This week I’m talking with Chuck Wisner, an expert in effective communication. He was a senior affiliated mediator with the Harvard Mediation Program and is president of Wisner Consulting. And he recently published the book, The Art of Conscious Conversations: Transforming How We Talk, Listen, and Interact.
In our conversation today, he introduces us to the four archetypal conversations that underlie all our interactions, from storytelling to collaboration and from creativity to commitment. He shares practical tips on navigating these conversations with mindfulness, highlighting the power of questions and the importance of understanding standards in our interactions, whether in business or personal relationships.
While this isn’t a strictly ADHD episode, I think it still is a valuable look at communication and something that many of us with ADHD can struggle with. Through our conversation, I do try and link up many of the ideas with how they present to those of us with ADHD.
William Curb: Thanks for coming. Can you tell me a little bit about yourself and about the book we're going to talk about?
Chuck Wisner: Sure. The book that was published late last year has been a journey doing the book. I've been in the consulting world with senior leaders at major companies for the last 30 years. In the course of that, the things I taught about language and conversations, the importance of our words and the power of our words really helped a lot of my clients and changed lives.
At some point, it was like someone asked, what can I read about this? My work is eclectic, so it's scattered about. I decided to write the book to bring together a compilation of ideas and practices around better conversations and understanding the power of our words.
William Curb: The title is the Art of Conscious Conversations and the subtitle, Transforming How We Talk, Listen and Interact. I do think we often think we're communicating when we're not.
Chuck Wisner: Right. The talk, listen, interact, each of those are distinct little practices or things that we do. What I like to say is we often do them on autopilot. Because from the day we start learning language, we sort of adopt patterns of talking and listening and interacting, whether it's emotions involved or not, whether there's body language. We adopt patterns and they become really part of how we communicate. They're just so naturally feel like, yeah, that's how you communicate. But often, parts of it serve us well and many parts of it don't serve us well. So getting off of autopilot and becoming aware of different types of conversations and different ways that we can communicate is really helpful.
William Curb: Yeah. I have kids and I will sometimes see them. I'll talk to them about something and I'm like, oh, none of that went in.
Chuck Wisner: Yeah. Right. Exactly.
William Curb: I'll ask them to do something, they'll walk off and do something else. I'm like, okay, that's also a failure on my part to communicate with what I want to do because they're like, generally, they're good kids. They want to please me and stuff. And it's like, oh, I wasn't clear with what I wanted them to do there.
Chuck Wisner: Yeah. Not only clarity, but also in the book, I talk about four archetypal questions. If we're trying to look at sort of a pattern we have that's not working well, or we're trying to deconstruct an opinion or story we have that doesn't serve us well, these four questions are really relevant and helpful. And one of them is the idea of authority. And that for every conversation we have, whether it's with our kids or whether it's a colleague or with a boss or with a spouse or a loved one, there are always power issues because we give different weight to different people's voices, which means we are either listening to them or not listening to them or taking them seriously or not taking them seriously. So in some ways, it's not only clarity about what you tell your kids, but the authority with which they hear it.
William Curb: Yeah. It's always an interesting thing. They get reports from schools like, oh, they listen to everything we tell them and all that. And they have a different relationship with their teacher than me.
Chuck Wisner: Exactly. Yes, exactly.
William Curb: So you said there were four archetypes that you wrote about?
Chuck Wisner: Yeah, four archetypal questions. Yeah.
William Curb: Okay.
Chuck Wisner: And in the book, there's four types of conversations, but these archetypal questions are a tool to help us in each different conversation because they're so common to how we think and how we engage with conversation. So authority is one of them. Our desires and our versions are another. Our concerns for the future are another. And the last is standards.
That one is really cool because it's just in every opinion we have or every judgment we have, there's an underlying standard that is often unconscious on our part because we adopt its standards from our parents, from our culture, from our families. And what's a good husband? What's a good wife? What's a good boss? How do you behave this way? We have all these standards that I'm not judging that, but saying that we often have them unconsciously, which gets us into conversational dilemmas.
William Curb: Especially because we have them unconsciously, and so we assume that other people have those same standards that we do.
Chuck Wisner: Absolutely. It makes so much sense to me that why wouldn't you think the same way? Why are you disagreeing with me? It makes so much sense that this is the right thing to do. For me, it's obvious, but the person across the table might be thinking completely different standards.
William Curb: I always would like look back on conversation, I'm like, oh, they were just thinking about that way differently than I was.
Chuck Wisner: Yeah. And so the standards is like that. But also, our desires are often like that. What we want in a conversation or what we want to take out of a meeting or what we want to take out of an interaction with our kids or our spouse, they might not be aligned. What we want and what they want aren't the same. And nobody's right, but we don't talk about it because, again, your desires are obvious to you, but we often forget to talk about them.
William Curb: Yeah. Unless we're consciously thinking about them, it's not something that we just were like, oh, yeah, they just have a different way of thinking.
Chuck Wisner: Yeah, exactly. And especially with people with ADHD, they want to just join a conversation. But the conversation already might be in a different place. And so they have to be aware that their desire to jump in has to be tamed a bit because maybe it's not the right way to do it or the right place to do it. So that bringing it up to the level of our awareness is what's really critical because as soon as we become aware of a pattern that we have.
I use the word patterns a lot because I think it's less judgmental than I did something bad or I'm such an idiot because I did X, Y and Z. But we all have patterns that we adopt it. And I like to use that word because it takes some of the judgmental sting out of it because we can become a sort of neutral observer and go, oh, wow, that's the interesting pattern. I got that from my dad, you know? But I don't have to keep it. I can change it.
William Curb: Yeah. I have a friend who's a financial manager and we've talked a lot about how people have all these money patterns. He's like, yeah, you just have these people and they have these very specific ideas of how you're supposed to do things with money. And when you kind of break it down, it can really help them figure out what they actually want to do with what they have.
Chuck Wisner: Yeah. And that is their desire for more and maybe their standards of how they spend their money. And then the other question about their concerns, their concern about the, you know, that they'll be better off two weeks from now or two years from now than they are today.
William Curb: I was like, oh, if I don't have this, I'm not safe. And if I'm not safe, right, all this anxiety builds up
Chuck Wisner: and then we're worrying it to death. Yeah. And that keeps us out of from being present. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So those four questions align up with the four conversations. And the four conversations are storytelling, collaboration, creativity, and commitment conversations.
William Curb: All right. Well, I feel like the ADHD, we're really good at three of those and really bad at one of them.
Chuck Wisner: Which three?
William Curb: I feel like storytelling, we're good at telling stories that we like to hear. They might go a lot of different places. Yeah. And we're like to work with other people. We tend to be very creative, but not great with commitments.
Chuck Wisner: Yeah. That conversation, we live in all four, but the commitment conversation is really the action conversation. It's where we decide who's doing what, by when, and how, and to what standard for satisfaction. And generally, I think not just with neurodiverse folks, but with anybody, we tend to do that conversation very quickly and very sloppily. We tend to say yes really easily instead of asking a few questions to find out what do they really want me to do? And does it make sense for me? And blah, blah, blah, blah.
A few questions to say, yeah, before I say yes, I think I can ask a few questions. Because as a culture, we are addicted to someone flies by my desk and says, hey, can you get me a report for Monday morning? And I say, sure. And then I spend the weekend doing the report and Monday morning, I find out I did the wrong stuff because I just said, sure, why not? I'll do it. And I spend my weekend time. And then my boss is angry at me on Monday morning.
William Curb: Yeah. I mean, and I also have seen where people will delay disappointing people by, like, I'm going to say yes, even though I know I can't do it.
Chuck Wisner: Yes, right. Because there's an emotional element. And there's that power issue again, the authority issue, who can I say yes to, who can I say no to, who can I say, well, I can't do it tomorrow, but I can't do it the next day, which is called a counteroffer. And so in the book, you know, the art of conscious conversations, it's like, how do we take apart these conversations so we can understand literally how they work, so we can more mindfully engage in each one.
William Curb: So the other three then were the storytelling, collaborative and creative. I kind of based my assessment off the names. Can you tell me a little bit more about those types as well?
Chuck Wisner: Yeah. So storytelling is a wonderful thing. We basically thrive on stories. I mean, as a culture and a society, money is a story, law is a story. And it's a story that we all agree on that keeps us safe and keeps our culture running and our government running sometimes.
William Curb: Yeah, not right now.
Chuck Wisner: Yeah, right. But stories, so as beautiful as they are, we also tend to have stories about ourselves that are negative. And that's all that inner chatter that is the negative self-talk, the critic talk. Or we have big judgments of other people, which we create stories and opinions about other people. And again, I'm not judging that because it's such a common human common trait, but to have them running on autopilot, A creates a lot of angst for us internally when we're doing negative talk.
And B, it creates a lot of stress with other people. If we're having a conversation and the whole time our chatterbox is running, this person makes no sense. I can't believe I'm talking to this person. I can't, all that stuff.
Those aren't productive. And so the idea is, how do we become aware of those negative stories that don't serve us well? For me, I grew up with a story that I adopted from my grandfather that I wasn't a big enough man, because I didn't want to do what he wanted me to do, or I didn't like skinning the deer, or I cried and I had emotions.
And literally that story that I wasn't a big enough man, that negative story, I took it hook, line, and sinker and lived that for many, many, many years until I could bust it and say, wait a minute, that's just not true. I'm six feet tall. I'm married. I have two kids. I'm an architect.
Wait a minute, something doesn't line up here. That's an example of just how we can bust some negative stories. And the four questions I mentioned, along with making sure we look for facts that either support or don't support our story, and then we check in with our emotions of how we feel, and we undo that a little bit. So it's a powerful process of self-reflection that can serve us to unravel some of the negativity.
William Curb: Yeah, I've worked on a lot because I know with ADHD, I have a ton of stories about myself, that I tell myself that don't work, but then on the other, also the stories I tell about other people, I could easily tell me it's like they're very negative things about my kids, about why they weren't listening rather than being like, well, I wasn't talking right, or wasn't clear. And personally, I found it very beneficial to try and give everyone the benefit of the doubt that it's like they're not out to get me.
Chuck Wisner: Right.
William Curb: What are the examples that's popping into my head just like dealing with bad drivers and being like, it's very easy for me to be like, they're the worst driver I've ever seen. They should not have a license.
Chuck Wisner: What a bunch of idiots.
William Curb: Yeah. Or if I go, okay, well, maybe, maybe I just saw them on a bad day. They were in a rush, you know, there's so many explanations for why, you know, because when I'm driving and I do something dumb in my car, it's like, well, I had a reason.
Chuck Wisner: Right. Exactly.
William Curb: When that person did it, they're a maniac. Yeah.
Chuck Wisner: Yeah. You're right. That little shift from taking the negative voice and putting it aside and go, okay, what's another story I can tell? That's a very powerful shift, but we have to be awake enough. I like to say that these negative things can just sort of take over like a mask, right? A good practice is if you have a pattern of doing that, you, number one, become aware of the pattern. And as soon as you come aware of it and you commit to saying, well, you know what? I can change that. Then when it pops up, instead of it taking over, you can say, thank you very much, pattern.
And now I'm going to change the channel. That's how that works. The other thing about stories is to realize that every time we enter a conversation at home or at work, we are entering with our story. And the trap is that when we're not aware and mindful, we sort of speak our stories as though they're the truth. I mean, the truth is a capital T rather than just my opinion or my perspective, right?
William Curb: Yeah.
Chuck Wisner: And if you think in a corporate setting, you think about meetings, you know, everybody walks in with their opinion and they're pretty sure that they're right and they have the right answer, right? And then, you know, nothing much gets done or we end up going around in circles or their shit hits the fan. You know, our stories are stories. They're not the truth. And what we can do instead of holding them tightly and defending them, we can, I'm not asking anyone to give up their story, but we can have our stories with a more open hand, say, here's my opinion. And here's why I think this way.
Here are my standards. Here's what I want to have happen. Here are my concerns. And just that alone or saying, I'm humble enough to say, yeah, it's my opinion or might be four others in the room. But here's why I think this way. And then that leads us to the next conversation, which is the collaborative conversation.
William Curb: Okay.
Chuck Wisner: Right. Because in that conversation, generally, we're taught to advocate or inquire into other people's positions defensively. We walk in with our story. Our story is a truth. We're holding it like a hard fist, and we are ready to defend or we're ready to go into inquisition mode to ask other people questions to prove them wrong.
Right? I'm generalizing, but that's a very common pattern when their ego's involved and people aren't aware of their speaking their stories as the truth. So the idea of the collaborative conversation, how do we change that? How do we go into conversations with an open mind and open heart to go, okay, I do have an opinion, but let me really try to understand the other opinions, because we can learn from each other.
And there's this mutual dance of how we openly advocate and openly inquire with the intent of saying, well, I might be wrong, or I could learn something, or, oh, wow, their standard makes more sense than my standard. Right? Yeah. And so that whole dance of collaboration is quite a skill. And so in the book, you know, we break it down to say, how does that, how do we break it down so we can begin to practice more open, handed advocacy and inquiry?
William Curb: Yeah. Because collaboration is something I've been thinking about a lot recently with just how to integrate more. Because when I started this podcast, it was really just me. And I'm like, how could I integrate to do more with other people? Because every time I work with someone else, it's better than when it was just me.
Chuck Wisner: That's great. It's great that you had that experience. But it takes that kind of experience for you to go, you know what, I don't have all the answers. There's no way I can have all the answers. And in business, the higher you get on the hierarchy, and I have plenty of experience with this, the more they think they have to have all the answers. And then the more they think that, the worse leader they become, because then they're the know-it-alls, you know.
William Curb: Yeah. And I think that's like the best way to look at things is that you're not going into like a conversation with trying to win, you're trying to come up with the best solution.
Chuck Wisner: Right. If we do that, if we have that kind of successful collaborative conversation, it automatically sort of just, let's think of it this way. If we have an open mind to learn, and we're open heart to give people the benefit of that, which you mentioned earlier, right? What happens is in that open space, ideas start bubbling up. You know, ideas you didn't think of, or ideas that the other person brought into the room that you never thought of, or you might come up with an idea that you never thought of before, had it not been for that engagement with the other person. And that notion of idea creation, ideation, right? It's about allowing ourselves to be in that space, to not judge, you know, an idea pops up and one person says, oh, that'll never work.
We did that five years ago. To not be in that space, but be in the space of generating ideas and generating possibilities. Like now we have three perspectives. Well, what are the possible ways that we can solve this problem? What are the possible ways we can go forward? And that allowing ourselves to just be in that wonder, wanderer space to go, what's possible here? Honestly, I can't say when I'm in that space, I don't know where those damn ideas come from. But I know when in that space with other people, that's what happens.
William Curb: I've always found too, like, it's a really cool feeling when like someone says something, you're like, oh, I have something to add to that, because what you said has just like lit my brain on fire.
Chuck Wisner: Yeah, exactly. We've all had that experience. And the idea is how do we harness that? And part of that is trusting our own intuition and trusting our right brain as well as our left brain, you know, trusting our creative side as well as our rational side, because we're all pretty well trained to have the answer be rational, logical, and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, as Einstein said, his best ideas didn't come from sitting down and working out formulas.
They came when he was showering or taking a walk with his dog. So we have to learn to allow ourselves to be in that space and maybe even create that time to say, you know what, I'm just going to let my mind wander. And that's okay. It's a good thing.
William Curb: Yeah, I do have a lot of wandering mind moments where I will come up with good ideas. And then by the time I get to a place where I'm like, oh, I did have something. No idea what it is now.
Chuck Wisner: Yeah. So interestingly, these four conversations, the storytelling, the collaboration, the creative and the commitment, two of them in general are what we prefer. We prefer storytelling, and we like to take action. We like to make commitments, you know, whether it's who's going to do the dishes or who's going to write the strategy for the board meeting tomorrow. We like those two conversations.
And because we're comfortable with them, we tend to misunderstand and underappreciate the middle two conversations, the collaborative and the creative. Again, back into business, if we go to a meeting and there's a bunch of stories bantering around the room, at some point, the leader or some loudmouth in the room or somebody else is going to say, what are we going to do? I call that a conversational bypass where we go from story to action or story to promise. And we don't take even 10 minutes to say, well, what are the different perspectives in the room? And another 10 minutes to go, well, are there different ways to solve this problem?
Are there different possibilities? The consequence of that is that we make decisions that aren't well vetted. We'll jump to a decision and then two weeks later realize, oh, we forgot that bit of data, or we could have done it this way, and then we're back to square one.
William Curb: Yeah, absolutely. I have that happen to me all the time when I'm just like planning my own stuff, where I'm like, oh, I needed to do this part first and I completely forgot about it and now have to backtrack and redo everything.
Chuck Wisner: Right. Again, without judgment on my part, it's just being aware of this inclination to lean into the action, lean into making the decision. Often, if I'm working with people, they say, well, we don't have time for those other conversations. And my answer is, well, how many mistakes have you made?
How many decisions have you made that had to revisit or weren't well vetted? And that takes a lot of time. So you don't not have time, because if you just take an extra half an hour, you might make a better decision. So it's changing that pattern to rush into the action.
William Curb: Yeah, anytime. It's always a red flag in my brain. It's like, we don't have time to do this. And it's like, well, do we not have time? Because if we don't do this, could this cause a problem later on?
Chuck Wisner: That's always a good question to say, well, okay, let's take a minute just to explore if there are other ideas, are there other potential solutions? It doesn't take long. You don't need hours or an offsite to do that. Just take a few minutes to explore and wonder, you know, wonder what else is possible.
William Curb: And it's really important to just, yeah, be, I used to have a sign in my office, it's just like slow down. Because I was like, so many things like just slow down.
Chuck Wisner: I mean, it is sort of an addiction because we live in a culture and business and society that says, you got to be doing, doing, doing, doing, doing. And oftentimes, I'm roping my clients back and say, you better put two hours of white space in your calendar, you know, or you better take the time to do the exercise because you're going to be a much better leader, a much better manager, whatever it is, if you take care of yourself and just unwind.
William Curb: Yeah, find it funny, we'll be like working on some planning. It's like, I need to catch up on this stuff. And I'm like, catch up to who?
Chuck Wisner: That's a good question. Yeah.
William Curb: Like, what am I chasing here? It can feel like we're always behind on everything. And then, oh, if I'm just comparing to me, I'm going at the right speed.
Chuck Wisner: There's so much information now with the internet and social media, we can't take it all in. So we have to be the filters. And again, if you say, I need to catch up on that in this check your standard, like according to what standard, you know, oh, so I'm smarter than this guy or I'm smarter than this woman, just that little bit of stepping back and go according to what is very, very helpful.
William Curb: Yeah, it's very relevant to business, but also in our personal conversations. You know, it's like having that collaborative conversation with your spouse, or, you know, I do that with my kids where it's like, okay, you guys aren't doing this thing, I want you to be doing, how can we make sure that you do it?
Chuck Wisner: Here's why it's important to me. Let's come up with a game plan of how you can do it, you know, when you can do it, how you do it. I remember years ago, before I had done a lot of these studies, I was leaving the house and I asked my kids to rate the leaves and say, I give them each five bucks if they, you know, rate the leaves. They were very happy to earn five bucks or whatever it was 20 years ago. So I went off to the hardware store to get whatever I was getting to do whatever errand and I was doing.
And when I came back, they were all delighted that they had completed their task and they were looking for their five bucks. And I looked at the yard and I was like, what are you talking about?
You guys haven't even begun. So in other words, I had this standard of just, yeah, do the leaves and I'll pay you. I never told them what that was.
I assumed that they would know what it was. So, you know, after a few tears of not getting paid, then we were able to talk about, well, here's what I was thinking and let's see if we can do it together and finish the job. So they understood what my standard was for finishing the job.
William Curb: Yeah, that communication of what the standards are is important for everyone in life because it's either I don't communicate it and I maybe they exceed it or maybe they don't. And then it's like, I'm disappointed because I'm like, well, I need you to do this thing. And I'm like, well, if I didn't tell them to do it, why would they do it that way?
Chuck Wisner: I mean, standard is a really big catch all word because it's about what's right or wrong and what our morals are and how we should behave in this situation or how we should show up as a leader or as a parent. It's a big thing, but it's a catch all because literally every opinion or everything we want to have happened, there's an underlying standard that we can just be more aware of because it can help us navigate with other people.
William Curb: People have a hard time communicating those things and like letting you know.
Chuck Wisner: I think for ADHD people, it'd be very helpful to just understand the conversations because understanding how they work and what I call the DNA of conversations, it's just a navigation tool. So you can navigate more effectively or more successfully and you can really understand, oh yeah, I'm jumping into that and now I'm doing this, but they're doing that and we're not on the same page. So it's a navigation tool that can be really helpful.
William Curb: And that's always something I find incredibly valuable is just be like, oh, if I just know the underlying structure, I can do things so much better, make it my own and do what I want to do.
Chuck Wisner: Yeah, exactly. Do it well with other people.
William Curb: All right. Well, is there anything that you want to leave the audience with?
Chuck Wisner: Well, one thing is I think because of our pattern of being defensive around how we are in the collaborative and the creative conversation, I'd say a thing we can be much more conscious of and much practice much better is to fall in love with questions again, to realize that we're in a conversation. If we don't know what's going on, don't be afraid to say, hey, help me understand X or help me understand why this is this way or I don't understand, can you please explain me why you feel that way or think that way?
Because questions done in a non-inquisitory way are really a way of letting people know that you want to engage in a heartfelt way, that you're open to hearing their position. And so I just think we are trained to advocate a lot. And so I think we can turn up the dial on how we are more inquiry and more good, open, honest questions.
William Curb: Questions are the key to everything because when I do questions to myself, it's always so helpful to be like, oh, this is why I'm doing this.
Chuck Wisner: Yeah, or I can change gears. I don't have to think that I can think this. On my website, I have an introduction. People can get a PDF of the introduction to my book. And that website is https://www.chuckwisner.com/
And they can find the book, The Art of Conscious Conversation on Amazon or their local bookstore, they can order it. Yeah.
William Curb: Awesome. And if they wanted to find anything else about you online, is there any place they should go?
Chuck Wisner: Well, Instagram is https://www.instagram.com/chuck_wisner/
William Curb: Okay
Chuck Wisner: And I think LinkedIn is the same way chuck underscore whizner. Instagram is linked to Facebook, so they'll find me there as well.
William Curb: Awesome.
Chuck Wisner: Great.
William Curb: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show. I think this was a great conversation.
Chuck Wisner: Thank you. I really appreciate you inviting me and taking the time.