Tough Conversations as a Growth Trajectory
I’m sure you would have often heard something along the lines of ‘Tough conversations are the only ones worth having’. People have extended this to even product management something to the effect of ‘The measure of a PM’s capability is the number of tough conversations he/she is having’.
I never got my head wrapped around as to why was it so important to have these tough conversations. How will they help me? It was only sometime back I realised that tough decisions/conversations are so important that they decide how we live life and how we grow.
In this regard, the Stoics got it right. (In case, you are interested, this article by BBC is a wonderful intro to Stoic philosophy) They got a lot of things right, but the one thing that has stuck with me is the ability to move on. As the Stoics say, life is about learning from experience and moving on. The ultimate aim of life is to be the best version that we can be and that can only happen with continuous learning.
In that regard, one can see that difficult conversations are crucial to maximise learning. One can plot their growth on a graph with time on the x-axis and growth on the y-axis. We learn every day (or at least have a chance of learning every day) with the conversations that we have with others and ourselves.
But how fast we want to grow is up to us. Tough conversations allow us to grow faster, be more self-aware and move on in life. With every tough conversation that we have, we take ourselves up a steeper growth curve — towards living a more complete life.
