003: Crucial Conversations | Kerry Patterson | The Leadership Talk You Keep Avoiding | Jeffrey Scott Stanton

Episode 3 of The Leadership Series with Jeffrey Scott Stanton draws from Crucial Conversations by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler, and applies it to the leadership situations where communication matters most: the conversations every leader has been putting off.

Jeffrey Scott Stanton is a coach, consultant, advisor, and former Executive Vice President of Learning and Development at Douglas Elliman Real Estate. His career has been built inside high-pressure sales environments where communication is the primary lever of performance. In this episode, he brings that experience to the hardest conversations in leadership: the ones that feel less urgent than they actually are.

This is where vision from Episode 2 meets the test. Because vision only matters if you are willing to have the conversations required to protect it.

IN THIS EPISODE, JEFFREY COVERS:
1: What a crucial conversation actually is and why these conditions make most people communicate defensively
2: Why the most dangerous conversations are the quiet, low-urgency ones that should have happened months ago
3: The Fool's Choice: the false binary leaders create before any hard conversation, choosing between honesty and the relationship
4: What accumulates on both sides while a leader waits: resentment building on one side, assumptions filling the silence on the other
5: The Why Trap: why most leaders get forced into hard conversations by a triggering event rather than choosing them proactively
6: How to create safety before delivering a hard message, and why a message cannot land when someone has already shut down
7: The second conversation: the internal narrative running in the other person's mind while you are talking
8: A practical four-point framework for preparing any difficult conversation before you walk in the room

TIMESTAMPS: 
[00:00] Cold open: the conversation you already know you need to have
[02:00] How Episodes 1, 2, and 3 build on each other — and who this series is built for
[04:00] The most dangerous conversations are the quiet, low-urgency ones leaders keep postponing
[06:00] The Fool's Choice: the false binary between honesty and the relationship
[08:00] What and thinking looks like in a real brokerage conversation
[10:00] What accumulates while a leader waits, and how drift spreads across the team
[12:00] The Why Trap: why reactive conversations are always more expensive than proactive ones
[14:00] Safety versus comfort: what safety actually means before a difficult conversation
[16:00] Two things that create safety: mutual purpose and mutual respect
[18:00] The second conversation: addressing the internal narrative before it takes hold
[20:00] The NLP principle: the meaning of communication is the response you get, not the response you intended
[24:00] Real listening in high-stakes conversations: how to hear what is not being said
[27:00] Unscheduled pressure moments and the two tools that work when preparation is not available
[31:00] The four things to write down before any difficult conversation
[33:00] Closing reflection: your conversations matter more than you ever know

HOST Jeffrey Scott Stanton: 
Jeffrey Scott Stanton is a leadership coach, consultant, and former Executive Vice President of Learning and Development at Douglas Elliman. He is the host of The Leadership Series on J Squared Podcast Productions, where leadership principles are broken down and applied in real organizations, real teams, and real pressure.

Connect with Jeffrey: 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeffreyscottstanton/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jeffreyscottstanton
Network: J Squared Podcast Productions: https://www.jsquaredpodcast.com/

FOUNDING SPONSORS: 
1: Wise Agent | https://wiseagent.com/jsquared - The all-in-one CRM that helps real estate agents manage contacts, automate follow-up, and grow their business.

2: Subi | https://www.oksubi.com/ - Your AI transaction genie. From contract to close, your work is my command.

3: The CE Shop | https://j2.theceshop.com/ Use the discount code jsquared for an additional 35% off

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Silence isn't a form of kindness. It's just a slower form of damage. Relationship you're trying to protect, it's already changing because the person on the other side is learning without being told that there are no real standards being kept here and they can just do what they want. Every day you delay is a day you're choosing. Not wanting, choosing. And the people in your organization are reading that choice, whether you intend them to or not. The second best time is to have that conversation right now. As a leader, there's a conversation you haven't had yet. You already know which one. It came to mind before I even finished that sentence. You've been carrying it with you for days, maybe even weeks, maybe even months. You've rehearsed it in your car. You've told yourself you're waiting just for that right moment to have that conversation. And while you've been waiting, the situation has been running without you. The behavior you haven't addressed has been teaching everyone around you what you'll accept. And the standard you haven't reinforced, your standards, they've been softening. And the person you haven't spoken to directly, they've been filling in every gap that you left open with something that you didn't intend. And that's where leadership breaks. Not in strategy, not in vision, in the moments when something needs to be said and you don't. The last episode we spoke about vision, the leader's responsibility to create direction with that vision. And this episode is where the vision gets tested, not in a meeting, in a conversation, specifically the kinds of conversations that most leaders and most people avoid.

SPEAKER_00 1:26

Our host believes the greatest leadership principles ever written were never meant to stay on the pages of books. They were meant to be applied in real decisions, real conversations, and real moments of pressure. Because leadership isn't learned in theory, it's built in practice. This is where timeless leadership frameworks are broken down, translated, and executed in the real world. This is the leadership series.

SPEAKER_01 1:48

Welcome to the Jeffrey Scott Staten Podcast. This is the leadership series. Now, some of you listening may already be leaders. You carry the title, you carry the responsibility, and the weight that comes with both. Some of you are stepping into that leadership role right now. And some of you don't have that title yet, but you already feel the responsibility. You are the ones that people come to, you are the ones that people watch. You're the ones that people measure themselves against, whether you ask for it or not, and whether you like it or not. You're the leader without the title. And this series is built for all three of you. I'm Jeffrey Scott Stanton. I'm a coach, I'm a consultant, I am an advisor, and I am a speaker. My entire career and my work has been focused on behavioral strategy, learning to design, performance enablement, and leadership development in a high-paced, high-stress, high-stakes environment like real estate. This series is designed to be listened to in order. If you're new here, please go back and listen to episode one. Episode one, we spoke about leadership as influence, not as a title. Episode two was vision and the leader's responsibility to give people direction with that vision. Episode two ended with a warning. Even the clearest vision fails when leaders cannot communicate it consistently and credibly. And that warning is why we're here today in episode three. Before we go any further, a sincere thank you to our founding partners, the CE Shop, Subi, and WiseAgent. These are companies that are built for professionals who are serious about growth and serious about building something that holds up. Today's episode drew us from one of the most important books ever written on leadership and human communicating and human community. Today's episode drew us from one of the most important books ever written on human communications under pressure. And that's Crucial Conversations by Kerry Peterson. As always, this is not a book review. It's about what those ideas look like in real leadership situations in the real world. Those one-on-one meetings, the team meetings, the moments of pressure that this industry delivers without warning. The book is the starting point. Your leadership is the destination. Crucial Conversations gives us a definition that's worth understanding clearly to start. A crucial conversation is any conversation where three of these conditions are met at the same exact time. Your stakes are high, the opinions differ, and emotions are strong. When all three are true simultaneously, when all three exist at the same time, most people stop communicating effectively and start communicating defensively. And this is where most leaders miss it. These conversations don't always arrive looking dramatic. Sometimes the most important conversations in your office, the most important conversations in anyone's career are the quiet ones, the one-on-ones with an agent whose numbers have been drifting for the past three months, where everything on the service still looks manageable, or with that conversation with the top producer who everyone knows everyone sees has been cutting corners. But the closing deals, so no one says anything to them. You don't say anything to them. Or that new team lead who was promoted six months ago and is still leading like an agent, doing all the work themselves, not delegating, not holding their people accountable. And you've been meaning to address it and meaning to have that conversation with them, but haven't found just that right time, just that perfect moment. Those conversations feel less urgent than they are. And that feeling, that that little, ah, it's not that critical yet. It's not that important yet, is exactly what makes them the most dangerous conversations in any organization. Not the dramatic ones, the ones that should have happened months ago, weeks ago, that didn't. And I've seen this confirmed across all different types of organizations at every level. The quality of a leader's culture, their team performance, their own credibility, it all traces back more directly to how well they handle these conversations than to almost anything else. Not the strategy, not the market conditions, not recruiting, the conversations. Because the conversations are where the trust is built or eroded and where the real culture gets established. Not what you write on the whiteboard, not within your PowerPoint presentation, but in what you're willing to say when it truly counts. So why don't leaders have these conversations? That's where we're going next. There's a concept called the fool's choice, and I want to spend some real time on this. I think it's the single most common reason that leaders don't have conversations that they know they need to have. The fool's choice is a fault binary. This is that either or that they construct in their minds before any difficult conversation happens. They say in their mind, either I address this and damage the relationship, or I protect the relationship and stay quiet. They either say something and risk losing that person, or they keep the person and tolerate the behavior. It sounds like a real choice, but it's not. It's a trap. It's a fool's choice. Now, think about how this plays out in a brokerage. You have an agent, solid producer, been with you four or five years, great relationship. And they've developed a habit of talking over the new agents in your team meetings, dismissing their ideas, undermining their confidence. You've noticed, the other agents have noticed, and you haven't said anything. Why? Because the relationship is good. The production's there. You've told yourself that if I address it, I risk the relationship. It's not big enough, it's not big enough for a problem yet. And if I don't, at least we stay stable. That's the fool's choice. And here's why it's called that. Because the actual cost of staying silent isn't stability. It's everything the silence is building underneath the surface. Your new agents are learning that production protects behavior. Your mid-level agents are recalibrating what they think the office and what they think the organization actually stands for. And that four-year relationship you're trying to protect, it's already changing because the person on the other side is learning without being told that there are no real standards being kept here and they can just do what they want. Now, the right question is never, do I say it or do I protect the relationship? The right question is, how as a leader do I say this in a way that actually serves both? Not or end. Because leaders who develop this skill find that honest, well-executed conversations don't damage relationships. They actually deepen them. The person leaves a hard conversation with a clear path forward and the sense that the leader cared enough to be direct, cared enough to say something, they don't feel less connected. They feel more connected. Silence isn't a form of kindness. It's just a slower form of damage. So this is what I call end thinking. And what does end thinking actually look like in a brokerage situation? You go to the four-year agent privately, not in a group setting, not in passing, and you open with the relationship, not against it. And you say something like this I want to talk to you about something I've been observing in our team meetings because I think you have a lot more influence in this office than you realize. And right now, that influence is cutting the wrong direction. It's cutting to the new people. You named the specific behavior, you connected it to the impact they're having on the people around them, and you make it clear that you're bringing it up because the relationship is worth the conversation, not in spite of it. That's how end, that's end works. That's how a leader says the hard things and protects the relationship with the end. It's not always comfortable, but it's always possible if you stop letting the fool's choice make the decisions before you even begin. Let's talk about what happens during the time between when a conversation should happen and when it finally does, because most leaders significantly underestimate this. Here's what accumulates while you wait. On your side, resentment, frustration builds quietly. You start coloring how you speak to that person. You're a little shorter in the hallway conversations, less recognition than you may otherwise give them. A slight edge in how you respond to them in meetings. You cut them off a little bit. You're communicating something, you're just not communicating it clearly. You're not communicating the right thing. And unclear communication is always more damaging to the relationship than a direct conversation about it. On their sides, assumptions. People almost always know when something is off. You always get that feeling. And when they haven't been told directly what the issue is, they fill that silence with their own interpretation, with their own meaning, which is almost never more accurate or more generous than the reality of the conversation. They may decide that the relationship is damaged because you're not saying something. They may start quietly looking at other options and you won't know that it's happening. You'll find out when they tell you that they're leaving to go to your competition. And across the team, something called drift. Everyone sees a situation, no one is naming it. They draw their own conclusions about what the standard actually is. That conclusion spreads. And by the time you finally have that one conversation with the person, you're no longer managing the original issue. You're managing everything that's accumulated around it. You're managing that person and that behavior, and now you need to manage the team that has changed because they think the standards don't apply to anyone anymore. Or the standards are different. Here's something I've seen play out in brokerages specifically. An agent's production starts slipping. The broker sees it in month one. They don't say anything. Maybe two closings when they normally have five or six. Month two, they mention it generally in a sales meeting. We all need to be focused on our pipeline right now. We need to increase our production. The agent hears it, nods, nothing changes. Month four, month five. Now the broker's frustrated, the leader's frustrated. The agent feels like something is wrong but doesn't know what. And a conversation that could have been a 30-minute coaching session in January. Now it's a performance review in June, and they're leaving. The delay didn't postpone the conversation. It changed what the conversation had to be. It removed most of the options that existed when the problem was small, when the problem first started. Every day you delay is a day you're choosing. Not wanting, choosing. And the people in your organization are reading that choice, whether you intend them to or not. So what finally forces the conversation, that's actually its own problem. This is called the why trap. Most leaders don't choose to have difficult conversations. They get forced into them. Something happens, a deal falls apart, a client complains, there's a public moment at a team meeting, and suddenly there's a reason. There's a trigger that finally justifies the discomfort of having that conversation. The problem is that when the event becomes the reason for the conversation, the conversation becomes about that event instead of the pattern, instead of the behavior that led up to that event. You end up addressing the one lost listing when the real issue six months ago was a pattern of poor preparation, poor performance, and poor follow-through. You may resolve the incident, but the pattern continues because you never actually named it. You never talked about the pattern, you talked about that one incident because that's what blew up. And here's what the person feels on the other side of that event conversation. They know you've been aware of what's going on. They feel that this conversation is happening because something forced your hand, not because you chose it. They feel like they weren't important enough for you to have that conversation with them when things first started. Because a leader who comes to someone proactively before a crisis, before it's obvious, before a blowup, sends a completely different message than the one who waits until it's undeniable, the one who waits until it's a situation that explodes. Proactive leadership, proactive conversations, say I'm paying attention and I care about what's going on here and I care about you. Reactive says, I was willing to live with this until I couldn't live with this anymore. And now I gotta say something. The best leaders I've worked with have a simple habit around this, and you could do this too. Regularly ask yourself if I were going to have this conversation six months from now, what do I wish I would have said today? And then just say it today. Not because there's a crisis, because waiting makes it more expensive. Waiting turns it into something it doesn't have to be. The best time to have the conversation was earlier. The second best time is to have that conversation right now. And once you made that decision, you're having that conversation. Once you decide you're going in, there's one thing that leaders get completely wrong the moment they walk through that door to have that conversation. They skip safety. Now, I don't mean comfort. I want to be clear about that. Safety and comfort are not the same thing. A difficult conversation should not be made comfortable, but it does need to be safe and feel safe. And safety is the condition under which the other person can actually receive what you're saying without shutting down, receive what you're saying without fighting back, receive what you're saying without disagreeing. And it's fine if they disagree as long as they feel safe. Here's what walking in, here is what walking in without safety actually looks like. Imagine broker calls a team leader into their office and opens up with this. I've been watching numbers, I'm concerned about the direction things are heading. We need to talk about what's going on. Technically accurate, completely direct, and the team leader's nervous technically accurate and completely direct. And then the team leader's nervous system starts firing off immediately. They're not thinking about their pipeline or the leadership or what needs to be changed. They're thinking, is this the beginning of the end? Am I being fired? Should I talk to my lawyer? What does my agreement say? The conversation is already over because they didn't feel safe. Not because of what you said, but because of the condition it was delivered into. If people don't feel safe during a conversation, they stop processing the content and they stop managing the experience. They will get defensive, they will go quiet, they'll nod without absorbing anything you say. You'll walk out thinking, hey, the conversation went well. They walk out having heard almost nothing you intended to say. You had the interpretation of a productive conversation, but none of the outcomes. You had the appearance of a productive conversation with none of the outcomes. You're listening to the leadership series on the Jeffree Scott Stan podcast, where leadership principles are broken down and applied in the real world. I want to take a moment to recognize one of our founding partners, Wise Agent. In any performance-driven business, the systems behind the scenes matter just as much as the person in front of the client. WiseAgent is an all-in-one CRM platform built specifically for real estate professionals. It helps manage your contacts, automate follow-ups, and grow your business with one platform instead of piecing together dozen different tools from dozens of different companies. If you're serious about building something sustainable, it is absolutely worth your time. Visit wiseagent.com. Link is in the show notes. Tell them J Squared Podcast Productions sent you. There's two things that create safety. First is mutual purpose. The other person needs to believe, genuinely believe, that this conversation has happened because you care about their success, not because you're frustrated, not because you're managing a problem, not because you're building a case against them. A broker who sits down with an underperforming agent and opens up with their own frustration has already lost the conversation. A broker opens up with something different and says something like, I want to talk about what's happening because I think there's more here and I want to figure out what's getting in the way. What can I do to help you? That broker has created a condition for the agent to actually hear them. The second one is mutual respect. The moment someone feels talked down to or dismissed, safety collapses. And once safety collapses, the conversation is functionally over, even if both people are still in the room talking, the conversation's over. One of the most useful tools I've ever used in a hard conversation is what I'll call the contrast statement. It's simple. Before you deliver a message, you name what you're not saying alongside what you're actually saying. I'm not saying your future here is in question. I am saying that what I've been seeing over the last three months needs a direct conversation. And I want to have that now with you. That one move, that one line closes the door on the interpretation that would shut them down before you even had the chance to say what actually needs to be said. It doesn't soften the message. It makes room for the message to land. It makes room for the message to be heard. And here's why it matters even more than most leaders realize. Because while you're talking, the person in front of you is having a whole different conversation. While you're delivering your message, the person in front of you is simultaneously running an internal narrative in their mind, what the words mean. Not just what you said, but what it means about them, what it means to them, what it means to their future, about where this is heading. That internal conversation is running the entire time you're talking, drawing conclusions faster than you could deliver any message. And if you don't account for it, it will determine what they actually hear, regardless of how clearly you spoke. And I've seen this happen in brokerages dozens and dozens and dozens of times. A broker pulls a team leader aside, they pull an agent aside after a meeting and say, hey, your numbers are off and we need to talk about it. Clear, direct, legitimate. That team leader here, might be pushed out. Maybe we should go look, maybe I should take that phone call from that recruiter. Is my position at risk? Is there a problem here? I think I should talk to that recruiter. Has the decision already been made? And then now they're telling me I gotta go. What's going on here? That second conversation has taken over. And now they're sitting across from you in the room nodding and saying, uh-huh, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Because they're not present. They're managing their own fears. They're managing what's going on in their mind, or at least they're trying to. The leaders who are most effective in difficult conversations have to learn to address the second conversation before it ever even takes hold. They name the conclusion that the other person might be drawing before the conversation even starts. Something like this. I want to be clear about why we're having this conversation. I'm not here to tell you your time here is limited because I think you're capable of more than what I've been saying. And I want to understand what's going on and what I can do to support you. That doesn't change the message. It creates space for the message to actually land. So again, before a difficult conversation, ask yourself this question. What's the second conversation likely to be? What is a person going to conclude the moment I bring this up, the moment I open my mouth, the moment I say anything, what are they thinking? And how can I address that directly so it doesn't crowd out everything else I say? That interpretation alone will change the quality of every hard conversation, every difficult conversation you have to have. And it connects directly to something that I think is one of the most important and least owned principles in leadership communication. There's a principle from NLP, neurolinguistic programming, that I come back to consistently when I'm working with leaders and coaching leaders. That is this the meaning of communications is the response that you get. Not the response that you intend, not the response that you thought the words deserved, the response you actually get. That's the meaning of what you communicated. Now, let that sit for a second, because what that means is when your message doesn't land the way you intended, when what was received was different from what you sent, the responsibility for that belongs to you, the communicator, not the receiver. Communication isn't 50-50. It's 100% on the person doing the communication. It's 100% on the person who's trying to share that message. It's on you, not the receiver. The default position for most leaders when a message doesn't land is this. I told them I was clear, they should have understood. And that position, as understandable as it feels from the inside, produces nothing more than frustration because it pulls the problem somewhere that you have no control over. The reframe is this. Instead of why didn't they get it? The question should become, or the question now should be, how do I need to communicate this differently? How do I need to communicate this differently? So the response I get is the one that I need. That's a question a leader can actually do something with. It moves the conversation from blame to responsibility. And that responsibility is on you as the person communicating as the leader. I want to be honest about how uncomfortable that reframe is for most leaders and for most people. Because it requires something that goes against the grain. It requires you to stay curious about your own role in the breakdown instead of immediately explaining it away. And that's what most people do. That agent didn't change their behavior after that conversation. The NLP principal says this something about how you communicated that, how that conversation was delivered did not produce the response that you needed. Maybe that message was clear, but the relationship wasn't safe enough for the person to receive it. Maybe the outcome wasn't specific enough to act on. Maybe they heard the words but didn't understand the urgency behind them. You don't know which one until you get curious about the response instead of getting frustrated by it. And getting curious about the response instead of frustrated by it is one of the most significant shifts a leader can make because it turns every failed communication into information instead of evidence that that other person is a problem because they're not. The problem is how it's being communicated. I've seen this play out in sales meetings all the time. The leader or managing broker announces a new CRM, a new lead management process. They lay it out clearly, they field a few questions, then they move on. Two weeks later, three-quarters of the team are still working the old way. The broker's frustrated. When you think about the meaning of communications, is the response that you get. What does that mean? The message didn't land the way you intended it to. And that responsibility is on you. So what needs to change about what you're delivering? Maybe it needs to be demonstrated, not just announced. Maybe certain people need direct one-on-one, hands-on help with it. Maybe the why wasn't clear enough. Maybe the why wasn't clear enough for people to buy in. Whatever the answer, whatever the answer, the question puts it right where it belongs in your hands. You know, this leads to probably one of the most important aspects in any important conversation is your ability to actually hear what's happening on the other side of that conversation. If responsibility for whether a message lands, a message is being taken in belongs to the communicator, then one of the most important things you can do is actually hear what's happening in the room. Not what you expected to happen, what's happening in the room. Not what you hoped happened, but what's actually being said. What's actually being said is equally as important to what's not being said. Here's the reality in a high performance sales environment. People are trained to present with confidence. They're trained to present confidently. An agent will tell you the market is slow when the truth is their pipeline is empty because they stopped prospecting. A team leader will tell you the team is aligned when what they mean is that people have stopped openly disagreeing, which isn't alignment, it's disengagement. The new agent will tell you they're doing fine when they had two deals fall apart and they're not really saying anything. And now they're questioning whether this was the right career choice for them or not. The leader who hears things underneath the surface catches those things early. And the way you develop that is simple. Even if it's not that easy, ask one more question before you accept your first answer. This is sales. This really is. This is leadership sales. When someone says they're fine, ask what fine looks like right now. When someone says it's the market, ask what's working for them in the market. What do they mean about the market? Stay curious long enough that you get the real version of what they're saying instead of the managed version that they're giving you. Ask one more question. There's also a specific tool you can use, which is paraphrasing. Not the cheap version where you repeat back what someone says word for word. Not parroting, real paraphrasing. Is restating what you heard in your own words to confirm your understanding and give them a chance to correct you if you're off. This does two things. It signals that you are genuinely trying to understand, not just waiting for your turn to talk, that you're actually listening. And it's listening to understand instead of what most people do, which is listen to respond. It's not that you're just waiting for your turn to talk. This catches the gap between what was said and what they actually meant. When you ask, when you paraphrase, in high-stakes conversation, this is almost always there. The person who hears you paraphrase what they said and then say something like, Well, not exactly what I meant is they just told you something. They just told you something that they weren't going to tell you otherwise. That's the real information. And real information is how you change what you lead, not just by the information they want to give you because they maybe don't feel safe, because they don't feel heard. Now, all of this is straightforward enough when you're prepared, when you've had time to think about the conversation, when you're prepared, when the conversation is scheduled. The real test on when none of that is true, when the conversation happens, when it's unscheduled. Here's the hard truth about everything we covered today. Safety, the second conversation, the meaning of communications, the response that you get, real listening. None of that matters if it disappears the moment the pressure goes up. And it will, because under pressure, people regress. Under pressure, people default to the pattern they're most comfortable with. They abandon what they know and go back to their automatic. The leader who understands all of this intellectually but hasn't built it. The leader who understands all of this intellectually, but hasn't built it through practice will feel the pressure and watch that theory evaporate, watch all what they learned evaporate because of the pressure. And those pressure moments in leadership are constant. The agent who challenges your decision in a full meeting. The team leader who gets emotional when you bring up their numbers in a one-on-one, the top producer who publicly questions your marketing strategy or your branding in front of a group of recruits that you brought in or in front of your entire team. The conversations that start as a routine check-in and quickly become something else within the first two minutes. These are the moments that reveal what your communication is actually built on as a leader. These are the true leadership moments. I'll share with you something from my own experience here. And it's not a success story. I was leading through a significant market downturn. I had a senior agent, someone I respected, someone in the room respected, someone everyone respected, challenged me on a decision I made publicly in a full team meeting. The room went quiet, and I felt exactly what I'm describing. I pulled towards defense, towards authority, towards winning the moment in front of everyone. To cutting this person down to show that I'm the authority, that I'm the boss. I was going to do that. But what I did was ask a simple question, a simply powerful question. Tell me more about what concerns you. Not because I was calm, I wasn't. Because I had learned from situations that I've handled a lot worse than this one. What the room needed for me at that moment wasn't for me to be right. It was for me to be trustworthy. It was for me to keep the room safe and calm. What came out of the question was a legitimate concern about a specific detail I hadn't fully fought through. And I acknowledge it. We adjusted, and that agent became one of the most loyal and aligned I worked with for the rest of my time at that company. The pressure moment is not an obstacle leadership. The pressure moment is an opportunity for leadership. Every time the stakes are high and the room is watching, that's when your leadership becomes real to the people around you. Not what you say when everything is going well. It's in how you show up when it isn't. And you build that capacity the same way you build any other skill by doing it repeatedly. Starting with that one conversation you've been avoiding. You know, there are two specific things that can help in that moment itself, can help you. The first thing is slowing down physically when the conversation speeds up emotionally. When tension in a room rises, your instinct is to match that pace, to respond faster, to push back immediately, to fill the silence before someone else does. The leaders who handle pressure moments best do the opposite. They pause, they think. That pause creates just enough space between what just happened and what you can do next. And that is allows clarity to enter the room. The second is asking a question instead of making a statement when you feel defensive. When someone challenges you and every part of you wants to defend that decision. Pause and ask. Ask a question. Tell me more about your concern. Help me understand where you're coming from. This isn't a technique. It's a genuine attempt to understand the person before you respond. That move from statement to question shifts the dynamic of that conversation entirely. It signals that you are more interested in getting to the truth than winning the moment. And that's what a leader does. A leader doesn't just win in the moment. The room is full of people waiting to see what you're going to do next and what you're made of. And that signal of asking a question is more powerful than any answer you can give. Stop, pause, ask a question. Now, I want to really make this practical before we close. That conversation you identified at the top of this episode, the one you want to have this week, the one you want to have now, before you walk in, write down these four things. What is the specific behavior or situation that you need to address? The one thing, not a list of things. What's the outcome you want when the conversation over? What's concretely different? Not just I want this to be better. What the second conversation is likely to be, what conclusion will they probably draw from that conversation? And how will you address it directly? What's your contrast statement? What are you not saying alongside what you're saying? What are you not saying alongside what you actually are saying? That's your anchor, not a script, it's an anchor. Where has the fool's choice been fracturing your leadership? Where have you been telling yourself either the relationship or the truth? When the real question was always how to deliver both, the end. Name it. Name it the fool's choice because once you see it clearly, it loses its power over you entirely. Leadership growth and communication isn't about having one great breakthrough conversation. It's about building the practice of choosing the conversation over the delay, of staying in the room when the pressure goes up, of listening past the first answer to what actually is the truth, about asking an additional question. It's about owning their response. It's about owning their response your communication produces. And that practice built over time, that is what makes you the kind of leader people would trust and follow when things get harder, when things get difficult. That's the difference. Leadership is not tested in moments where everything is working. It's tested in the conversations, especially the ones nobody wants to have. The one that took months to arrive, the one that took the pressure for that moment that gave you no time to prepare to have that conversation. The moment you had to say the hard thing clearly and how you said it determined whether anyone in the room trusted you more for it or trusted you less. That's leadership conversations. That's leading in the moment because your conversations matter more than you ever know. And again, it's not those big conversations, it's those small conversations, the conversations in the hallway, the one-on-ones, the team meetings, and everything in between. That's leadership. If this episode was of value to you, I'd really appreciate it if you left a comment, a review, or shared it with someone who's been avoiding having one of these conversations. Because the right message at the right time changes the conversation. And that conversation can change everything in your organization and everything in your leadership. And thank you to our family partners, which are leaders in their respective fields. SUBI, the CE Shop and Wise Agent. Their information is in the show notes. Please reach out to them. I am Jeffrey Scott Stanton. Lead with intention, lead with clarity, lead with communications. I'll see you on the next one.

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Leadership isn't learned in pages, it's built through repetition. What you apply becomes your standard, and what you reinforce becomes who you are as a leader. Leadership is built in practice and proven in performance. This has been the Leadership Series, hosted by Jeffrey Scott Stanton and produced by J Squared Podcast Productions.