How to Have Hard Conversations
When I was in college, I was a Resident Advisor. That meant I was in charge of a floor of Freshman and Sophomores often a year or two younger than me.
Sometimes difficult scenarios came up, like...
- A man who broke in who was walking around threatening students
- Someone knocking on my door at 11:30 PM telling me they were worried they had forgotten how to breathe
- A student who had plugged their toilet and didn't know how to unclog it so they undid the water connection flooding their room
However, these weren't the hard conversations. They were simple to approach as they required quick decisions on the spot to prevent bad things from happening to people.
Hard conversations were the hundreds of times I was asked me to mediate people's disputes between them and their roommate(s) that ranged from anything from body odor to alarm schedules or the times I had to knock on doors and ask people to turn down their music.
These were hard because:
- I knew and could dread they were coming
- They were awkward and embarrassing for everyone
- No one wanted to have them
What I learned was that the only way to have hard conversations is to have them
Hard conversations are one of the things in life where you get points for showing up. There are other guides for how to make the most of these conversations and to handle them tactfully, but the best thing you can do is to have the hard conversation and have it with the most empathy and respect for the other part as is possible. You will make mistakes. You will blunder and fumble and make a fool of yourself.
But, it is always better to be the fool who blunders, than the fool who never tries. The one who buries the conversation or puts it off to another time in the hopes it will go away (it won't).
Most of what I learned as a Resident Advisor won't be useful in the rest of my life. I've yet to be asked how to make a grilled cheese on a dorm-legal grill top while I begged people to attend my silly floor event instead of going out to party.
But, you and I are always asked to have hard conversations.
So, whether you are asked to try and reconcile two high-school best-friends who now can't seem to stand each others company or inform a low performer they need to shape up or ship out - the best thing I've learned is to just have the hard conversation.