Dave Kashen breaks down a framework called "communicate to reveal" that uses four unarguable things: facts, feelings, thoughts, and wants. He walks through an example of addressing a teammate who keeps arriving late to meetings.
I'm going to teach you how to communicate more effectively and increase your influence. And what the most effective communicators do is communicate to reveal. And there's 4 primary things that we can reveal that are unarguable. They are facts, feelings, thoughts, and wants. Let me give you an example. Somebody on one of my client's teams was coming to their meetings late, and the default way that he would communicate is, Hey, you're coming late. You don't care about me and the team. You're not engaged. The person would just respond defensively. Well, but I've been here till 2 in the morning. I'm working my butt off. What are you talking about? And so I taught my client instead to speak unarguably by sharing the facts. Hey, I noticed you've been late to the last 5 meetings. Feelings: I feel frustrated and disappointed. Thoughts, stories: The thought I'm having is that you're disengaged, that maybe you don't care about us or the team. And what I really want is for you to be on time for the meetings. So if you start communicating to reveal, you'll be way more effective as a communicator. You're much more likely to have influence on people and not trigger their defensiveness. And it's so much easier because you don't have to think about what to say. You just reveal what's actually happening for you.
