Under pressure? Four ways to drive smoothly through the toughest conversations 

Have you ever found yourself in critical meetings that suddenly got stuck and, despite the many communication tools that you have learned over time, you felt unable to restore the flow? Have you experienced an important video call that got heated and led to poor decisions and yet it was only afterwards that you realized what you could have said to avert this outcome?

Perhaps you led a meeting that you thought was going well, but where people hesitated to come to an agreement on a way forward until, exasperated, you pushed them to commit?

What these situations have in common is a sense of confusion, a difficulty in making sense of what is happening and, therefore, an inability to take appropriate actions. Why is this?

The why

Very often, important conversations trigger intense emotions, reducing our ability to think clearly and make decisions effectively. In these situations, people often revert to basic psychological reactions: flight, fight, or freeze.

For example, some…