I think I’m something like 99th percentile at having difficult conversations, after intentionally getting a lot of practice, and reading Difficult Conversations, Nonviolent Communication, taking classes about the subject, etc.

After all of this, I asked myself: what is the one most important nugget behind all of these systems? If I gave people one thing to take away, what would it be?

“Be curious about the other person’s perspective” is too obvious. There’s something less obvious, and equally impactful, which is: it always feels bad when your interlocutor is trying to constrain your agency. Like when they are angry with you in an effort to destabilize you, or asking a question strongly directing you towards a particular answer, or sharing a feeling so that you will have a choreographed feeling back. This can even be true of positive-coded acts of communication: it’s annoying to receive a compliment when you can sense that the asker is just digging for a compliment themselves.

All good communication tools can be poisoned by a grabby, manipulative sensibility if they are applied in order to control you.

Correspondingly, the most important thing about contentious communication is that things will go much better if you can communicate with genuine openness to whatever comes back at you.

This is an easy “one weird trick” that is also hard, because this requires actually facing the scary fact that you can’t control people, and facing the possibility of really not getting the response you might want from a given conversation.