This Is How I Mastered Communication, with Andy Puddicombe

(air whooshing) (gentle music) Headspace Studio. (wind gently rustling) Hi, it's Andy here, and welcome to Radio Headspace and to Friday morning. I don't know if you ever have a situation in your life where you wanna have a conversation with someone, but it's not an easy conversation. Maybe it's your partner, could be a parent, child, maybe someone at work, but there's a conversation that kind of needs to be had but it's just difficult to kind of get into it. And very often in these situations, one person has one opinion, perhaps we have another opinion. And so part of our fear or trepidation is knowing that we're not necessarily going to agree. Because if we're gonna agree with the person then there's no real fear, right? We have no hesitation at beginning those conversations. And, you know, I was chatting to a friend the other day, and he was chatting with his partner about the potential of moving to a different place, different city, maybe even different country. And anyway, they were having this conversation. I should point out, by the way, as my friends always do to me, this isn't my friend. Like, this is me at home with my wife. (chuckles) We weren't having this conversation. This actually was my friend. Anyway, he was at home having this conversation. And he said it was really difficult to navigate because he had a very strong feeling and a very strong opinion about it. And he couldn't really imagine changing that opinion. Equally, he knew that his partner, that they had a very strong opinion. So how do you go into a conversation like that with a genuine sense of openness and curiosity, wanting to explore the subject, whilst knowing that you don't really (chuckles) wanna change your mind? (gentle music) I feel like that happens actually a lot more in life than we might necessarily realize. So I think it is a skill, and some people naturally seem to have that ability. They're not necessarily fixed to a particular outcome in conversations and in life, and others kind of really struggle with that. When I think about sort of my teachers in the past in meditation, those people who seem to have done a lot of practice, definitely seem a lot more fluid in their thinking and in their approach to those types of difficult conversations. They may still have a very definite outcome, like a preference, (chuckles) that they would like, but they're still in the spirit of the conversation. There is a sense of exploration. And I feel like that's the thing to kind of focus on when you go into those conversations. For a moment, we put down our preference and we actually explore it, not through the lens of, "I want to get to this particular answer. I want this particular outcome. I want this person to agree with me." We actually explore it, and we explore it through the lens of...