Spend more time understanding first

Learn how to say what you think without blowing up your relationships. Most of us have been there. A conversation that starts completely normally and somehow ends with you lying awake at 2am wondering how it went so wrong, again. Whether it is a partner, a teenager, a colleague, or someone on the other side of a political divide, the cost of disagreement done badly is one of the quietest, most cumulative kinds of pain there is.

Julia Minson is a behavioral scientist and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School who has spent years studying the psychology of disagreement, researching how people handle opinions, judgments, and beliefs that differ from their own, and what it actually takes to navigate those moments without losing the relationship in the process. Her book How to Disagree Better distills that research into a practical, science-backed guide for anyone ready to do the real work of staying connected across difference.

In this conversation, you will discover:

• The single most common mistake people make at the start of a disagreement that almost guarantees it will escalate into a full argument
• The HEAR framework, a four-part behavioral science tool for expressing your view firmly without triggering defensiveness or shutting the other person down
• Why leading with facts and data backfires when you are talking to someone who already disagrees with you, and what to use instead that dramatically increases trust
• A critical practice for building disagreement skills on low-stakes conversations first, so you are not white-knuckling it when the big moments arrive
• Why empathy is wonderful in theory but unreliable in the heat of the moment, and what to focus on instead that actually shifts the dynamic

If you are tired of watching important relationships quietly erode one hard conversation at a time, this episode is for you. Press play and let's figure out how to disagree better, together.

You can find Julia at: Website | LinkedIn | Episode Transcript

Next week, we're sharing our conversation with Dr. Nicole LePera, New York Times best-selling author of Reparenting the Inner Child, about why so many of us feel stuck in patterns we can't seem to escape, no matter how hard we try. And what's actually happening in your nervous system when that happens. It's a grounding, hopeful conversation.

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