YouSaid · the spoken record

Sheila Heen

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127
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2021-09-15
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2021-09-15
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  1. “And the second is that if you're wrong about anything, the minute that something surprising happens, you're knocked off your path and you're locked in the woods.”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “I think that structure mostly serves as landmarks. So I think that the way that we often will, well, if you're like me, prepare quote unquote prepare for a difficult conversation is that we lie awake worrying about it. And maybe we turn on the light and jot down a few talking points. And then we think about how they're going to react. And then we think about our rebuttals to their reactions. And we're sort of charting a path. Like I'm going to say this and then I know they're going to say this. So I'll respond with this, et cetera. And we're charting a path through the woods to try to get to the other side. And by the way, then we turn out the light and realize, yeah, I don't know that this is worth even bringing up. And now we're back at the beginning, trying to decide whether it's even worth trying. The problem, though, with the path charting is number one, it sets you up to do a lot of talking and very little listening.”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “So that also helped us understand why it is that some people have trouble with some conversations and the same conversation is easy for someone else. And it's partly because of whatever the story is that you tell about yourself and who you are trying to be.”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “That's right. And so here's a simple example for people who have trouble saying no, well, that doesn't seem that hard. Just say no more often. You've probably gotten that advice a million times, right? It's not that you don't know how to say the word no, it's that chances are you think of yourself as somebody who is very loyal or generous or would never abandon a friend in need. Well, if that's true, then anytime someone asks you for help, turning them down for that help isn't just saying the word no, it's doing something that feels in conflict or intention with who you want to be in the world. And someone letting you know that you let them down will be a much harder conversation for you than for someone who just doesn't happen to have that identity story about themselves, right? The guy in the office next door has no trouble saying no to everybody, which of course why everybody comes to you because they know you'll say yes.”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “So you've got what happened conversation, we call it in the book, the second is the feelings conversation, and then at the deepest level is what we call the identity conversation. And the idea here is that if a conversation feels difficult, chances are there's something the situation suggests about you that feels troubling or at stake or maybe a little bit true. Or maybe infuriatingly wrong. It's not just that we're arguing about money. It's always about more than money. It's about whether I'm respected or competent or a good person or worthy of love even. And that's part of why these conversations feel so high stakes.”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Beneath that, which is how we each feel treated by the other, which is that I've been telling you that these timelines aren't realistic forever, and yet you keep blaming me for missing them because you're just not willing to listen. And if we don't address how we Resolve the surface problem, but that deeper problem is going to turn up in a different form next week or next month.”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “That's one level of the conversation, but there are two more things going on beneath the surface. A second is by the time somebody becomes a difficult conversation, we're each usually struggling with a whole host of feelings of frustration, betrayal, confusion, guilt, shame, anxiety. And what do we do with those feelings? Often we don't address them directly. They simply infuse the conversation. They're the energy that drives the conversation and feelings get translated into blame and arguments and accusations. And if we don't talk about them, often we're not getting to the heart of what's going on. Even in business, by the times it becomes a difficult conversation, typically we've got at least two problems. One is the surface problem. Is this timeline realistic? We're arguing about that. Is this the right strategy going forward? Who's right about that? But there's a second problem.”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Those are the three pieces of the story that I'm telling about you. But by the way, you're telling the same story about me. Well, a different story with the same elements. You're focused on what you're right about and whose fault it is, which is clearly yours. No, you think it's mine and why the other person's acting this way.”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “Actually, it didn't matter who you are talking to, and it doesn't matter what you're talking about, the same kinds of things show up in our internal voice in any difficult conversation, meaning the internal voice is what we're thinking and feeling, but may not be saying to each other. And those fall into three categories. So the first is that we're each thinking about what's happening, what has happened, what is happening right now, and what should happen. So this is sort of the story we tell about the facts, quote unquote facts, because it's really an interpretation. And that includes what I'm right about, who's right, but usually what I'm right about, whose fault it is that we're having this problem, and also what your intentions or motivations or character are. Like, why are you being so impossible? Why are you being so stupid or difficult?”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “We'll just figure out what those different types of conversations are and we'll have a chapter about each. This is great because people buy books with titles like that. And so, this is a fabulous plan. We quickly ran into a little bit of trouble because we realized that we were wrong.”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “We figured, I don't know, there's probably like eight or ten or twelve different types of difficult conversations. And a conversation with your boss would be different than a conversation with your partner or your spouse. And that'd be different than a conversation with your teenager, which is probably a volume unto itself. And so we'll just figure out what those different types of conversations are.”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “And that's been one of the things that's been really fun about this field incredibly rigorously analytical. It has to do with who we are and what we think the meaning of life is and the emotions that we carry into all of our conversations and relationships, whether we're aware of them or not. So when we first started working on the book, Bruce and Doug and I that became difficult conversations, the working title was actually the 10 hardest things to say and how to say them.”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “That image really has stayed with me that maybe part of the journey of getting better at difficult conversations and getting better at understanding humanity and our relationships with each other and our own limitations in understanding each other. And I think that learning happens between us. The way that you learn about yourself, the way you might learn about God or the universe or the nature of life is in that space between you and me. That's where the struggle often is But you asked a more analytical question, which I will also respond to”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “I actually should pause there because there's one of the theologians, Dominic, said something so profound in the nature, in the course of that conversation that it stuck with me all these years. Part of what emerged from the conversation was if we're made in the image of God, what does that mean for each of us? What do we each think that means? And one of the things that came out was the idea that if our souls are partly the nature of God, maybe it's that we have thousand watt souls. But as human beings, we only have 40 watt bulbs. We're able to plug into that so we understand and show so little of the light that is possible there”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Yeah, great question. By the way, I spent, I think it was about 15 hours locked in a room with six theologians with disagreements over the truth, nature of truth and God, and I got that all figured out now.”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “What were we learning about difficult conversations? So by the time I graduated and they offered me a full time job to join them at the negotiation project, we were all kind of thinking about and wrestling with some of those same questions.”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  17. “Happening, what was I experiencing? What was I noticing? What were my diagnoses for what was going on? What was I, should I have spoken up? Who was I trying to influence or persuade? Or even if I wasn't going to persuade him of anything, was I speaking up on other people's behalf or was I just speaking up for myself so that I could come out of that interaction with some sense of self-respect for sticking up for something? And what was I risking in any of those interactions? What would be my purpose and what might be at risk? And I think I really see in that paper a few of the germs of what later became the book difficult conversations simultaneous to that, unbeknownst to me. I was writing that paper for Bruce Patton, who is a co-author on Getting TS and was supervising the paper. And unbeknownst to me at the time, he and Doug Stone were already themselves working on.”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  18. “And by the time the doors opened on the lobby and everyone sort of with relief spilled out of that confined space where you just felt trapped and unable to breathe, I was shaking and I was thinking, oh my goodness, what could I have done? What should I have done? I didn't know what to do. And was I responsible for saying something or not? And what was interesting was that it has stuck with me. I'm like shaking now. I'm thinking about it. It has stuck with me all these years. It wasn't aimed at me, clearly. I'm white. And yet it stuck with me so viscerally that I ended up writing my third year paper about it to graduate from Harvard Law School at that time. You needed to do a pretty big research paper. Your third year, and I decided to do it on that interaction just to better understand. Was it that”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  19. “And did whatever I did there that we're all probably familiar with. I got in the elevator to come down and I was on a pretty high floor. And the elevator filled, packed. And on the way down to the lobby, A guy in the elevator just started ranting saying the most upsetting and vile, racist stuff. And my mind has completely blanked out on exactly what he said. But I do recall that I had never, you know, I'm a sheltered kid from Nebraska. I had never heard even some of these things before. And he was going on and on and on as we clicked slowly down the floors in a packed elevator of people from all over the world. And it was silent.”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  20. “Yeah, let's start there. Well, on the business side, I will say that difficult conversations come at you from every direction. They're with your subordinates, with your peers, with your boss, with your partners and vendors, et cetera. And often you see them coming down the pike or you're wondering whether to have them. But every once in a while they ambush you kind of out of nowhere. And I think that's what happened to me that day in Los Angeles. So I, where was I going? I guess I was going to Spain because we were going over to teach negotiation. And I was still a student that I had been invited to go and be part of the Harvard negotiation program that was teaching a week in Madrid. So I had to go renew my passport and I was working that summer in Los Angeles. So I went down to the federal building, which is near UCLA.”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  21. “Manage the inevitable conflict in all of our relationships will professional relationships and personal relationships. So I'm learning every day not only because of my own shortcomings, which become sharper and clearer every day, it seems, but also because I get to stand on the shoulders of so many people who are like, hey, this is really interesting. And I think to myself, wow, that is really interesting. I wonder how that applies. And you're off and running again.”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  22. “I think partly that it was so interdisciplinary. So when we're trying to understand something, we're reaching in all directions, behavioral economics, neuroscience, psychology, social psychology, you're really reaching in all directions just to understand the human aspects of working relationships and problem solving and what gets in the way. And that means as each of those fields advances and we understand more in each of those fields, well, we get to capitalize on that to think, well, how would this apply to how we”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  23. “I grew up in Iowa and Nebraska and through a series of sort of serendipitous accidents I ended up at Occidental College in California for college and when I was applying to law school ultimately I was trying to decide whether to go to Stanford or Harvard because of course they didn't get into Yale, which is true of almost every person who's listening to this podcast. So we all have that in common. And one of my college advisors said to me Harvard is the bigger and kind of scarier choice, I hear you saying, but they have this negotiation thing and I just have an instinct that it might be up your alley and probably partly because it was the bigger and scarier thing, but also because I felt he knew me pretty well. I decided to come to Harvard. I didn't know anybody. And of course, he was right. I took negotiation my very first year of law school and just fell in love.”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  24. “The ANC and the white government just before the constitutional talks. That's how I got involved in Ireland. And it's also how he came to write getting to yes, which is the negotiation book that really became a foundation book in the field of negotiation and conflict resolution.”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  25. “Dedicated his life to trying to find better ways for us to manage conflict in the world. And his passion was international relations, right? So he would sit down and read the paper in the morning, the newspaper, of course, was how we got our news back even when I turned up on the scene in the 90s. And he would find a conflict and he would just start working on it. And then he would fax his advice off to the leaders involved and they'd be getting these faxes from some guy named Roger who had some kind of interesting ideas. So every once in a while someone would call him back. And that's how he got involved in border disputes between Peru and Ecuador. That's how he got involved in South Africa.”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  26. “The walls are etched with names of Harvard students and graduates, so some of them didn't graduate before they died, who have died in service of our country. And it would be fascinating. The sky was just the most generous person I had ever met And I think that that experience really motivated the rest of his life. He came back and”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  27. “Oh, golly, how can I capture for your listeners who Roger was? Roger was just an incredibly inspirational person So he fought in World War II, and he was in both the Atlantic and the Pacific theaters. He was actually a weatherman. So they would send up a plane. They didn't have weather satellites, right? So they send up a weather plane to check out the weather over Germany. And then that, they radio back to say whether you should send out the mission. Being in the Air Force during World War II was not a super survivable place to be. And when Roger came back from the war, he found that he had lost several college roommates, friends. He was the only one who came home in his immediate social circle. If you go to Memorial Church on the Harvard College campus”

    2021-09-15 · The Tim Ferriss Show · #532: Sheila Heen of The Harvard Negotiation Project — How to Navigate Hard Conversations, the Subtle Art of Apologizing, and a Powerful 60-Day Challenge · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT