It’s halfway through the year and considering that I’ve made it halfway through my target reads for the year (that is, 6 of 12), I thought I’d blog about book six this week. I finished it just on Friday, so it’s rather fresh right now.
Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking when Stakes are High fits into that category of books which one might label ‘self-help’. However, it has a bit of a different flavour to some others in that category.
The book basically details a range of issues at play when people are coming to an important conversation with a lot of emotion, or differing opinions, or pressure to succeed and not fail. Or, they’re coming at the conversation with all of those things.
How do we give everyone a chance to be heard? How do we ensure everyone is on board with the conclusion and application of the conversation? How do we tell if people have just allowed a conclusion to happen that they don’t actually agree with and are actually not going to abide by, even though you think, at the time, that they will?
And so on.
This book addresses all these things and more and applies them to both professional contexts and relational contexts of friendship and family life. There are examples and case studies, summary tables and previous reader testimonies (this is the 3rd edition of the book).
As an executive member of staff at my workplace, we were all given the book to read, prior to some professional learning we did. I didn’t finish it in time for that day but have now got to the end of the book.
There’s a lot in the book that is of help to many people.
One thing that I thought was most true in the book was their concern about ‘lag time’. By this they meant how when there is a crucial conversation to be had we often delay it… a lot. They also said that lag time is not our friend when it comes to crucial conversations. I think they’re right on that one.
I was speaking recently with another Christian who has read this book. She said how she thought the church isn’t very good with crucial conversations. Again, I think she’s right on that one.
I can’t recall her reason for that conclusion, but I think the church doesn’t just have lag time on crucial conversations. Sometimes we completely avoid then or don’t even allow them.
Everyone has to be happy all the time. No one is allowed to have a problem or issue.
Mark Fennell recently described this church phenomenon as “unrelenting positivity”. That’s exactly what it is, and it doesn’t just happen in Pentecostal churches, which is where he was applying it.
It’s hard to know the difference, given that I obviously only have the one perspective, but I often feel like this is even more the case for females within the church.
She is never allowed to complain. She is never allowed to be angry.
Her anger is sinful, even more so than a male’s anger.
I always felt like that from my teen years onwards. Whether that’s true or not, I can’t say. I just know that this is what it always felt like.
If she ever did display disagreement or anger or concern, it was sinful. And she was scary.
I know, the sexism is rife.
Although, I’m sure there would also be men who would say they feel the same way about their pressures within the church. Still, I think females have to be even happier about everything.
I still sense that we do. It still happens in little and big ways.
Now this all is obviously totally unhelpful.
Don’t we as Christians have the most crucial conversation to share with the world? Isn’t that a conversation about the gospel?
If we can’t have crucial conversations with each other, how can we have them with the rest of the world?
Oh and by the way, the book is a decent read. You can find it here.
Yours, crucially,
Alison
