Win-win-win conversations

Welcome to (un)leaderly, the podcast that looks at the world through an atypical leadership perspective. In this episode, host Barbara Iverson examines what she calls win-win-win conversations and how they differ from those that leave one person feeling small or like they've lost. 

When leaders or people in positions of power enter difficult conversations (which happen all the time!) wanting to win or make the other person feel small, they create breaks in relationship and remove psychological safety. What does a more leaderly approach look like and how do we get there?

Barbara tells stories from her life and looks at the world through an atypical leadership perspective. Every week she offers a challenge or task for listeners, to prompt reflection or growth. This podcast is the perfect listen for someone who feels like they don't quite fit to the typical leadership profile. 

Find us on Instagram @unleaderlypodcast

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Hi, before we get started, would you take a moment and like or follow or subscribe or leave a review? Whatever you can do to help make the podcast more visible to others, I would appreciate it. And speaking of that, Paige Biggs 9214, thank you for leaving a comment on the YouTube video. The it was the first episode of the podcast, and she left a really sweet little comment. More of this, I think she can relate to being someone who didn't play well with others as a child. So thank you, Pai, for that comment. Would love if you listen and have something on your mind, please, please leave a comment. I would love the feedback and I would love to hear what resonated with you. And it would be incredibly helpful and very kind on your part. Hello and welcome to Unleaderly, the podcast that looks at the world through an atypical leadership perspective. My name is Barbara Iverson, and I'm your host. Today I want to talk a bit about something that I call win-win-win conversations. And what do I mean by that? Well, I think all of us have been in situations where we've had to have a difficult conversation with a boss, with a colleague, with someone on our team, with a friend, with a romantic interest, with a family member, anything. We've all had to face difficult conversations where maybe something has gone wrong in the workplace. Maybe there was a process that went badly, and you have to figure out what happened so that you know how to prevent the problems in the future. In a relationship, maybe somebody's feelings were hurt and you have to talk about it to help the other person understand, hey, this wasn't okay for me. There's any number of reasons for a difficult conversation to take place. And I already did that episode about feedback, which I think a lot of you did find helpful because it gives you a framework to be able to give feedback. But this is a little bit more of the difficult conversation, it is a little bit more needing to get information to know what's going on. It's less about offering feedback because you know what happened, or you know how you feel, or you know what you saw or observed. But that difficult conversation can often take place more because you need to know what went on. And you have an impression that something is true, but you're, but you're checking. So I had this recently where I had a conversation with someone from the apartment rental agency that I interact with. And I've talked with this woman many times in the past, and I had received a letter saying, hey, this is what your new rent is. And I was like, whoa, where did this number come from? And I looked through the paperwork I had, which was a lot, and decided to call to say, Hey, this doesn't look right to me. And so I did, and of course, this all took place in German, and Germans really prefer to be as clear as possible and expect you to use really clear language. So of course I used the word wrong. I think these numbers are wrong. And the moment I said that, her tone changed completely. And instead of sort of listening to me, she turned to the offensive and started telling me that I had not paid the proper amounts and that I was in the wrong and that all of this was happening and I should know. And what on earth was I talking about? And I was like, uh, okay. In the end, she finally softened a bit and was like, listen, I can send you what I'm talking about. And I was like, that would be very helpful. Thank you. And she did. And I went through much more carefully again the papers that I had and discovered the mistakes that I had actually been making. It was my fault. I had been overloaded with information and numbers, and this changed, this didn't, this changed, this didn't, and I had missed it. Okay. But it really got me thinking: like this woman that I had to talk to, she doesn't know me, but we have interacted in the past plenty of times. And I kept wondering how might that conversation have really looked different had she in particular approached it from a different side. And I put this on her because she's the person who holds the power and the authority in our relationship for whatever it may be. She's the one who has control and power in most situations. I have rights, but I don't have a lot of power. So for that's the person in the power position, that's what I'm really wanting to talk about today. How does the person in the power position approach the conversation? And this also, it's important, I think, for those of us when we're not in positions of power to also be able to check ourselves and how we're entering these conversations. But what's even more important from my perspective is really the person in power, how do they respond? How do they go into these conversations? And how have they already done the work so that when these conversations happen, they're not just reacting. They don't come from a place of reaction, but they come from a place of calm, cool, collected, like my mom used to always say, being calm, cool, and collected, and really having that sort of open and curious perspective. So I've already just given it away. The key to this is openness and curiosity. What a shock. But I think having openness and curiosity, particularly if you think you've been attacked in some way, whether or not you have. Certainly in the case that I just gave you, I was not attacking this woman personally at all. I was saying the numbers are wrong or they look wrong to me. But she went straight into offensive mode. Offended or offensive, whatever it was, maybe a bit of both. She wanted to make sure that I left that conversation feeling small and falling in line. And it was not, I didn't, I don't feel like I walked away with that thinking like, okay, that was that was a good conversation. In the end, because she did soften and offer me something, it wasn't as bad as it could have been. I wouldn't say it was a complete lose-lose, but I I don't really think it was a win-win-win. And it's what got me thinking, is this a huge deal for me, this relationship with this woman? Absolutely, it is not. And she for now also needs me. So we have to find a way through. And what happens when you have lose-lose conversations more than the win-win-win is you are less and less likely to be in contact or to ask questions when but before things go wrong. You really tend to wait until you absolutely have to talk to that person. Whereas if you feel like if you have a good relationship, you can much more easily have those conversations. I actually, this is taking me back to another landlord tenant situation I had many, many years ago in a different city altogether. And I lived in two different apartments over those years. And the first one, the guy was super harsh. He did not live in that city anymore. He actually had emigrated many, many years before that, lived in a different city, would come back every now and then. And I was expected then, he was rarely the one who showed up. It was usually his wife. She would come over, I would make her tea, and I'd pay her cash. And it was just the system that we had, and it was fine. But he was very, very difficult in providing paperwork and things that I would need. Like when you, for that space, when you were getting a visa, you needed to be able to prove where you lived. And he really gave me a hard time every time I asked for that kind of documentation. It was part of his job as someone who was leasing an apartment, but also especially to a foreigner. But what I was asking for was also not difficult. It was a piece of paper that he would sign. And he just didn't want to do it. So it conditioned me, him always giving me a hard time. It conditioned me to not want to ask him for things. And we had some really, really problematic times in that relationship. And he took huge advantage of me as a tenant and and bullied me all over the place. So terrible relationship. And he's the reason I finally was like, I've had enough. I'm not staying here. Found another apartment close by that was actually great. And that guy who owned that one, he was, he was actually a sweetheart. He was actually a really, really kind man and was happy to help with everything and totally understanding as well about problems that occur within an apartment. He never blamed me for anything. And there were problems that happened while I lived in that apartment. I'm laughing because it was always with doors. There was one time where I locked myself in the bathroom. I had a house full of people. We had just finished this week-long event and everybody was exhausted, but everybody came back to my place. And a friend came from out of town, even, and there were all these people, and I had gone into the bathroom and I'd locked the door, and it was a door that I almost never locked. But because there was a room full of a house full of people, I did. And something happened and I couldn't get the door open. And this house full of people was, they decided to be helpful, and it took a couple hours, and they were eventually able to free me. If I remember right, the doors were weird, and they were able to sort of dig to the hinges and like pull it off, but it did ruin the door. Um, and then there was another time where I was just in my bedroom and there I had a really strong crossbreeze from time to time, and the door slammed, and that piece that usually I don't even know what it's called, it's that piece of metal that when you turn the knob or the handle, it's what moves and comes out of the door frame so that you can get the door open and it's what closes in there to lock it. Well, it was a rotten piece of metal, so when the door slammed shut, there was actually glass in the door, and I was very lucky the glass did not shatter. But instead, this piece of metal came apart and was now like inside of the door frame, inside that jam. And it was so I couldn't get the door open at all. Fortunately for me, I had my phone with me. So I called the landlord and said, Hey, uh, I don't know what just happened, but I can't, I can't leave my room and I can't get this door to open. And he'd been kind the thing with getting locked in the room had happened like, I don't know, a year beforehand. And it had taken me a long time to finally tell him. And he was like, Oh, no big deal, I'll get you a new door. And I was like, Oh, this is so different. But then when the when the thing was stuck in the door, he came over and the window to my bedroom and the window to the room next to it were really close together. And I remember he sort of handed something off to me. I to try to have me do something in the end, he had to remove the handle, like the that plate on the door, he had to remove it, and then he could sort of reach in and and get the door open. But again, he was super cool and it he felt really bad for me that it was it wasn't really traumatic, but it was not a fun thing to just be locked in the room and not know what was gonna happen. But I tell these stories to say I was conditioned by the first landlord into what that relationship would look like. And even when the second landlord, who was so kind, even when I realized I knew in my head that he was a kind man and wasn't like the other one, it kind of didn't matter because I was so conditioned with the first that it took a long time to trust the second. And he hadn't done anything to not deserve my trust. But the first one had been so awful that it really took a lot for me to trust him. So that's one of those situations where these lose-lose situations really condition you to not trust someone. It really breaks that relationship and it also primes you to not be able to trust in a future relationship. So, how can we shift into win-win-win situations? Primarily, I think this has to do with approaching the conversations with curiosity and openness. I already mentioned those two words before, but that's truly what I think. And I've read books about difficult conversations. Some of them are actually just called difficult conversations. And several of them have used those words and have said, this is the key. And another thing that I think goes straight along with that is how are you entering this conversation? Do you want this to be a win-win-win conversation? Or do you want someone else to lose? And I think whether or not you're in a position of power and authority, knowing how you're entering that is really, really important. Because if your goal is just to win and make sure that the other person loses, feels small, doesn't feel very comfortable from the situation, then it's time you need to not have that conversation yet. But it's also true when the persons appear. And it's even also true, I think, when you are the person without power and you're entering a conversation with someone who has much more than you do, say with a boss. I'm gonna tell a story about that from my own experience at the end. But these conditioning conversations really are important because our impressions of people that we get early stay with us. And if we believe that this person or if they have shown us that they're more interested in making us feel small, more interested in this win-lose, which actually is a lose-lose, but if they're more interested in that than having a win-win-win situation, we become conditioned because of how we've interacted with them in the past. I had an experience like this where the con it wasn't even that we'd had such terrible interactions, but it was a guy who was the head of marketing. I was working in HR, and he saw himself as a designer, but he really hadn't done a lot of really good design work for many years. He was a bit of a dinosaur, and the people in the organization tended to talk about him that way. And we had to interact very early on in my time there because somebody had started a project that was extremely expensive. And I didn't really know why it had been somebody, well, it wasn't my predecessor in the position, but somehow somebody had said, like, it should be my responsibility. And I looked at it and I was like, I don't want anything to do with this. This is not an HR task. It is definitely marketing, and I would be so glad if he takes this back. It was a tricky conversation to have, especially because we really didn't know each other. But the good thing about it was I was like, hey, I I think that you should be the owner of this because you have much more knowledge, you have so much more experience. And I laid out all these things, and yeah, I was trying to butter them up quite a bit. But also I I knew that it was gonna be of setting me up to fail and setting up the project to fail if I took it forward. In the end, it failed anyway because nobody was really behind it, and the wrong people were running it. Let's just say that. Anyway, I had these conversations with him, and I had another conversation with him that, man, we must have talked for an hour and a half. And and the way it ended was exactly where it started. And I remembered thinking, like, oh my goodness, we could have saved so much time by just being a little bit more open on the front end. And so I had even from that, just sort of this feeling like, mm, I'm not really sure where I am with this guy. And it doesn't feel like we're having really open, honest conversations. I feel like a lot of other, there's a lot of politics happening here and a lot of things that maybe I'm not aware of yet. So I was careful. Well, we had to redesign the intranet, and that would be the pages that people within the company looked at, and especially being an HR, we wanted them to be pages as resources for whatever people would need so that they could find what they need and not have to call us and we answer the same calls or questions 50 times a day, which was what was happening because it was so poorly designed and people couldn't find anything. Great. So without me asking for them, he provided me with some headers to go over pages with different themes. And these headers, I hadn't asked for them, and I could tell that they were following some of the, let's not say style, maybe the color choices of the company, which were very dark and very cold colors. So he was using those a lot of black, a lot of blue, a lot of gray. So not very upbeat. But then what he had done is he had layered a ton of words and icons over each other and over sort of um grayscale type photos that were not really helpful. I mean, the whole thing to me, it looked very aggro, actually. I I didn't like these images at all. I found them to be not welcoming, not fun, not light. They were really, really heavy. And I didn't want to tell him. And I also, and he had also said, like, hey, this is your project, do whatever you want. And when he gave me those images, I can't remember if he said, like, hey, use these or not. Uh, let me know if you need anything different. He definitely didn't say that. He definitely didn't say, let me know if you have if you need any help or if you're stuck somewhere. No. So this was my project. And the the software that we were using for the intranet was so terrible. It had its own interior logic that I had never been trained on it. So I just had to learn by trial and error, which is fine. And I can do that. It just makes everything take so much longer, and sometimes you really get stuck. So I had the idea hey, we have to do all these pages for the different countries. Let's use photos from those places because it's something that the people from there can be proud of or be happy to see, and it can help, you know, it's just it builds like recognition of those spaces. Great. So had photos. But the problem was they were huge. They were so huge you could fit, you could see nothing else. Like you would open up the India page, and it was just this massive picture of the very beautiful and absolutely stunning Taj Mahal. So cool, but also not really helpful. Like if you just came upon that, you would have to figure out that you had to scroll down, and hopefully everybody would, but it wasn't a great landing page because it was just a photo and you had to scroll down because I couldn't figure out how to do it. And I didn't ask him. I simply I kept it up because it was more important to me that the things went live than for me to figure out all the little ways that it would work. And nobody else seemed to really know either. So it was one of those things I thought, you know what, we'll just deal with this later. So we went live. And oh my goodness. Boy, did I get an earful from him once he saw it. And remember, he had told me, This is all yours, you do whatever you want with it. So I did. And he must have lectured me for 10 minutes about how terrible it was with these photos, which, hey, I agreed with him. I knew that that was not an ideal situation, but I knew it was better than his headers. And I knew that most likely people would know enough to scroll down and then they would find what they were looking for. He also had every opportunity to say, hey, these photos are really big. It looks like you're struggling with the software. Can I help you? Yes, please. Please do. I'm totally stuck. I can't figure out how to make them smaller without being tiny. It's either tiny or massive. How can we, how can we find a way to large? He could have done that and he didn't. So we were both unhappy in the end. He didn't like the design. He didn't offer his help. I didn't like the design. And I didn't want to ask for his help. So we were both in this rather stupid situation that we didn't actually have to be in. But we were. So there we were. But it was this question of I'm gonna call it psychological safety. And this is quite a topic in a lot of companies around now. Do people feel psychologically safe? And I will say, in this situation, I did not. I did not feel that I could come to him. I felt like if I opened the door with any questions about design at all, he would really start insisting that I use the headers that he created or make me tell him why I didn't want to. That was a conversation I wasn't really interested in having. So we both were then stuck and both unhappy, which really is quite the epitome of the lose-lose situation, right? But it's because of the interactions before and what happened in that moment. But it had a lot to do with what came before. And looking back at it, it is a little bit surprising that so few interactions made me absolutely unwilling to go and talk to him. I just did not want to. I just didn't want to have those conversations. For better or for worse, and in the situation for worse, even though in the end he fixed some of it and it turned out fine. But it felt very uncomfortable, I think also for him. Like he didn't, he wasn't happy. So it was just one of those like messy situations where you ask yourself, does it have to be like this? And the answer is no, it doesn't. It doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be this way. But it takes like he wasn't my direct supervisor, but he was a director level, and I was definitely not. So he had certainly more power, if not some authority over me. And there were so many other ways that any of those conversations could have gone. But when you have the feeling, whether it's true or not, but in this case, I'm I most certainly believe it is true, he wanted to show his power, his authority. He wanted me to be small in these conversations. And so he took action so that would happen and I responded. Would someone else have approached it differently? Uh, maybe. There may be plenty of people who would have said, I don't care. And you know what? Had I been in that position longer, that might have happened. I might have had a lot more confidence. But for many, many reasons, I actually didn't. But just because someone doesn't have confidence doesn't mean that it's okay for you to run right over them. It doesn't mean it's okay for you to take advantage of that. And I've been on the other side of this myself. And you have choices in those moments because you can see if that person is really pushing back or if they're not, or if they have confidence, or if they don't. And in my opinion, what a good leader, what a leaderly leader does is sees that and identifies it and says, I'm actually gonna use this to help you become more confident. And I'm gonna give you some ways to express that. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna find ways to support you in your growth journey and in these conversations rather than taking advantage of the fact that you don't have as much confidence as I do. Oh, to have the confidence of a mediocre or subpar white man. But I don't. I didn't. I didn't in that situation. I can't say I don't. I think I'm definitely not that person who I was back then. But in that moment I didn't have it. And he had choices and he made his. And did it help? No, it didn't. So another situation where I saw this, and this is one where I have played all of this back in my mind 10 million times. It is actually lived rent-free in my head for far too long. So I'm kind of glad to be talking about it. And that was I had a boss who was extremely emotional, extremely impulsive, and had no experience whatsoever for the job that he was in. He was hired in a super shady way, just sort of slid into the position. And a lot of people in the company actually were questioning why on earth he was in that director level position. But the CEO and other people were protecting him because he had spent so much time schmoozing and sucking up to them when he first entered the company as a freelancer. But then he was given the director position. Great. And it became clear to a lot of people that he didn't know what he was doing, but he was so full of bluster and he was going to bully his way through everything by firing people. If he didn't like the look of you or he didn't think that you were playing by the rules that he thought you should be playing by, he would fire you. He was firing people left and right, even people that he had no business firing. But the right people were standing behind him to make sure that he was untouchable, and he really was. But I was able to have a good relationship with him. I'm not really even sure how. I think a lot of it was I supported him in certain ways and I kept quiet in others. And I think that really had a lot to do with it. But he was, I mean, he was so unstable. He wanted to fire a woman because she had told him that she had to have a hair appointment during the workday and she would be away from the desk for a little bit. And he was like, I think I'm gonna fire her. And I was like, uh, maybe, maybe think about that a little bit more. I don't really think that's like a firing offense. There was a meeting that was taking place, and I was part of it because I was the one who held the information about the budget and stuff, and so it was gonna be him and me and someone from the accounting. And at the last minute, I was removed from that meeting, and my the guy on my team who also oversaw this area but did not have all the information I did, and certainly not the experience, he was brought into that meeting instead, which he told me afterwards he was extremely uncomfortable, didn't feel like he had the information that they needed, didn't understand it. And I let myself get really, really worked up about this. I was so mad. And looking back on it now, I'm not really sure why I was. And I think it had to do a lot with the fact that my boss had already started, started undercutting me in certain areas, leaving me out of conversations, making decisions without me, and just sort of telling me later that I thought this we need to have discussions about these things. Like this is not just like this was on my plate, and you wanted me to do this, but now you've taken it away and you're going in a completely different direction. And I'm the one who has to answer questions and has to tell people, but I don't even know what your thinking is behind it. So I'm really stuck here. So I I think that I felt that very strongly because of what had already been happening. And after talking with the guy on my team who said that was pretty bad. I don't, I don't think that I don't understand why he was doing it. And I said, I don't know either. And I said, I'm gonna talk with him. And he could see that I was pretty upset and he was like, I don't think you should. I think you should wait. And I was like, ah, it's gonna be fine. Trusting that the relationship that I had with my boss would survive that conversation. Was I entering it with curiosity and openness? No, I was not. Was I the person with power and authority in that conversation? Also, no, I was not. And it was a genuine question: why would I be removed from that meeting? I believe I have the information that you need. Am I wrong? So had the conversation with him, and he went from zero to a hundred in about a second and accused me of making this personal and why would I do this? And then he started yelling at me. And I very quickly realized, oh dear, this is not good. And I tried to bring the temperature down and try to say, okay, fine, let's not talk about that. Let's talk about how we work together in the future and how we how we go forward, which he was sort of willing to do. And by the end of the conversation, he was like, Okay, I really want you to come in all smiley and happy tomorrow. What woman doesn't want to be told to smile, but okay. The next day I came in, we were both in the office, and I was all smiles and happy. And he turned to me at one point during the day saying, That conversation with you made me really sad yesterday. Now, I knew in that moment I had a few choices. I could coddle him and be mommy and say, Oh, what made you sad? Oh me too, and approach it that way. Or I could do what I did and not really say anything. And he didn't elaborate, but I didn't I didn't say anything either. I didn't give him the response that I'm sure he wanted. And a month later, he very illegally and through bluster and lies fired me. Is it because I questioned him? I think so. Is it because of that conversation where I asked about why I'd been taken out of that meeting? Yeah, I think so. And and also because of how I didn't respond that he would have wanted me to in the follow-up. And for a lot of other reasons that I've thought a lot about since. And this was this was years and years ago now. It's this did not happen recently. But it was one of these super unjust moments where I don't know if it's because I'm a woman or I overthink things, or it just made no sense. And nobody has to get fired for the any of the reasons that he stated. And he lied and he used people's names that they were really upset then. But it came down to the person with power in that relationship. I mean, when I said to him, Hey, why did you take me out of that meeting? His response, his calm, cool, collected response could have simply been, I can tell that you're upset by this and I understand it. Let's talk about it tomorrow. End. And I would have said, okay. That would have been completely acceptable to me because I would have felt seen, I would have felt recognized, and we would also have had time to talk about it and get to some sort of place of resolution or understanding. But he went in the complete opposite direction. Is that his fault? Yes, for sure. Could I have entered that conversation differently? Yes, for sure. But I also recall being extremely stunned in it that he went from listening to my question to making it all my fault and how dare I, and why is this so personal immediately. Like two wrongs did not make a right. It's one of those things where you look back on it and all you can do is say, I do not want to do that to someone else. Because, you know, even if I had approached that conversation with openness and curiosity, I think it's entirely possible because of who he was, and maybe still is, I have no idea. Because of who he was, it might have gone to hell no matter what, no matter how I approached it. Because the way I approached it in some ways didn't matter because he was the one with the power and the authority, and he was the one who could set the tone, and he was the one who could decide what would happen as a result, not me. That was up to him. I had no control over how he would take it, and I had no control over the decisions that he would make as a result. That's not on me. Absolutely not. Someone with more maturity and more experience would have seen what was going on with me and would have said, we're not gonna do this right now, but we will come back to it. I think there's a part of me now that just really goes, gosh, immaturity and an inability to stay calm and have some perspective and be open and curious. Like thinking back on all of these where I'm not the person in the position of power. And I can't control the way that these men and women respond to me. And they have choices, but I have to suffer through whatever their choices are. That's that sucks. It doesn't have to, it doesn't have to be like that. It's so frustrating to me that people who are in positions of power don't know what to do with that power and don't recognize that they have responsibilities because of it. And that they can be wise and they can be calm, cool, and collected, or they can be impulsive, emotional, and show their inexperience. Your challenge is when you are in positions of not having the power. So the positions that I was in for these three stories. When you are in that position, but you have to enter a difficult conversation. This is difficult as I think about it because truly you're not you can't control the person and you can't know how they're gonna respond to you. So we know that before it even happens. And I'd love to say, like, hey, how can you word things and approach with this curiosity, openness to mitigate? But you know what? At the end of the day, you can't. You can't. So instead of that, I want us all, I want us all to think about whether we are or are not in positions of power because all of us have positions of power in some way. May not be in a job situation, but it could be in our home or friend or some other aspect of our lives. When we are in that position, having some sort of power, some sort of authority, and someone tells us something that raises those hairs on our necks, brings that flush into us because they've said something that is either pointing out something we did that was not exactly okay, or even if they're asking a question and we don't like that they're asking it, they could have approached it a different way. Who cares? What I'm saying is, how can we, as leaders of our own lives and people who have the opportunity to lead in some area of our lives, how can we slow down, get calm, cool, and collected, and approach the situation with openness and curiosity to find out where that person is coming from before we make assumptions and say things that we can't take back. How can we slow ourselves down? And I'm asking this of myself because I can absolutely see where and that I would have the same propensity. It's the hard thing to be calm, cool, and collected and to have that perspective. But on the other hand, I can tell you that I actually have had situations. I'm remembering now one with a colleague. She was a person on my team who was responsible for onboarding, and we were figuring out swag. And she entered this conversation with things that she wanted out of the conversation, meaning like she wanted her choices to win the day. And I was approaching it actually really different. All I wanted to do was create structure so that we had a means of measuring things like impact and cost and balancing out what people would receive. But because she had wanted certain things from that, and when I was not just automatically or even slowly saying yes to her, she became really emotional and got really upset. And she turned off her camera and I could hear it in her voice that she was really, she wasn't already crying, she was about to. And I in that moment realized that I had choices. And I came to to her and I said, listen, this isn't about me getting what I want in terms of swag that that we give this away and you get to say, this is what people get. I said, We're here to build a structure. And I'm I'm trying to take you through the process of creating a structure. This isn't about you or I getting what you what we want, unless it's building a structure. That is what I want. But I I don't want to win here and you lose. Because she had said earlier, like, well, fine, then we'll do it your way. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. That that's not what this is about. This is about working together to create a structure. And I know that she was really upset with me. And I tried my best in that moment to. To be calm, cool, and collected. And to see how we were coming at it from really different perspectives. And that I wasn't interested in winning. And I wasn't really interested in her having the feeling that she was winning either, to be honest. I wanted us both to walk away going, okay, now we have a structure. We can, we can do this, and this will hold for the future. Like we've got a way, a process, a structure, a way to think about this that will serve us now and moving forward. This isn't about whether we give somebody a t-shirt, a pair of socks, or a power bank. That's not what we're talking about today. From my part, from my side on that one, I realized I had not been clear enough on how I was approaching that conversation, period. She thought we were just going to decide they get X, Y, Z. And I was thinking, no, we're going to set up the structure so that we know what X, Y, and Z like should be. Anyway, we all have choices. And it's not easy. But how can we use that leadership to keep things calm and to make sure that people don't feel like they're small and don't feel like they're losing? Because that doesn't serve anybody. Not at all. Not at all. And I mean, in case you're wondering, getting fired, like, it was fine. In the end, it was a company I knew I didn't really want to work for. It was a super painful way for that to happen, but it was all right. I survived it. But still doesn't make it okay. It's all right, but it's not okay. I hope this has been helpful and helped you think about this maybe in a slightly different way. It's been, it's good for me to take the role of the observer and ask myself what was happening in my brain in those situations. What might I have done differently? What might I have kept to? Did I approach this in a way that I can say, yeah, I'm I'm proud of that, or I'm at least good with how that went. Because we can only control ourselves. And this is why, yeah, this isn't about how do we do this to make sure that the other person doesn't lose their minds and come at us because truly we can't. There's no guarantees of that. So we do what we can and we become the leaders that we want to see. Oh my goodness, does that sound trite? But I think it's true. How can we prepare ourselves today for those conversations that will inevitably happen either tomorrow or next week or next month or next year? How do we prepare? How do we take that breath? That is it for this week. You can find us on Instagram at unleaderlypodcast, no punctuation, no spaces, nothing. Would love to hear from you. Would love to hear your thoughts. And we're on LinkedIn, Unleaderly Podcast. You can find us there as well. Would love to hear from you. Comment, favorite, like, subscribe, tell your friends, tell your mom. All the things. Have a great week. Big thanks, as usual, to Lilia Keys for our intro and outro music.