Always have difficult conversations in person.

Difficult conversations are often characterized by emotions that divide us.

Difficult conversations are often characterized by emotions that divide us.

That’s why they’re so difficult to tackle — they’re never driven by unifying emotions.

These emotions can comprise of frustration, conflict, feat, anger or other, not-so-friendly emotions that generally put us at odds with our friends, families, peers and co-workers.

Going into these conversations is difficult.

But avoiding is costly.

Not only does the natural delay towards tackling these conversations lead to pent up negative emotions.

These pent of negative emotions can be furthered amplified by asynchronous communication.

Emails, messages, passive aggressive texts.

Communication from behind the safe embrace of a screen, which unfortunately makes everyone feel as though there are no repercussions for vicious words directed towards peers.

The result of this un-unifying emotions, prolonged, pent up, negative thoughts, and long-distance outbursts can be costly & dangerous.

But ultimately, avoidable.

One single piece of advice that has never let me down in my entire career.

Have difficult conversations in person.

Let people see your facial expressions, let people hear your vocal inflections, let people re-discover and realize your humanity, when they’ve just seen you as an angry email for the past 24 hours.

The number one reason why difficult confrontations are difficult, is because of those pesky un-unifying other-human-repelling emotions.

What’s the number one way to radiate unifying emotions & to re-build those lost feelings of love, support and camaraderie?

Engage in real life, real time, communication with another human.

I’m not saying it will solve every conflict, but in my experience, the outcome is always better, when you have difficult conversations — in person.