Humans are complicated creatures. Or at least I am. I consider myself a straightforward person, but ironically, I shun from confrontation because a part of me wants to be nice. However, being nice might be doing others a disservice because they don’t get to hear my truth. I’m also unfortunately the type of person who bottles everything up and lets it all explode like a burst dam, so perhaps having fierce conversations will detoxify some of my troubling thoughts on a regular basis.

Reading “Fierce Conversations” by Susan Scott was helpful because she not only includes seven principles to initiating and inviting authentic conversations in our lives, but she also provides a decision tree that we can use with our superiors to negotiate the amount of agency and autonomy we can employ in our professional lives. I liked the decision tree so much that I zapped a copy and shared it with my immediate boss, hoping to have more clarity about my job scope.

Susan Scott shows herself to be a well-read person because she peppers her anecdotes with well-chosen quotes from famous thought leaders. She also stands out from the crowd by going into the morphology of words. So, apparently “con” is the Spanish word for “with”, which is an apt association with “conversations”. Courage is from the French word, coeur, meaning “heart”. Okay, knowing some word origins isn’t going to help me out with the fierce conversations, but it increased the readability.

Of course, all these frills would just be icing on the cake if Susan Scott doesn’t provide techniques to having fierce conversations. I like how she grounds this with the simple yet profound question “What would love do?” That dissolves a lot of ambiguity in my mind. There were many sentence starters that I typed into Obsidian but I’m just going along with “I’m worrried that you’ll be put off by what I want to ask you, so I want you to know that I’m prepared to be dead wrong about this.” so as not to overwhelm you, my reader. Just know that if I ever need to initiate a fierce conversation with someone, I will be looking at those sentence starters to build up my courage, the French-inspired word.