Media Skills: The Email Subject Line: Persuading People to Open Your Messages

This is the third post in a new series in which we explore a variety of essential skills for using digital, social, and visual media. We’ll present the information in ways that you can share directly with your students, and we hope this information will enhance your lectures and class discussions.

The email subject line may seem like a small detail, but it is one of the most important parts of an email message because recipients use it to choose which messages to read and when to read them. Many businesspeople receive dozens or hundreds of email messages a day, and subject lines help them decide where to focus their attention. In addition, the subject line often serves as a “browsing label” when people scan their inboxes to find a message they’ve already read but need to find again.

The optimum wording for a subject line depends on the message, the situation, your relationship with the recipient(s), and whether you are using the direct or indirect approach in the message. For routine, direct messages among close colleagues or subordinates who are likely to read all your messages, a straightforward description of the message’s content is often sufficient. However, if there is a chance that recipients might ignore your message or delay opening it, the subject line requires some creative thought.

To write a compelling headline when you need to persuade someone to open your message, put yourself in the recipient’s shoes. How can you relate the content of your message to this person’s immediate needs and interests, and how can you catch his or her attention in just a few seconds?

Start by identifying issues that are important to the recipient and how he or she is likely to feel about them. What can you do to add positives and remove negatives? For example, someone working in sales wants to close as many deals as possible as quickly as possible, so anything you can offer that relates to that desire could make good material for a subject line. Similarly, a department manager cares about such things as hitting budgets, keeping employees motivated, and avoiding expensive mistakes. If your message relates to any of those goals, use that in the subject line. Whenever you can, give recipients a “selfish” reason to open your message by conveying that it relates to them and their needs.

Next, if a response is needed by a specific date, indicate that in the subject line (such as “Marketing plan draft for your review; please respond by Dec. 14”). Conversely, if a message doesn’t require immediate action, recipients will appreciate knowing this so they can focus on other messages. If you are forwarding information that someone wants to have on file but doesn’t need to attend to right now, for instance, you can add “(no action needed)” to the subject line.

Finally, look for ways to add intrigue to your subject lines, when appropriate. For example, “July sales results” may accurately describe the content of a message, but “July sales results: good news and bad news” is more intriguing. Readers will want to know why some news is good and some is bad.

For every message, keep these general tips in mind for effective subject lines:

  • Make sure you clearly convey the subject of the message. Vague subjects, such as “Interesting idea” or “Update,” don’t give the reader much motivation to open a message.
  • Shorter is better. Assume that recipients will see your messages on mobile devices, which often display fewer characters than full-size screens.
  • In addition to the subject line, the inbox listing in many email systems and mobile email apps displays the first line or two of the message content. You can use the first few words of the message body to continue or expand on the subject line. Alternatively, if you are replying to a message, you can include the opening line of the original message to remind the recipient which message you are replying to.
  • Revise the subject line if an ongoing thread has altered the focus of the conversation or to distinguish newer messages from older messages with the same subject.

 

Adapted from Courtland L. Bovée and John V. Thill, Business Communication Today, 15th Edition, 2021, pp. 197–198. Email skills are also addressed in our titles Excellence in Business Communication, Chapter 8, and Business Communication Essentials, Chapter 6.

Back to Basics: Understanding What Employers Expect from You

This is the third post in a new series in which we revisit the fundamentals of business communication, from what it means and why it matters to tips and techniques for success. We’ll present the information in ways that you can share directly with your students, and we hope this information will enhance your lectures and class discussions.

Today’s employers expect you to be competent at a range of communication tasks that reflect the value of effective business communication. These capabilities can be grouped into four general categories:

  • Acquiring, processing, and sharing information. Employers expect you to be able to recognize information needs, locate and evaluate reliable sources of information, organize information into cohesive messages, and use information ethically. This collection of skills is often referred to as digital information fluency. Information fluency includes critical thinking, which is the ability to evaluate evidence completely and objectively in order to form logical conclusions and make sound recommendations.
  • Using communication to foster positive working relationships. This capability includes listening, practicing good etiquette, resolving conflicts respectfully, and communicating with people from diverse backgrounds.
  • Representing your employer in the public arena. Employers expect you to act responsibly and professionally on social media and in other venues and to follow accepted standards of grammar, spelling, and other aspects of quality writing and speaking.
  • Efficiently using the tools that your employer provides. Aside from in-person conversations and meetings, every instance of business communication involves some level of technological assistance, so employers expect a level of proficiency with the tools they provide you to use.

As you advance in your career, either by moving up in an organization or perhaps by starting your own company, the first three groups of competencies become increasingly important. When top executives are looking for the next generation of leaders for their organizations, they will observe how their employees use information, develop relationships, and represent the company to the public. Shortcomings or poor habits in any one of these areas could stall your career prospects, so keep all these skills in mind as you find your footing early in your career and map out how you would like to progress over time.

Adapted from Courtland L. Bovée and John V. Thill, Business Communication Today, 15th Edition, 2021, pp. 6–7. This topic is also addressed in our titles Excellence in Business Communication, Chapter 1, and Business Communication Essentials, Chapter 1.

 

Media Skills: Four Content Strategies for Business Social Networking

This is the second post in a new series in which we explore a variety of essential skills for using digital, social, and visual media. We’ll present the information in ways that you can share directly with your students, and we hope this information will enhance your lectures and class discussions.

One of the most appealing aspects of social networking for both internal and external communication is the range of options you have for connecting with your communities and for creating and sharing content.

Developing and Sharing Original Content

For business social networking, much of the value you can provide will come from original insights and information you can offer. A good approach is to put yourself in the minds of your social connections and ask what information they could use to improve some aspect of their personal or professional lives. In many instances, the need or desire to share information will be triggered by some change or event, such as when you need to let your employees know about a new company policy. In others, your motivation will be a matter of enlightened self-interest, when you want to create some visibility for yourself or your company while helping others.

For example, you could share tips on using a product more effectively or ideas for saving money. If the information is useful to your readers, sharing it will solidify your reputation as a valuable social media partner.

Responding to Existing Content and Questions

Responding to questions can be a great way to encourage conversations, build your personal brand, demonstrate your company’s commitment to customer service, and clear up confusion or misinformation about your company and its products.

Keep in mind that when you respond to an individual query, whether on your own pages or on a forum or other community Q&A site, you are also “responding in advance” to every person who comes to the site with the same question in the future. In other words, you are writing a type of reference material in addition to corresponding with the original questioner, so keep the long time frame and wider audience in mind.

Curating and Sharing Existing Content

At its simplest, content curation can involve sharing links to useful articles or videos via your social media accounts. Companies can also set up dedicated websites that publish links to original content in a variety of topic categories.

As an alternative, several web services offer ready-made content curation solutions. Pinterest and Scoop.it, for example, make it easy to assemble attractive online portfolios or magazines on specific topics. Content curation is also a good solution for internal communication, if the employees in a firm need to stay up to date on developments in their professions or in the industries in which the company does business.

Curating content for a target audience can be a great way to add value and stand out as an expert in your field, but content curators need to be aware of two key ethical concerns:

  • Never copy anyone else’s posts to your site, even if you properly attribute the source. Instead, provide a link from your site back to the original so that you drive web traffic to the originator’s site. It is acceptable to copy a brief introductory segment, such as the first paragraph, to your site in order to give the link some context.
  • You are promoting yourself as an expert when you curate content, and people will expect you to do a competent job of finding and filtering materials. As with any communication task, make sure you understand the needs of your target audience so that you can provide the best material to meet their needs.

Facilitating User-Generated Content

User-generated content (UGC) is any social media content about a company or its products that is created independently by customers or other outside stakeholders. As with other social media, one of the keys to effective UGC is making it easy for people to contribute content that others will find valuable. First, encourage content that people will want to see and share with colleagues, such as tips from experienced customers on various ways to use a product.

Second, make material easy to find, consume, and share. For example, a branded channel on YouTube lets a company organize all its videos in one place, making it easy for visitors to browse the selection or subscribe to get automatic updates of future videos. YouTube lets fans share videos through email or their accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms.

 

Adapted from Courtland L. Bovée and John V. Thill, Business Communication Today, 15th Edition, 2021, pp. 228–230. Social media communication is also addressed in our titles Excellence in Business Communication, Chapter 8, and Business Communication Essentials, Chapter 6.

Back to Basics: What Makes Business Communication Effective?

This is the second post in a new series in which we revisit the fundamentals of business communication, from what it means and why it matters to tips and techniques for success. We’ll present the information in ways that you can share directly with your students, and we hope this information will enhance your lectures and class discussions.

Communication efforts are successful when they transfer information, meaning, and understanding. In some instances, this is a simple matter of sharing basic facts about a topic, but it others it can be complex process of building understanding and negotiating meaning until both parties are satisfied with the exchange.

To make your communication efforts as effective as possible, focus on these five goals:

  • Provide practical information. Give recipients useful information that helps them solve problems, pursue opportunities, or take other action. Understanding your audiences and their needs is a key step to providing the right information.
  • Give facts rather than vague impressions. Use concrete language, specific detail, and information that is clear, accurate, and ethical. “We need to get better at this” isn’t terribly helpful because it doesn’t explain or quantify what “better” means. Depending on the situation, it might also be helpful to explain why the improvement is important.
  • Communicate efficiently. Concise, well-organized messages and documents show respect for people’s time, and they increase the chances of a positive response. Efficiency also means reducing the number of messages or conversational exchanges required to achieve your communication goals. Spending a little more time in the planning and writing stages often saves time in the long run by eliminating multiple rounds of explanations.
  • Clarify expectations and responsibilities. Craft messages to generate a specific response from readers. When appropriate, clearly state what you expect from audience members or what you can do for them. Always look for ways to make your communication efforts more precise. For example, instead of writing “we need to have a plan as soon as possible,” describe what kind of plan is needed and when it is needed.
  • Offer compelling arguments and recommendations. When you are offering an analysis or a recommendation, present compelling evidence to support your message. When a situation calls for persuasive communication, show your readers how they will benefit if they respond the way you would like them to respond.

These five points make a great quality-control checklist as you develop messages, documents, and presentations throughout your career.

Adapted from Courtland L. Bovée and John V. Thill, Business Communication Today, 15th Edition, 2021, p. 6. This topic is also addressed in our titles Excellence in Business Communication, Chapter 1, and Business Communication Essentials, Chapter 1.

 

Media Skills: Online Etiquette

This is the first post in a new series in which we will explore a variety of essential skills for using digital, social, and visual media. We’ll present the information in ways that you can share directly with your students, and we hope this information will enhance your lectures and class discussions.

Digital media seem to be a breeding ground for poor etiquette that can harm companies and careers. Whenever you represent your company online, in any medium, you must adhere to a high standard of etiquette and respect for others. Follow these guidelines:

  • Avoid personal attacks. The disconnected feel of online communication can cause even level-headed people to lose their tempers.
  • Stay focused on the original topic. If you want to change the subject of an online conversation, start a new message or thread.
  • Follow basic expectations of spelling, punctuation, and capitalization. Sending careless, acronym-filled messages undermines your credibility.
  • Use virus protection and keep it up to date. Sending or posting a file that contains a computer virus puts others at risk.
  • Watch your language and keep your emotions under control. A single indiscretion could haunt you forever.
  • Avoid multitasking while using messaging or other tools. You might think you’re saving time by doing a dozen things at once, but you’re probably making the other person wait while you bounce back and forth between tasks.
  • Don’t waste others’ time with sloppy, confusing, or incomplete messages. Doing so is disrespectful.
  • Never assume you have privacy. To be safe, assume that anything you type will be stored forever and that it might be forwarded to other people, analyzed by automated content-analysis tools, and read by your boss or the company’s security staff.
  • Be careful of online commenting mechanisms that aren’t related to work. For example, many blogs and websites let you use your Facebook login to comment on articles. If your Facebook profile includes your job title and company name, those could show up along with your comment.
  • Respect boundaries of time and virtual space. For instance, don’t use colleagues’ or employees’ personal social media accounts as a venue for business discussions, and don’t assume people are available to discuss work matters around the clock, even if you do find them online in the middle of the night.
  • When working from home, approach videoconferencing with the same professionalism you would exhibit in meetings in the office. Reasonable people appreciate the challenges of conducting business from the same location where you live, but do your best to create a business-appropriate background for video calls and to minimize disruptions and distractions.

With so much of business moving online these days, the need for thoughtful, audience-sensitive behavior is greater than ever. Being mindful of positive etiquette will be a definite boost to your career.

 

Adapted from Courtland L. Bovée and John V. Thill, Business Communication Today, 15th Edition, 2021, p. 63. This topic is also addressed in our titles Excellence in Business Communication, Chapter 3, and Business Communication Essentials, Chapter 2.

Nine Tips to Help Your Students Build Effective LinkedIn Profiles

LinkedIn is the most important website for students to incorporate in their job search efforts. Employment recruiters search LinkedIn for candidates far more than any other social network, many employers now want to see LinkedIn profiles rather than conventional résumés, and companies doing background checks are almost certain to look for candidates’ LinkedIn profiles.

Encourage students to think of LinkedIn as a “socially networked multimedia résumé.” An effective LinkedIn profile includes all the information from a conventional résumé plus some additional features that help candidates present themselves in compelling ways to potential employers.

Here are nine tips to share with your students for building an effective profile:

  1. Photo. Add a photo that says “professional” without being overly formal. You don’t need to hire a professional photographer, but the photo needs to be clear and lit well enough so that your face isn’t in shadow. Stand against a visually “quiet” background that won’t distract viewers, dress appropriately for the jobs you are pursuing, and remember to smile.
  2. Headline. Write a headline that expresses who you are or aspire to be as a professional, such as “Data science major ready to make data come alive through leading-edge techniques in data mining, visualization, and AI.” Include keywords that target employers are likely to be searching for. As with other text fields on LinkedIn, you have a limited number of characters to work with here, so focus on your most valuable attributes.
  3. Summary. Write a summary that captures where you are and where you are going. Imagine that you are talking to a hiring manager in a personal and conversational tone, telling the story of where you’ve been and where you would like to go—but expressed in terms of meeting an employer’s business needs. Highlight your job experience, education, skills, accomplishments, target industry, and career direction. Unlike the introductory statement on your conventional résumé, which you can fine-tune for every job opportunity, your LinkedIn summary offers a more general picture of who you are as a professional. Be sure to work in as many of the keywords from your research as you can, while keeping the style natural. Employers can use a variety of search tools to find candidates, and they’ll look for these keywords.
  4. Experience. Fill out the experience section using the material from your conventional résumé. Make sure the details of your employment match your résumé, as employers are likely to cross-check. However, you can expand beyond those basics, such as by including links to photos and videos of work-related accomplishments.
  5. Recommendations. Ask for recommendations from people you know on LinkedIn. You may have a limited number of connections as you start out, but as your network expands, you’ll have more people to ask. A great way to get recommendations is to give them to the people in your network.
  6. Featured skills. List your top skills and areas of expertise. As you expand your network, endorse the skills of people you know; many users will endorse your skills in return.
  7. Education. Make sure your educational listing is complete and matches the information on your conventional résumé.
  8. Accomplishments. LinkedIn offers a variety of categories that let you highlight academic achievements, special projects, publications, professional certifications, important coursework, honors, patents, and more. If you don’t have an extensive work history, use this section to feature academic projects and other accomplishments that demonstrate your skills.
  9. Volunteer experience and causes. Add volunteering activities and charitable organizations that you support.

For the most current instructions on performing these tasks, students can visit the LinkedIn Help center at www.linkedin.com/help/linkedin. Remind them that the more robust they make their profiles, the better their chances are of catching the eye of company recruiters.

All three titles in the Bovée-Thill Business Communication Series offer in-depth advice on the full range of job-search communication, from researching job opportunities to crafting effective LinkedIn profiles. This coverage includes unique perspectives on personal branding, writing "the story of you," and the Build Your Career activities that guide students through the entire process of developing employment-related messaging. (Build Your Career is available in Excellence in Business Communication 13th Edition and Business Communication Today 15th Edition.)

 

Adapted from Courtland L. Bovée and John V. Thill, Business Communication Today, 15th Edition, 2021, pp. 540–541.

Encouraging Students to Apply Their Skills Now: Make QA a Routine Part of the Writing Process

When manufacturers produce something, an essential step in the process is quality assurance (QA), a methodical evaluation of the product’s quality relative to its design goals. This is the last chance before the product ships out to customers to make sure it is something the company can be proud of.

Encourage students to make QA an essential part of their communication efforts, whether they’re writing reports, crafting presentations, or completing any other type of assignment. By practicing now on assignments in all their classes, QA will be second nature when they’re writing and presenting on the job.

Just as in manufacturing, QA in writing is more effective if it follows an explicit, step-by-step process, rather than randomly looking for mistakes. If you haven’t already given your students a proofreading checklist, they can use the following tools:

  • In Business Communication Essentials, 8th ed: Table 5.4: Proofreading Tips, page 126
  • In Excellence in Business Communication, 13th ed: Checklist: Proofing Business Messages, page 206, and Five-Minute Guide to Revising and Proofreading, page 215
  • In Business Communication Today, 14th ed: Checklist: Proofing Business Messages, page 170

With each assignment, remind students to give themselves enough time to evaluate their first drafts, revise to improve readability, edit for clarity and conciseness, and then produce professional-quality output. Once they get in the habit, producing high-quality documents and presentations won’t take much more time and energy than producing mediocre work.

Self-Coaching Ideas for Your Students

  1. Do you ever feel the temptation to say, “Eh, that’s good enough” on an assignment when you know you could do better? What can you do to reset your priorities so that quality work is a matter of habit?
  2. Do you need to examine your work methods to make sure you leave enough time to do an effective QA check on every assignment?

 

Image credit: Stuart Whitmore

Intelligent Communication Technology: The Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

business communication

As one of the most powerful technologies ever developed, artificial intelligence (AI) is already influencing human life in multiple ways and promises to do so even more in the future. AI is now used in a variety of business communication applications, from message testing to employee recruiting and evaluation.

Although many of these developments are positive, AI shares the two-sided nature of every major technology: The power that enables it to be a positive force can also gives it the potential to become a negative force. Moreover, even with good intentions, it is impossible to foresee and control all the consequences that AI could unleash.

Two issues of particular concern from an ethical perspective are embedded biases and a lack of transparency and accountability.

Human Biases Embedded in AI Systems

Like all human creations, AI reflects the intentions and beliefs of its creators—sometimes consciously and sometimes subconsciously. Simplifying greatly, AI systems incorporate algorithms, or instructions, and data that those instructions operate upon. If either the algorithms or the data reflect human biases, the AI system will likely exhibit those same biases.

For instance, facial recognition systems, which are increasingly being used for security and identification purposes, are “trained” using large collections of photographs. What they learn depends to a large degree on the photos in those collections. When African American AI researcher Joy Buolamwini (see photo) discovered that some of the most widely used facial recognition systems had much higher error rates on female and nonwhite faces, she traced the problem to the photo sets they were trained on, which were composed of mostly white, male faces. The only way she could get some of the systems to recognize her face as a face at all was to wear a white mask.

The developers of these systems are making improvements, but the fact that the problems existed in the first place could reflect a lack of diversity in AI research. As Buolamwini put it, “You can’t have ethical AI that’s not inclusive. And whoever is creating the technology is setting the standards.”

Another area in which AI systems can exhibit bias is language processing, because they learn from human language usage, which can have patterns of bias that range from overt to deeply buried. For instance, in a test where otherwise identical résumés were presented to some employers displaying a European American name and to other employers displaying an African American name, the résumé with the European American name drew 50 percent more interview invitations. If AI systems take on biased behaviors from language usage, their ability to automate decision-making at lightning speed can propagate biases throughout business and society as a whole.

Other areas where AI systems can potentially exhibit bias include risk-assessment systems that purport to predict an individual’s likelihood of committing a crime and automated applicant-evaluation systems used to make lending and hiring decisions. However, these automated approaches have the potential to be less biased than human decision makers if they are programmed to focus on objective factors. In an important sense, we don’t want AI that can think like humans; we want AI that can think better than humans do.

Lack of Transparency and Accountability

One of the most unnerving aspects of some advanced decision-making systems is the inability of even their creators—much less the general public—to understand why the systems make some of the decisions they do. For example, an AI system called Deep Patient is uncannily effective at predicting diseases by studying patients’ medical data. In some instances, doctors don’t know how it reached its decisions, and the system can’t tell them, either.

This lack of insight has troubling implications for law enforcement, medicine, hiring, and just about any other field where AI might be used. For instance, if a risk-assessment system says that a prisoner is likely to reoffend and therefore shouldn’t be paroled, should the prisoner’s lawyers be able to cross-examine the AI? What if even the AI system can’t explain how it reached that decision?

The Efforts to Make AI a Force for Good

AI unquestionably has the potential to benefit humankind in many ways, but only if it is directed toward beneficial applications and applied in ethical ways. How can society make sure that the decisions made and the actions taken by AI systems reflect the values and priorities of the people who are affected? How can we ensure that people retain individual dignity and autonomy even as intelligent systems take over many tasks and decisions? And how can we make sure that the benefits of AI aren’t limited to those who have access to the science and technology behind it? For example, a high percentage of the available AI talent is currently concentrated in a handful of huge tech companies that have the money necessary to buy up promising AI start-ups. While this benefits Google, Amazon, and Facebook in their business pursuits, potential applications in other industries, agriculture, medicine, and other fields might be lagging behind for want of talent.

Recognizing how important it is to get out in front of these questions before the technology outpaces our ability to control it, a number of organizations are wrestling with these issues. One of the largest is the Partnership on AI, whose membership includes many of the major corporate players in AI and dozens of smaller companies, research centers, and advocacy organizations. Its areas of focus include ensuring the integrity of safety-critical AI in transportation and health care; making AI fair, transparent, and accountable; minimizing the disruptive effect of AI on the workforce; and collaborating with a wide range of organizations to maximize the social benefits of AI.

Individual companies are also helping in significant ways. Microsoft, for instance, is directing millions of dollars and some of its considerable AI talent to AI for Earth, a program that uses AI to improve outcomes in agriculture, water resources, education, and other important areas.

The spread of AI throughout business highlights the importance of ethical awareness and ethical decision-making. Only by building ethical principles into these systems can we expect them to generate ethically acceptable outputs.

 

Adapted from Courtland L. Bovée and John V. Thill, Business in Action, 9th ed (Pearson: 2020), 110–112.

Encouraging Students to Apply Their Skills Now: Think Now, Write Later

business communication

When students get a new assignment, they can be tempted to either dive in immediately so they don’t get into a schedule crunch later or put it off until the last minute—when they will definitely be in a schedule crunch.

Not surprisingly, the do-it-later approach isn’t always a successful way to work. Writing under a tight deadline can sometimes be invigorating, and time limits can help the mind stay focused, but mostly it’s just stressful and exhausting. Plus, there’s the potential problem of getting bogged down in complex issues at the last minute and not having enough time left to think through them or do additional research.

Somewhat more surprisingly, the do-it-right-now approach isn’t always the most productive way to write, either. When you sit down and command yourself to write something now, the mind has a funny way of rebelling and giving you nothing but a blank stare. Instead of figuring out what you need to say, you’ll start worrying about how to say it, and your inner editor will get in the way with criticism and self-doubt.

Encourage your students to try this modified approach instead. As soon as they get an assignment, dig into it but tell themselves they don’t need to do any writing right now. Just explore the topic, do some research, and start to fill their minds with nuggets of information—without worrying about how they’re going to say anything yet. Let these thoughts rumble around while they go off and do other things. Their minds will keep busy in the background, searching for connections between the bits of information they have collected, trying out ideas for organizing the piece, and generating useful phrases and other bits of text. The piece will gradually take shape somewhere between their conscious and subconscious mind before they begin to write, and when they do sit down to write, the words should flow faster and easier than trying to force them on command.

Self-Coaching Ideas for Your Students

  1. Do you ever find yourself in a panic when you try to start a writing project? If so, don’t get down on yourself; this can happen to everybody, including professional writers who have been honing their craft for decades. Try this trick: Tell yourself you need to write just one sentence. As you fine-tune that sentence, you’ll probably feel yourself settling into a groove, and the rest of the work will go easier from there.
  2. If you’re in the habit of putting writing projects off to the last minute, what are some changes you could make to get yourself into a more-controlled and less-stressful mode of work?

 

Photo: Yudis Asnar

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Encouraging Students to Apply Their Skills Now: Preparing for Difficult Conversations

No one welcomes the prospect of a difficult conversation, whether it’s with a professor, a parent, a spouse, a teammate, or anyone else. Remind students that while they may not be able to change the information that needs to be shared, they can take steps to make the conversation itself less upsetting—and to keep emotions from spiraling out of control. Encourage students to make these conversations as trauma-free as possible with these tactics:

  • Don’t put it off. Although it’s natural to want to avoid an unpleasant confrontation, waiting usually makes things worse because you have to live with the anxiety for that much longer.
  • Don’t go in angry. While you don’t want to put off a difficult conversation, don’t jump into it if you’re still angry about something that happened, even if your anger is justified. Anger can cloud your perception and spur you to make bad decisions or say things you’ll regret. Find a way to cool off first.
  • Don’t make excuses. If you made a mistake or failed to meet a commitment, own up to it. You’ll feel better about yourself and earn respect from the other person.
  • See things from the other side. Regardless of who is at fault—if anyone—take a moment to consider what the other person is going through.
  • Ask for help if you need it. Admitting you need help can be a difficult step. However, if you’re in trouble, the bravest course is often to ask for help.
  • Be the boss of your own emotions. Be conscious of your emotions and actively control them; don’t let them control you. This is not easy, but it can be done.
  • Be kind. Unless you’re being taken advantage of, you’ll never regret being kind to someone, regardless of the circumstances.

Self-Coaching Ideas for Your Students

  1. Do you ever find your emotions getting out of control when you’re having a difficult conversation? What steps could you take to keep them under control?
  2. Is there a difficult conversation that you’re putting off right now? If so, imagine the relief you’ll feel once you get it over with. Even if it’s likely to be a painful experience, it could be the start of repairing a damaged relationship or getting your life back on track.
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