The Cost of Avoiding Difficult Conversations
For us Highly Sensitive Entrepreneurs and Leaders avoiding difficult conversations is actually not only disempowering, but financially threatening.
Avoiding difficult conversations means you avoid:
- marketing yourself
- selling conversations
- challenging clients re blind spots
- calling out team members
- setting boundaries with family and friends
All which end up being extremely costly leaving you with no to low client numbers and income.
I know this intimately since the first years of my business gave me such a crash-course in difficult conversations (and I didn’t even know at that time that I was highly sensitive!) including:
- friends who didn’t approve of what I was doing,
- referral partners who ended up not agreeing with my coaching style,
- clients who didn’t follow through with tuition payments
- and then there was the time my apartment was broken into and my computer was stolen that had all of my clients payment info stored on it – I dreaded
- making each of those phone calls…
The Importance of Having Difficult Conversations
Yet, every time I chose to step up into having a difficult conversation I strengthened my highly sensitive leadership muscle of V&V Energy – visibility and vulnerability – and my ability to confidently voice my needs, my wants, my desires, my ideas, my inspirations, my intuitions. And then also my highly sensitive strengths of Deep Listening and Empathy. All in the attempt to better understand another person rather than avoid them.
The result? I shifted the limiting belief that unbearable emotions are my nervous system burden to carry into one of empowered knowing that, actually, my nervous system can handle it – whatever the “it” is – people being disappointed, losing their temper, not liking me or not understanding me.
And with each difficult conversation my income strengthened, too.
This is why mastering Difficult Conversations is THAT important for us Highly Sensitive Entrepreneurs and Leaders committed to empowerment by training our nervous systems.
So, let’s choose diving in by going deeper with a supportive training clip and a powerful transformation assignment, shall we?
Training Clip
Transformation Assignment
Reflection
Take a moment for self inquiry or journaling on the following questions:
- Is there a difficult conversation you’ve been avoiding?
- If yes, what kind of difficult conversation do you need to have based on the 3 types mentioned above – “What happened”, “Feelings”, or “Identify”.
- What about this conversation feels difficult and what’s needed to express yourself clearly and confidently instead?
Next Inspired Action
Based on your answers to the above questions, what is one inspired action you can take to support yourself in shifting a difficult conversation into an empowered conversation?
