Brian Johnson explains how the meaning you assign to a conversation creates stress, and introduces WOOP: define your wish, envision the outcome, identify obstacles, and plan how to handle them. Anticipating what could go wrong reduces avoidance and helps you actually have the difficult talk.
Chapters
The more meaning you put into the conversation and the relationship, the more stress you're going to feel. If you didn't care about the person or the conversation, you wouldn't have stress. So your stress goes with meaning. We want to connect with the individual. Then we do the hard work to develop our ability to say it with control, confidence, and to say it to connect. You need to know what you want before you enter a conversation. It's how often have you just had the conversation and you didn't actually slow down and figure out what do you want? So one of the things that I do that I talk about in the notes is something called the Woo Process. It doesn't work. You're less likely to do the things you need to do if that's all you do is imagine things going great. She says you need to imagine the challenges you're going to face. Why? Because you can make a plan for it. So she has a process called WOOP. You start with a wish, then you imagine the outcome you want— positive. Then you rub it up against reality. You imagine the obstacles you'll face and the plan you will engage in in order to meet those obstacles. W-O-O-P. Wish, outcome, obstacles, plan.
