McMillan said, “The strategy that makes sense to me is a Steven Covey principle. “Seek first to understand, then seek to be understood.” If I work on you first. and you feel really understood, then often your defensiveness comes down. I am not attacking you. I am listening. It introduces reasonableness to our conversation and without even noticing it, we are talking, without yelling or threatening.
He said, “Crucial conversations work best when our intention is this: ‘I want to understand why you think that way. I want to understand why you did what you did. I want you to understand why I feel the way I do. I want to see if we can come up with some resolution. When those things are in your mind, you automatically check yourself. You put the brake on before you say hurtful words.’”
“What do I really want? That’s a question that takes the reasoning and logic side of your brain and plugs it in to your values and beliefs. We call it Start With Heart. Get your heart right before you open your mouth and you will have dramatically increased the likelihood of having a helpful rather than a hurtful conversation.”
He said, “One of the most important things we learned in our research is if you can make it safe for the other person to talk with you, they almost always will. Make it safe enough, you can talk with almost anyone about almost anything. There are two conditions that make it safe to talk. If both are present in a large degree the other person will feel very safe. If these conditions only exist to a small degree there is very little safety. If either condition is missing there will be no safety and constructive conversation is unlikely.”
McMillan shared, “The two conditions that make it safe to talk are Mutual Respect and Mutual Purpose. The hostage negotiator taught us the importance of Mutual Respect. Always choose to be respectful. Mutual respect doesn’t require you to love the other person or even want them to be your best buddy. You don’t have to agree with them, but you do have to show respect to them so you can have an effective conversation.
Mutual Purpose means we both want the same thing. This reduces conflict. There’s no need to do battle with me if I am helping you to get what you want. Creating Mutual Purpose begins by honestly answering this question: What do I really want?
I do not know the perfect balance between discourse and discussion. It varies with the individual teacher and promptings of the Spirit. Unfortunately, the discourse method is sometimes overused at the expense of meaningful discussion. In the process of correcting this, however, the pendulum occasionally swings too far in the opposite direction, and teachers abandon any discourse for the sake of discussion as an end rather than a means. To rely solely on one method at the expense of the other may be discounting the most effective way to teach a given doctrine to a given group at a given time.
Inspired teaching certainly includes discussion, but it does not, nor should it, exclude powerful discourse and instruction.