Latest / Overwhelmed Working Woman: Boost Productivity, Master Time Management, Overcome Overwhelm & Stop People Pleasing / #291| Why Waiting For The Right Time To Have A Hard Conversation Is Making Things Worse
Transcript
- 0:00Michelle Gauthier: When you listen today, you'll learn why waiting for the right time to have that difficult conversation is the exact thing keeping you overwhelmed and stuck.
- 0:08Michelle Gauthier: You're listening to Overwhelmed Working Woman, the podcast that helps you be more calm and more productive by doing less.
- 0:20Michelle Gauthier: I'm your host, Michelle Gauthier, a former Overwhelmed Working Woman and current life coach.
- 0:25Michelle Gauthier: On this show, we unpack the stress and pressure that today's Working Woman experiences.
- 0:30Michelle Gauthier: And in each episode, you'll get a strategy to bring more calm, ease, and relaxation to your life.
- 0:37Michelle Gauthier: Hi, friend, thanks for joining.
- 0:42Michelle Gauthier: Everybody has to have a difficult conversation every once in a while, and maybe depending on your life, you need to have many.
- 0:48Michelle Gauthier: Today's guest is Sara Fisk.
- 0:50Michelle Gauthier: Sara is the host of the X Good Girl podcast, and she has been a previous guest on Overwhelmed Working Woman.
- 0:57Michelle Gauthier: So I'm so excited to have her back today.
- 0:59Michelle Gauthier: When you listen, you'll learn the difference between a drift conversation and a deadline conversation.
- 1:04Michelle Gauthier: What Sara calls good girl math and why it's quietly draining your time and your energy and the three skills you need to have hard conversations, including how to start it, which is often the hardest part.
- 1:17Michelle Gauthier: Okay, let's get into it.
- 1:19Michelle Gauthier: Hi Sara, thank you so much for being with us again.
- 1:23Michelle Gauthier: I'm glad to have you on the podcast.
- 1:25Michelle Gauthier: For anyone who hasn't heard the other episode, tell us a little bit about what you do and what you help women with.
- 1:32Sara Fisk: Help women learn to have the hard conversations that they spend a ton of time and energy rehearsing in their heads, the ones that just get stuck there for days, weeks, months, maybe even sometimes years.
- 1:45Michelle Gauthier: Years, yes.
- 1:45Michelle Gauthier: We don't want to say that, but maybe so what's a difficult conversation?
- 1:48Michelle Gauthier: Give us an example.
- 1:50Sara Fisk: A difficult conversation is just any time there feels like there is a threat to your relationship, really, what they're gonna think of you, what they're going to say to other people about you.
- 2:02Sara Fisk: Sometimes it really is about your actual reputation or your professional work, but most of the time it's about who you are as a person.
- 2:10Sara Fisk: Do they think you're kind or good or nice or worthy of having a good opinion of?
- 2:16Sara Fisk: And so when that feels threatened, it gets really hard to speak up.
- 2:19Sara Fisk: And the easiest thing to do is not have the conversation.
- 2:23Sara Fisk: It's weird because it sounds easier, right?
- 2:25Sara Fisk: It sounds easy until you lift up the hood and look at what's actually going on underneath because what that does is it makes it go internal and it turns on what I call the good girl math, which is that constant cost-benefit analysis in your brain that you are running to try and answer the question: is it worth the risk?
- 2:44Sara Fisk: Is it worth the stress?
- 2:46Sara Fisk: Is it worth the potential misunderstanding?
- 2:48Sara Fisk: Is it worth all the discomfort that I'm gonna feel?
- 2:51Sara Fisk: Is it worth them being disappointed or angry or upset with me in some way?
- 2:55Sara Fisk: And so you're doing this internal calculation.
- 2:58Sara Fisk: And sometimes you're thinking, okay, if I just say it this way, then that will control their reaction.
- 3:04Sara Fisk: Or if I just wait for this mood or this time or after this event.
- 3:08Sara Fisk: And the problem is two things.
- 3:09Sara Fisk: Number one, that good girl math that's constantly running is a huge drain on your actual time and your actual energy.
- 3:17Sara Fisk: Just think about the number of hours that you ruminate about and rehearse those talks that you don't actually have.
- 3:24Sara Fisk: And then number two, you're running all of that math to try and control something you can't, which is the emotion that you're gonna feel and their reaction.
- 3:34Sara Fisk: You can't control those two things, but we think we can.
- 3:38Sara Fisk: And yeah, on the surface, it might sound like I know, I'll just fix this by not having a conversation, but that costs a huge amount of internal energy.
- 3:45Sara Fisk: And oftentimes, avoiding the conversation is actually making something worse.
- 3:50Sara Fisk: And we're not aware of that.
- 3:52Michelle Gauthier: So for everybody listening, think of a hard conversation that you're not having because Sarah's gonna take us through the steps and what we need to do in order to prepare for this conversation.
- 4:02Michelle Gauthier: So whether it's something that you need to talk to your boss about or someone on your team or your child or your spouse or whatever, just think about that difficult conversation that you keep putting away.
- 4:13Michelle Gauthier: For me, when I have one that's on hold, it just keeps coming up and coming up in my mind.
- 4:17Michelle Gauthier: So everybody think about what theirs is so that Sara can teach us what to do with that.
- 4:22Sara Fisk: Absolutely.
- 4:22Sara Fisk: And I just want to make a quick distinction between two different kinds of difficult conversations because I think everyone listening, if you look for your mental shelf where you have all these things piled up, right?
- 4:33Sara Fisk: I wish I could talk to my friend about the time that she said that thing in front of all of our other friends that hurt my feelings.
- 4:38Sara Fisk: I wish I could talk to my coworker about the way that we collaborated on that project.
- 4:43Sara Fisk: And then they took all the credit and made it sound like I didn't do anything.
- 4:46Sara Fisk: We all have this shelf of conversations.
- 4:49Sara Fisk: And those conversations are a little different because we can leave those up there sometimes for a long time.
- 4:55Sara Fisk: I call those drift conversations.
- 4:58Sara Fisk: And I call them a drift conversation because it's like a boat on the ocean.
- 5:01Sara Fisk: You think it's in one place, but it's actually drifting away.
- 5:05Sara Fisk: And while we are not talking with the friend or with the coworker, we are feeling resentful or angry or sad or anxious.
- 5:13Sara Fisk: And we're continuing to collect evidence for the type of relationship that we think we have with them.
- 5:18Sara Fisk: And it's taking us further and further apart.
- 5:22Sara Fisk: We think that we can put this conversation on the shelf and just kind of press pause, but it doesn't really happen.
- 5:27Sara Fisk: So that's one kind of hard conversation.
- 5:29Sara Fisk: The second kind, I call a deadline conversation.
- 5:32Sara Fisk: And that's when your boss needs an answer by Friday, or the contractor who's done work for you, who messed it up, who wants to be paid is coming back to your house on Monday, or your son is going on the date on Saturday and you need to talk with him before he leaves about X.
- 5:47Sara Fisk: So deadline conversations are also hard because there's some kind of external timeline that we don't control and we hate the urgency, but in a way, that urgency works in our favor because either we have the conversation or we have to accept some consequence that we don't want.
- 6:05Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, I see what you're saying.
- 6:06Michelle Gauthier: We could look at that deadline as something that's helping us address this.
- 6:11Michelle Gauthier: Yeah.
- 6:11Sara Fisk: Yeah.
- 6:11Sara Fisk: Yeah.
- 6:12Sara Fisk: And so there's deadline hard conversations and drift hard conversations.
- 6:16Sara Fisk: So if you're listening to this, I want you to give yourself an internal check.
- 6:20Sara Fisk: Is the conversation I'm thinking of, is it a drift conversation or is it a deadline?
- 6:25Sara Fisk: Because it's just helpful to know.
- 6:26Sara Fisk: But the good thing is you need the same three steps to have either one.
- 6:30Michelle Gauthier: Okay, great.
- 6:31Michelle Gauthier: So as we're talking through these three steps, can you give us an example of either something in your life or something you've worked with a client on?
- 6:39Sara Fisk: Absolutely.
- 6:40Sara Fisk: A great deadline conversation is actually, I've been working with a client, let's call her Laura.
- 6:45Sara Fisk: She did hire a contractor to come and do a bunch of work.
- 6:48Sara Fisk: He did some of it fine and some of it not great.
- 6:51Sara Fisk: And as she was walking around and taking note of everything, she was assuming he would come back to her and say, I've got to finish X, Y, Z and then we'll be done.
- 6:59Sara Fisk: And nope, he said, I'll be by Monday to pick up the check.
- 7:02Sara Fisk: So she knew I either have to tell him about the work that needs to be done, or I've got to accept shitty work and I'm stuck with this work that doesn't look like it was supposed to.
- 7:12Sara Fisk: That's a deadline conversation, drift conversation.
- 7:15Sara Fisk: Let's call her Carol.
- 7:16Sara Fisk: Her last of three children just started his senior year.
- 7:20Sara Fisk: And she knows he's planning on going out of state to college.
- 7:23Sara Fisk: She's beginning to look at the state of her marriage, and she's thinking, oh, we're more like roommates than lovers or spouses.
- 7:31Sara Fisk: We don't really check in with each other about anything other than what the kids need or what the dog needs or what the house needs.
- 7:38Sara Fisk: She's starting to notice a lack of closeness, but there's no deadline.
- 7:43Sara Fisk: She doesn't have to talk about it by Friday at five.
- 7:46Sara Fisk: And so she decides to wait.
- 7:47Sara Fisk: I'll just wait until after this stressful thing is over at work.
- 7:51Sara Fisk: I'll just wait until after.
- 7:53Sara Fisk: I'll just wait until after.
- 7:54Sara Fisk: But the whole time she's watching her husband the way he behaves, and she's making up a story about it in her mind.
- 8:00Sara Fisk: And it's confirming, you know what?
- 8:02Sara Fisk: What if he has fallen out of love with me?
- 8:04Sara Fisk: What if he doesn't want the same things I want anymore?
- 8:06Sara Fisk: What if?
- 8:07Sara Fisk: And so that's the conversation that is still getting harder for her.
- 8:11Sara Fisk: Both Laura and Carol need to do the same thing.
- 8:14Sara Fisk: They need to have three skills.
- 8:15Sara Fisk: They got to start the conversation.
- 8:17Sara Fisk: They need to stay in the conversation, and then they need to handle whatever happens after the conversation.
- 8:23Michelle Gauthier: And is starting the hardest part?
- 8:25Sara Fisk: You know what?
- 8:26Sara Fisk: It can be.
- 8:26Sara Fisk: I call the skill stop debating it.
- 8:28Sara Fisk: And this skill is about believing that just because it matters to me, that is enough of a reason to bring it up.
- 8:36Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, that's great.
- 8:37Michelle Gauthier: That's great.
- 8:38Michelle Gauthier: I think we could all use that reminder.
- 8:40Michelle Gauthier: Say that again, please.
- 8:42Sara Fisk: You'll know if this skill needs some work because you find yourself waiting to see if the behavior that you want to bring up happens again, or gathering more evidence, or checking with other people.
- 8:53Sara Fisk: Is this a big deal?
- 8:55Sara Fisk: Should I be mad about this?
- 8:56Sara Fisk: Or maybe you're simultaneously telling yourself, I should just get over this, but you're still feeling really resentful.
- 9:02Sara Fisk: Those are all signs that you need some work on that first skill to just stop debating it and speak up.
- 9:09Michelle Gauthier: I have definitely had all those signs in my past, as well as trying to figure out that person's mood.
- 9:14Michelle Gauthier: Is this a good time based on what their mood is?
- 9:17Michelle Gauthier: Yes, that's right.
- 9:18Michelle Gauthier: Those all make sense.
- 9:19Michelle Gauthier: So when we remind ourselves, just because I want to have this conversation is a good enough reason to have this conversation, and we have the nerve and we start the conversation, then what?
- 9:30Sara Fisk: Then the conversation has begun.
- 9:32Sara Fisk: And your job is to say what you actually want to say without making yourself or your message smaller.
- 9:40Michelle Gauthier: What would that look like in the case of the person who had the contracting work done that was not good?
- 9:45Sara Fisk: So Laura starts the conversation.
- 9:47Sara Fisk: And if she is needing some work in that second skill of saying what she actually wants to say, she's going to be softening.
- 9:56Sara Fisk: Hey, I just need to talk to you, but it's not a really big deal.
- 9:58Sara Fisk: Or you know what?
- 9:59Sara Fisk: Don't worry about fixing that part.
- 10:01Sara Fisk: She softens her ask, or she notices that she's making herself more likable, nicer, actually sometimes physically smaller, overexplaining so that the contractor is convinced that she really does have a good point, or sometimes just going blank or freezing.
- 10:18Sara Fisk: So what should she say if you're really great at that skill?
- 10:22Sara Fisk: What would it look like if you said that?
- 10:24Sara Fisk: I love actually to ask questions because when we have been doing a lot of good girl math, we think that we need to come into the conversation with this bulletproof list of reasons and evidence because we're really afraid that they're not going to like it.
- 10:39Sara Fisk: And we need to prove that we have the right to be speaking about this.
- 10:42Sara Fisk: And so I actually coach clients to ask questions.
- 10:45Sara Fisk: The conversation that Laura had with him sounded in the end like, hey, can you help me understand what your idea of a finished product looks like?
- 10:53Sara Fisk: Because this to me doesn't look finished.
- 10:55Sara Fisk: And I'm wondering what you were thinking.
- 10:57Sara Fisk: Can you tell me what your process is for checking off all of the elements of what this thing, finished thing is supposed to look like?
- 11:05Sara Fisk: Because when I look at it, I see some things that I think need some work.
- 11:09Sara Fisk: Okay, great.
- 11:09Sara Fisk: And it puts the onus on the other person to explain themselves.
- 11:14Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, that's great because it's so much easier to ask a question than to say, I want this to look like this, or I'm not going to pay you.
- 11:22Michelle Gauthier: That would be a hard sentence to get out for most people.
- 11:25Sara Fisk: That's right.
- 11:25Sara Fisk: And in the beginning, especially when we're working with someone that we don't have a lot of history with, it might simply be we have a different definition than they do of whatever the thing is we are talking about.
- 11:37Michelle Gauthier: So if we switch over to the other conversation where the husband is starting to feel like a roommate, how would we do this step number two?
- 11:44Michelle Gauthier: What kinds of questions or what would you suggest for that?
- 11:47Sara Fisk: I would suggest a little bit of a different approach because now you're working with someone that you have a lot of history with.
- 11:53Sara Fisk: It's gonna be depending on the person and their preferences, hey, I've been thinking a lot about our closeness.
- 12:00Sara Fisk: And I'm wondering if that would be something that we could talk about.
- 12:03Sara Fisk: So asking if they're open to the conversation.
- 12:06Sara Fisk: Yeah, yeah.
- 12:07Sara Fisk: Okay.
- 12:08Sara Fisk: I've noticed that we don't seem to talk a lot about anything that isn't related to kids, dog, house, or work.
- 12:15Sara Fisk: Is that something you've noticed too?
- 12:17Sara Fisk: Because when I think about that, it makes me sad that over the years we've lost what it was that brought us together in the beginning.
- 12:25Sara Fisk: I'd like to see if we can get back to some of that.
- 12:28Michelle Gauthier: Would you?
- 12:28Michelle Gauthier: That's great.
- 12:29Michelle Gauthier: I love it.
- 12:30Michelle Gauthier: I love the question asking.
- 12:32Michelle Gauthier: And you could also find out that you have been worrying about something that the other person isn't worrying about.
- 12:38Michelle Gauthier: Or, hey, I've been thinking about that too, but I was afraid to bring it up.
- 12:41Michelle Gauthier: Just by asking questions, you can really get so much more information for yourself.
- 12:45Michelle Gauthier: That's right.
- 12:46Michelle Gauthier: Okay, so let's imagine they've had the nerve, even while probably feeling uncomfortable, to start the conversation, to ask these questions, to be really clear on what they want, try their best not to make themselves small.
- 12:57Michelle Gauthier: I'm sure that takes practice.
- 12:59Michelle Gauthier: And then what?
- 12:59Michelle Gauthier: What's the third thing that they do?
- 13:02Sara Fisk: The third thing is they have to trust themselves to handle whatever happens after the conversation.
- 13:08Sara Fisk: It's about this idea that I know that if I feel uncomfortable, I can just take care of myself as I feel uncomfortable.
- 13:15Sara Fisk: And if the other person is uncomfortable, we'll just have another conversation about it.
- 13:20Sara Fisk: We can have as many conversations as we need, or I can decide what to do next based on what happened.
- 13:27Sara Fisk: And I don't have to spend weeks ruminating about it.
- 13:30Sara Fisk: I should have said that.
- 13:31Sara Fisk: Why did I do that?
- 13:32Sara Fisk: Oh my gosh, that was so dumb.
- 13:33Sara Fisk: I should have, I should have, I should have.
- 13:34Michelle Gauthier: Trust that you can work it out for yourself.
- 13:37Michelle Gauthier: That brings up the marriage one for me because I feel like in that moment, if that person does say, I think everything's just fine, and you end up having hurt feelings or feeling badly about bringing it up, you can trust yourself that you can then work through what to do with that.
- 13:52Michelle Gauthier: You can say, you know what, I'm feeling a little sad about that.
- 13:55Michelle Gauthier: I'm gonna go lie with my blanket and read a book for a while or whatever, that you can trust yourself to take care of yourself.
- 14:01Michelle Gauthier: That's great.
- 14:02Michelle Gauthier: I love that.
- 14:02Michelle Gauthier: Because then you're not afraid to have it because of what the outcome might be when you know that you can trust yourself in that moment.
- 14:09Sara Fisk: And then if you really want more closeness, you can go back later and say, you know what, honey, I know that you might think things are fine, but I actually don't.
- 14:18Sara Fisk: And I'm wondering if we could talk about how we might get closer, even though you don't think it's a huge problem right in this moment.
- 14:25Sara Fisk: I would still like that.
- 14:27Sara Fisk: Because again, she if she's wanting to be closer and she hasn't gotten an answer on that yet, then it's time to have another conversation.
- 14:35Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, but I love the way you open it up once you've started the conversation.
- 14:39Michelle Gauthier: You might have three or five or 10 different little settings where you have these that you don't have to go in and say, This is exactly what I want, and we need to keep talking until we resolve that.
- 14:49Michelle Gauthier: It's like you're opening a conversation and open to see how it goes and trusting yourself, and you'll go back if you need to.
- 14:56Michelle Gauthier: That feels very freeing to me.
- 14:58Sara Fisk: It is the best feeling in the world to know you can always just have another conversation if that's what you choose to try to get either closer or more clear.
- 15:09Michelle Gauthier: So, what kind of results have you seen with the women who you coach through these difficult conversations?
- 15:16Michelle Gauthier: How does their life look differently when they're able to have these kinds of conversations?
- 15:22Sara Fisk: I just had a session yesterday, actually, with Laura, the client who hired the contractor.
- 15:26Sara Fisk: And she said, I just need you to know how miraculously different it feels to not spin and ruminate for weeks before I have to have a difficult conversation.
- 15:38Sara Fisk: She has a son who has special needs.
- 15:40Sara Fisk: The teacher that he is currently assigned to is not enforcing his IEP the way she should.
- 15:46Sara Fisk: And she said, that would have made me sick for months.
- 15:49Sara Fisk: I would have just waited to see.
- 15:50Sara Fisk: Maybe she'll change her mind, maybe she'll get better at it, maybe she'll actually start doing it.
- 15:54Sara Fisk: And I would have been in that spin cycle for months and then finally made the appointment.
- 15:59Sara Fisk: She said, I waited a week to see if maybe it was just the first day of school, but there were some really specific things that were supposed to be happening.
- 16:06Sara Fisk: And then she said, I just called the school and said, Hey, I'd like to come in and talk about a couple of things.
- 16:10Sara Fisk: She is saving so much time, energy, effort, mental space.
- 16:17Sara Fisk: It is not just, she doesn't have this buildup of all these backlog of hard conversations, but she's spending less of her life worrying about them, planning about them, and ruminating about them afterward, which is amazing just for her alone.
- 16:33Michelle Gauthier: And then think about the impact.
- 16:34Michelle Gauthier: Had she waited for the whole semester, the impact on her son and his learning and his confidence, I'm sure it just trickles out to all aspects of your life when you're able to have these tough conversations.
- 16:46Michelle Gauthier: So for everybody listening, if you're if someone out there is thinking, okay, yes, this is me, I'm doing good girl math and I'm really afraid to speak up, what do you what would you say to her?
- 16:58Michelle Gauthier: What does she need to do or understand if now she gets the sort of the layout of how to have these conversations, but it still feels too scary?
- 17:06Sara Fisk: I would tell her that she needs to come to one of my free weekly workshops.
- 17:09Sara Fisk: Okay, great.
- 17:09Sara Fisk: We we go through these steps, and all of these skills rest on nervous system regulation.
- 17:17Sara Fisk: Okay.
- 17:18Sara Fisk: Because in order to start the conversation, you have to get to a place with your nervous system where it feels safe enough to speak up in order to stay in the conversation, in order to not ruminate for weeks after and to trust yourself to happen what happens after.
- 17:34Sara Fisk: You have to be able to regulate your nervous system.
- 17:37Sara Fisk: And that's why we hire coaches, right?
- 17:39Sara Fisk: Because that's not something that you can do in a day or a week.
- 17:43Sara Fisk: It takes some sustained practice.
- 17:45Sara Fisk: But if they come to one of those workshops, that's what I teach how to do in that workshop because it is knowing what the skill is, but it's also feeling safe enough to do it.
- 17:55Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, that's great.
- 17:56Michelle Gauthier: Okay, I love this.
- 17:57Michelle Gauthier: So you have a workshop every week and it's free, and they can workshop a real situation.
- 18:02Sara Fisk: That's right.
- 18:03Michelle Gauthier: Okay, tell us about it.
- 18:04Michelle Gauthier: Where can they find that?
- 18:05Sara Fisk: I'll give you the link.
- 18:06Sara Fisk: It'll be in the show notes.
- 18:07Sara Fisk: It's sarafisk.coach backslash voice.
- 18:12Sara Fisk: And that's where it is every single week.
- 18:15Sara Fisk: And I'd love to see anybody there who wants to work on this.
- 18:18Michelle Gauthier: That's amazing.
- 18:18Michelle Gauthier: And if they are just loving what you're talking about here, where else can they find you?
- 18:23Sara Fisk: I also am the host of a podcast.
- 18:25Sara Fisk: It's called The EX -Good Girl.
- 18:27Sara Fisk: And every week I release episodes related to speaking up, using your voice, the skills you need, and the support you need to be able to do that.
- 18:34Michelle Gauthier: Okay.
- 18:35Michelle Gauthier: That's amazing.
- 18:35Michelle Gauthier: Great.
- 18:36Michelle Gauthier: We will put all of that in the show notes.
- 18:38Michelle Gauthier: Now, before I let you go, I want to ask you two questions that I ask all guests, and it's not related to what we're talking about today.
- 18:46Michelle Gauthier: The first one is what is a rule that you have for yourself that you very rarely break?
- 18:52Sara Fisk: I have to move my body every single day.
- 18:55Sara Fisk: It's just going on a walk, it's jumping on my little bouncy trampoline, it's stretching for a few minutes.
- 19:01Sara Fisk: I feel like there is something about connecting to my body and feeling how it moves and feeling how it feels on the inside.
- 19:10Sara Fisk: I can really get into a rut of just produce.
- 19:13Sara Fisk: And when I take a few minutes every day, like this morning, I just put on some music while I was getting ready and did some dancing.
- 19:19Sara Fisk: And I love it.
- 19:20Sara Fisk: In my bathroom, a little Shakira in the morning got me going.
- 19:23Sara Fisk: And it just reminds me that I have a body that needs my attention and that has additional information for me about my life that I need to be aware of.
- 19:33Michelle Gauthier: Yeah, that's awesome.
- 19:34Michelle Gauthier: I love that.
- 19:35Michelle Gauthier: I love it.
- 19:35Michelle Gauthier: Shakira would just always make me in a good mood.
- 19:38Michelle Gauthier: Hips don't lie.
- 19:40Michelle Gauthier: Exactly.
- 19:40Michelle Gauthier: Exactly.
- 19:41Michelle Gauthier: Okay.
- 19:42Michelle Gauthier: And then the second question is what's something that you're just into right now?
- 19:45Michelle Gauthier: Not related to work, just like something that you're really loving.
- 19:49Sara Fisk: I am really into how we use language.
- 19:53Sara Fisk: And this, granted, is part of my profession, but I listened to a TED talk by a woman named Lyra Bodoritsky, and I can send that link to you.
- 20:02Sara Fisk: And she talks about how language is acquired and how different cultures use language completely differently.
- 20:09Sara Fisk: And I'm fascinated because my job is to help people learn how to communicate.
- 20:12Sara Fisk: And she said that her favorite quote is the only problem with communication is the idea that it has happened after we have had a talk.
- 20:19Sara Fisk: And so constantly helping people understand that while you think you've said what you need to say and you think you've heard the other person, like we really need to ask better questions because oftentimes we're just, as we have discussed, talking about a difference in definition or a misunderstanding or an experience that kind of shaped us differently.
- 20:37Sara Fisk: And she spoke to that so eloquently as she's talking about how different languages have developed all over the world that actually allow us to express completely different things.
- 20:47Michelle Gauthier: Oh, that does sound interesting.
- 20:48Sara Fisk: Okay, that's fun.
- 20:49Sara Fisk: Thank you so much.
- 20:50Sara Fisk: Thank you so much for having me.
- 20:52Sara Fisk: I love conversations like this.
- 20:54Michelle Gauthier: Yes, that was great.
- 20:55Michelle Gauthier: That was so helpful.
- 20:55Michelle Gauthier: I think everybody listening has hopefully worked through a difficult conversation in their head and they're ready to get out there and start the conversation.
- 21:02Michelle Gauthier: Thank you for listening to the Overwhelmed Working Woman podcast.
- 21:10Michelle Gauthier: If you want to learn more about my work, head over to my website at MichelleGauthier.com.
- 21:16Michelle Gauthier: See you next week.