Fierce Conversations: Achieving success in work and in life, one conversation at a time

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Don’t talk too much, let them. As long as you are talking, you are not learning aything you didn’t know already. Gabe loves the outdoors and enjoys surfing, biking, and snowboarding, and especially hiking with his wife. Read More There are 7 principles of fierce conversations which help us to move away from misunderstanding, silos, defensiveness, and competition, and to move toward exploration, accountability, inclusion, engagement, alignment, innovation, and collaboration. Focus on being Fierce – Don’t focus on being the boss; focus on the relationship between you and your employees. Encourage yourself to create a passionate and lasting relationship with someone else, or an employee, by relating to what they have to say.

Susan founded Fierce in 2001 after 13 years leading CEO think tanks and more than 10,000 hours of conversations with senior executives. Over the past two decades, she has shared her expertise with clients through her keynote presentations, TedX Talks, and award-winning books, Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life, One Conversation at a Time, and Fierce Leadership: An Alternative to the Worst “Best” Practices of Business Today. She holds a Bachelor of Art degree in English from Hobart and William Smith Colleges. With today’s fast-paced personal and business environments, we often become “too busy” to engage in fierce conversation with people. I encourage everyone to sit down with one person, without distractions, and to talk while listening intently to what they have to say. As Susan consistently emphasized throughout her book, the conversation is the relationship. It is a popular book that is still “hopping” and in a 3rd edition. The new edition is essentially the same, if that matters. Some content got moved to different chapters and there’s a few cyber-era paragraphs but it’s largely the same book. I was struggling in my most important relationships. I wasn't about to just give up, so I tried to fix them. I blundered around for a bit because, while I had worked up the courage to have the conversations I needed to have, I didn't know *how* to have them. I realized I needed help to not only have the right conversations, but to develop the tools to have them effectively.She wrote her book in terms that could be understood by anyone, and gave more than adequate examples to support her information. She added a good mixture of serious, in-depth elaboration of a topic and mixed it with a splash of humor throughout. Overall it was a very well thought out book and I encourage anyone interested to read it as well.

It’s not our thoughts or feelings that get us into trouble…It’s our attachment to them, our belief that we are right.” Conversation = Relationship. Your conversations are your relationships. When you avoid something in a conversation, you limit the possibilities in that relationship. The more you withhold, the more you reduce your emotional capital and the potential scope of your relationships. At an organizational level, this affects whether you can attract and retain great customers and employees, which in turn determines how far it can build a sustainable competitive advantage. Susan explained removing the word “but” from our vocabulary; the reason for this being, if we began a statement with a compliment and then use the term “but” as a transition, this may lead the other person to believe that we just used that as an opener in attempt to keep their guard down. Instead, use the term “and” as a transition in this type of situation to show that not only is what we first said true, the next statement is also true. I explained this to a potential employer at one point during an interview I had went through, and he replied with, “You’re right. Whenever we say the word ‘but’ everything else we just said before then gets forgotten and thrown out the window.” Best Selling Books." Wall Street Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y. [New York, N.Y]18 Oct 2002: W9. Via Proquest.

You can’t build a deep relationship without understanding the other person. Be fully present, use regular one-to-ones to connect, and use the “decision tree” to give everyone more autonomy and freedom for decision making. Principle 4: Confront Your Toughest Challenge Now Hold your ideas about what needs to be done until the other person has had an opportunity to formulate his or her own solutions