7 Tips For Constructive Conversations

Whether you’re negotiating a deal, having a heart-to-heart with a friend, giving or receiving feedback to a colleague or employee, checking in with your kids, or working with clients, constructive conversations are essential.

Constructive conversations can help both people feel seen and heard, foster empowerment, and help create meaningful progress toward results.

Once you’ve met the 5 pre-requisites of constructive conversations, how can you ensure the conversation is, indeed, constructive?

Here are some tips.

7 Tips for Constructive Conversations

(1) Be Fully Present

An essential aspect of constructive conversations is full presence.

You cannot engage in meaningful conversation — either a speaker or listener — when you are daydreaming, reading or listening something else, drafting an email, or doing complex tasks.

That said, it’s important to consider that “presence” doesn’t necessarily look like direct eye contact and stillness. Sometimes people can maintain eye contact but be off in another world in their head.

Others listen better when their hands are occupied with a rote task, they are moving around, and they aren’t making eye contact.

(2) Pause Your “Predictive Text” Algorithm

We often listen with the equivalent of “predictive text” in our minds — assuming we know what the other person is going to say before they finish. Once we allow our inner “predictive text” algorithm to take over, we stop actually listening to what they’re saying.

This can result in the conversation getting completely off-track, or two people having a “conversation” where they are speaking past each other, about different things. It almost always results in one person not feeling fully heard, which leads to a breakdown in trust.

Active listening to another person involves being fully present, releasing your inner predictive text algorithm, and not jumping to conclusions or making assumptions about what you believe the other person is saying.

Listen fully until the other person finishes.

(3) Check Your Filters

Filters are the “lens” through which we hear what other people are saying. Everyone has filters, because everyone has different types of experiences and backgrounds.

The fact that we hear things through our filters is not a “negative” — it’s simply human nature. But being aware of those filters is essential.

Our filters can include our social status, life experience, education level, race, class, privilege status, beliefs, expertise, values, and more.

We also have the filters of our expectations about, and perception of, the person who is speaking. For example, if you have an expectation that the other person is solution-oriented, you’ll hear them differently than if you perceive them to be problem-oriented.

Fully listening requires us ideally to put aside both our filters and the filters of our perception of others. At the very least, it’s important to be aware of how those filters might be shaping what we hear.

Before you judge another person’s comments as “positive” or “negative,” check in with whether your label is based on your meaning and story, or your perception of them.

(4) Relax Your Defenses

Fully listening requires being open to receive what the other person is saying — even if it makes us uncomfortable.

This isn’t easy.

It involves letting go of our human instinct to close off to things that may make us uncomfortable or get defensive when we feel under attack.

There’s a reason people tell you to sit down before they deliver news that might be upsetting: the best way to stay open is to stay grounded.

To do your best listening, sit down on a chair — or even on the floor. You might also find it helpful to place a hand on your lap or on your belly as a signal of grounding. Practicing mindful breathing as you listen can also help you stay open and receptive.

(5) Seek to Understand Before You Reply

Its common to fall into the trap of only half-listening to others while the other half of our brain is formulating a reply. We might do this in a subconscious effort to keep the conversation going without long pauses, or because we feel rushed to finish.

Constructive conversations take time.

Allow the other person to finish what they are saying, and make sure you understand what they are saying before you jump in with a response.

Instead of treating a conversation like a game of ping pong, with the ball lobbing back and forth, think of it as a game of catch with a baseball glove. Think about how a baseball player in warmups massages the ball in the mitt before throwing it back. In the same way, you want to feel the impact of what the other person says before you reply.

(6) Reflect Back What You Hear

A helpful practice to aid understanding is to reflect back to the other person what you heard and understood before you respond.

After they speak, take a beat to digest what they said and reflect back what you’re hearing them say, in your own words.

The key to reflecting back is to use your own words to summarize your takeaways, rather than simply repeating verbatim what they said. The purpose is to show that you understood what they were saying. If you didn’t, your reflection allows the other person the opportunity to clarify their meaning.

Reflecting will keep your conversation on track, instead of devolving into a situation where you’re talking past each other.

(7) Be Curious

Curiosity is the secret weapon of constructive conversations. Even if you’ve planned and practiced a difficult conversation in advance, conversations never go as planned. Humans are unpredictable. We can’t predict how we will react to something in the moment, let alone how someone else will react.

When we enter a conversation with a mindset of curiosity, we naturally let go of our preconceived ideas of how a conversation will unfold. Curiosity both emerges from and facilitates presence, and helps us hear more clearly what is being said — and what isn’t being said that might be still lurking under the surface.

For example, if someone tells you that they are not angry, but their tone and body language convey otherwise, you can be curious and ask about it. Maybe they don’t realize that they are conveying anger.

When we listen with curiosity we can pick up on what’s between the lines, allowing for deeper and richer conversations.