This document summarizes the key points from the book "Crucial Conversations" by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillian & Al Switzler. The book teaches skills for having crucial conversations, which are high-stakes dialogues about important topics that require discussing sensitive issues. It discusses how to avoid common unproductive responses like fighting, flighting, or accepting the "sucker's choice" of truth versus relationship. The book provides tools for making conversations safe, keeping unhealthy goals in check, and strengthening relationships even during difficult discussions.

1. Mission:
Empowering individuals to create quality conversations
and thereby improve the quality of their life.
Crucial Conversations, Tools for Talking When Stakes are High
written by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillian & Al Switzler
Crucial Conversations

2. Crucial Conversations
• Competence
• Excellence
• Positivity

3. Crucial Conversations

5. Crucial
Conversations
Fight:
Controlling
Labeling
Attacking
Flight:
Masking
Avoiding
Withdrawing

6. The Sucker’s Choice
Truth
vs.
Relationship

7. Shared Pool of Meaning
(Dialogue)

9. Role Play #1
• You ask your roommate to move her things
in the refrigerator off your shelves, and onto hers.
• You thought it was no big deal, simply a
request to share the space evenly, and you
went to all the trouble to label each shelf.
• You have no hidden agenda. You like this
roommate a great deal.
• She comes back with: “There you go again,
telling me how to run my life.”
• I can’t change the vacuum cleaner bag
without you jumping in and giving me advice.”

10. Unhealthy Goals:
To Win
To Be Right
To Look Good
To Save Face
To Punish
To Blame
Keep the Peace
Avoid Conflict
Healthy Goals:
To Learn
Find the Truth
Produce Results
Strengthen Relationship
Motives Matter

11. Master My
Stories
Heart
Problems
What We
Can Do
Hold
Stories
Lightly

12. Mother Daughter Video

13. Time to
Practice!

14. Role Play #2
• Customer calls into the service center, says he wants to deposit a large check,
then use it to buy a car. He is told to make the deposit, and a supervisor will
release the money for him on the next business day.
• Customer makes a $37,000 deposit 2/19 (Friday).
• He needs the funds released 2/22 (Monday) for the purchase of a car.
• He calls in irate that we can’t release his funds.
• We ask for a copy of his check.
• He says he doesn’t have a copy– no one told him he needed it!
Use what you have learned so far to de-escalate this call.

15. Our Stories are the Master Key
Salomeh Diaz

16. Contrasting Statements
12/15/2016 16
Use “Don’t”
Statements to express
what you did not
__________or_______
__.
Use “Do”
Statements to
confirm ________
and _____________.

17. 12/15/2016 17
Make the
Conversation
Safe:
• Apologize
• Use Contrast
• Create Mutual
Purpose

18. Role Play #3
12/15/2016 18
Respond to the following statements with your partner:
• “You come prancing in here like you own the place.”
• “Never mind; if you think the white one looks better, I guess you know what’s best.”
• “You’re not going to actually send that letter are you?”
• (Looking upset and discouraged.) “Don’t worry. I’m just fine.”
• “One more stunt like that and I’m going to the boss.”

19. • Our Stories are the Master Key
• Paths to Success
• Conversation Planner
• Mission
Crucial Conversations

20. • Competence
• Excellence
• Positivity
Crucial Conversations