To get what you want, you need hard conversations. Ask deliberately simple questions to seem ego-free, paraphrase back to confirm understanding, and speak calmly. If you can't have these talks with someone, it's not a real friendship.
Everything you want is on the other side of a few hard conversations. But a way to ask those harder questions is to frame them like you're an idiot. I always say, hey, talk to me like I'm a golden retriever that has Down syndrome and doesn't speak English. Let me ask a couple stupid questions, right? And so I say that as my big frame before I start asking questions so that I'm pulling all the way back saying like, this is not an ego thing, this is not me attacking you, I just seek to understand. And that can position the other person to do the explanation in a way that's not an attack. And whenever someone does say something back to me, I I say, awesome, let me say it back to you to make sure that I get it. If someone says, hey, under these circumstances you would bear this cost, I'd be like, okay, so that means if we drop the ball, we eat the bag. We fuck up, we pay. Am I duplicating that right? It's really just walking through that. And if you're talking about it in a matter-of-fact way, then usually you can defuse a lot of the tension in those situations. But if you can't have these types of conversations with someone, then guess what? You're actually not friends.
