotions about, as well as we know a city we are visiting for the first time. [00:13:00] We may recognize certain landmarks, but fail to understand the subtle rhythms of daily life. We can find the main boulevards, but remain oblivious to the tangle of back streets where the real action is. Before we can get to where we're going, we need to know where we are and when it comes to understanding our own emotions where most of us are is lost. And this isn't because we're dumb, but because recognizing feelings is challenging, feelings are more complex and nuanced than we usually imagine. What's more, feelings are very good at disguising themselves. Feelings we’re uncomfortable with disguise themselves as emotions. We’re better able to handle bundles of contradictory feelings, masquerade as a single emotion, and most important. Feelings transform themselves into judgments, accusations, and attributions.”

After giving myself the gift of therapy, I learned that I react in anger or [00:14:00] frustration when I'm actually deeply hurt. So that's something that I can't recommend highly enough that if you need a third party to talk to, a therapist is a wonderful human that can offer that impartial perspective, if you don't have a friend or a family member to be a thought partner for you.

I hope this reflection was helpful for you and offered you some tools to start having difficult conversations because after those difficult conversations are had, it doesn't mean that we're going to all get what we want. But I go back to something Katy said. We all want to be understood. We all want to belong, but being understood is different than being right.

Have those difficult conversations. Feel your feelings. And take care out there. See you next week. Schoolutions: Coaching and Teaching Strategies is created, produced and edited by me. Olivia Wahl. Thank you [00:15:00] to my older son Benjamin, who created the music playing in the background. You can follow and listen to Schoolutions wherever you get your podcast or subscribe to never miss an episode and watch on YouTube. Now, I'd love to hear from you. Send me an email at schoolutionspodcast@gmail.com. Let me know how your school or district handles difficult issues and conversations. Tune in every Monday for the best research, back coaching and teaching strategies you can apply right away to better the lives of the children in your care. And stay tuned for my bonus episodes every Friday where I'll reflect and share connections to what I learned from the guest that week. See you then.