How to Tell Difficult Truths So People Thank You

Honestly, I think this article is spot on when it comes to relating how you feel to other people in a way that diffuses possible confrontation while still being assertive. The post delves into merely relationship advice, but you can relate this to anything that comes across your path. So look deeper than the examples here, and see the overall lesson. Try to implement it when confrontation arises and you'll be all the better for it.



There is a piece of wisdom about life and relationships so important that it should have been posted on the walls of our elementary schools and taught us every day: Our lives are shaped by the significant truths we say or don’t say.

Most of those life-defining truths can be spoken in ten seconds with one out-breath. Think of the difference in the life of Bill Clinton and all of us in America had he said, “Yes, indeed—I had lots of sex with that woman.” That’s an example of a ten second, one out-breath truth that would have saved us all considerable time and money. In the aftermath of a ten-second lie, “I didn’t have sex with that woman,” came fifty million dollars worth of hassle and a year of partisan bickering.

Most of our truths are not the fifty-million-dollar kind, but in the context of our lives they have that same level of importance. That’s why it’s important to learn how to speak the truth. The barrier most people face in speaking the truth is that they don’t want to do it in a way that hurts other people and stirs up trouble. From three decades of helping people speak difficult truths to each other, we’ve learned a few simple techniques and principles that can make the process much easier.

When You Speak The Unarguable, People Don’t Argue

If I say to you, “My stomach feels queasy,” you’d have a difficult time arguing with me. If I say to you, “You make me sick to my stomach,” you’d probably find plenty to argue with me about in that sentence. The difference is intention. If I say, “My stomach feels queasy,” my intention is to reveal my inner experience. If I say, “You make me sick to my stomach,” my intention is to blame you for my experience. In speaking difficult truths so that people thank you afterwards, the trick is to reveal your inner experience and stay out of blame.

Breakthroughs in relationship communication are always brought about by saying unarguable things and never by blaming. It’s possible to communicate the most difficult truths in this new way, so that people are literally filled with gratitude afterwards.

The Technique

The trick is to speak first from your three major feeling-zones:

Zone 1 is made up of your neck, shoulders and mid-back. When you’re tense in this zone it’s because you’re holding onto anger you haven’t communicated.

Zone 2 is your throat and chest. This zone tells you when you’re feeling sad by signaling you with constriction (“lump in the throat”) and a sense of heaviness.

Zone 3 is your stomach and beltline area. Tension and racy-queasy sensations (“butterflies”) tell you that you’re scared.

Let’s say you want to break up with your lover. Your main complaints are that he never helps around the house, he has a perfect record of forgetting your birthday and he is unwilling to make a long-term commitment to the relationship.

Scenario One: You say to him: I’m leaving you because you’re lazy, disrespectful and commitment-phobic. Would he be likely to thank you for sharing this “truth” with him? Probably not. He’d probably argue with all three of your labels for him. You’ve provided him with a perfect way to avoid learning anything from your communication, because you’ve communicated it in arguable terms.

Scenario Two: You say to him: For a long time I’ve been feeling sad and disappointed. I can feel it right now in my chest, and I can hear it in my voice. I don’t think I’m getting what I want in our relationship. I feel angry a lot at you, and although I feel scared about being by myself, I think I’d rather face that fear than continue to feel what I’ve been experiencing the past year.

There’s no guarantee he’ll thank you for speaking those truths, but we can give you a pretty solid guarantee that he won’t argue with you. We know, because we’ve coached hundreds of people to speak like that in sessions, and it stops arguments cold.

With regard to thanks, we’ve seen many situations in which people felt upset at hearing unarguable truths. However, they registered the impact of the communication and learned from it. Later, when they’ve digested it thoroughly, they often thank and appreciate the speaker for being courageous enough to speak the truth in a way that didn’t produce arguments.

Why Your Plans Fail

I feel like this article on planning is pretty good. Read it if you're interested in understanding aspects of planning.



Business plans, diet plans, plans to get a degree and your plan to get rich. Life is full of planning. You’d think that all your practice planning would make you at least somewhat good at it. Then why do so few things go “according to plan?”

Your business can’t make money the way you intended. You quit your diet on day three and start eating the chocolate cake. You realize that you hate the subject you’re studying. The map rarely matches the territory. “Okay,” you might say, “I’ll admit some of my plans didn’t work out perfectly, but it can’t be that bad, can it?”

The Planning Fallacy

People are notoriously bad at planning. The worst part is, we don’t even know it. One psychological study conducted asked students to predict when they expected to complete an assignment, almost none gave enough time. Other looks into financial analysts show that few can consistently beat the market.

The real problem is that these planning failures aren’t recognized. People make wildly overconfident projections but fail to notice their abysmal track record in predicting. The question is, what can you do about this?

New Planning Techniques Aren’t the Solution

The problem isn’t a better planning method. We’ve all had a great deal of practice planning. Different planning styles can help, but they can’t solve the core problem of uncertainty. That is, you have no idea what the future holds.

The planning fallacy creates two major problems – the inability to plan and being blind to that incompetence. The real solution is to keep a careful eye on your track record and learn to stomach uncertainty.

Watching Your Track Record

The way to tackle overconfidence is to be aware of your success rate. Whenever you make plans, keep a record of occasions you were forced to deviate from them. I’ve done this, and the differences between your map and reality can be surprising.

How does humility help you? We’ve all been told to have faith and certainty in our efforts, otherwise it is too easy to give up. I’d argue the opposite. When you are motivated to do something, being humbled about your ability to predict forces you to be highly flexible.

Stomaching Uncertainty

Does risk make you queasy? Stomaching uncertainty is the next problem. Once you become aware of your inability to plan, you need to find a way to make the unknown tolerable. There are a couple ways you can do this: worst-case planning and flexible planning.

Planning for the Worst

One way to mitigate the actual risk is to plan for the worst cases possible. The point of this is to make you aware of the negative outcomes, and knowing you can handle it. The worst-case rarely materializes, or if it does, it usually happens in a way you didn’t expect. Worst-case planning can’t give you a look at everything that could go wrong, just a bit more confidence in knowing you can handle it.

The other benefit of worst-case planning is it balances the built in optimism plans have. Most people can’t distinguish between their best-case plans and expected plans. In other words, when predicting the future they imagine the most optimistic scenario possible.

A common rule I heard in software development was to figure out how long it should take. Then double that time and add six months. For your best-case. This adjustment was another method to offset the natural optimism in predicting.

Flexible Planning

The second option is simply not to plan. This may seem crazy, but I’ve found using what I’ll call a “flexible planning” model to be ideal for areas where there is a heavy amount of uncertainty.

Flexible planning isn’t planning in the traditional sense. Traditional planning involves looking at your outcome and devising a route to reach there. Flexible planning defies this entirely by not focusing on an end result. Instead, the emphasis is placed on doing actions that will place you in more favorable positions.

Flexible Planning VS Traditional Planning

Traditional planning starts with your objective and works backwards from that. Let’s say you were planning out what career choice you wanted. A traditional approach would be to work out your career choice, possible firms to work with, education you’ll need, classes you’ll need to take and how to fund your education. Each step determining the one before it.

The problem with this method is it cleanly erases uncertainty along the way. What if changes happen in the industry and firms you want to work for start downsizing? What if your school of choice doesn’t accept you? What if you don’t like the classes or eventual career? What if you can’t fund tuition?

Flexible planning starts where you are and works forward. So your current position might be limited post-secondary schooling and funds. Flexible planning suggests that many outcomes are favorable and that the paths to get there are almost infinite. Instead your job becomes to put yourself in increasingly more favorable positions.

The next step might be to get some schooling, apply to different Universities and scholarship programs or work to earn money for tuition. The best step is the one that has the most favorable options flowing from it.

In a business context this would mean planning your business so that it would have the largest amount of opportunities available. This way if one of your original plans fails, you can easily switch to another.