How to Finally Have the Talk You've Been Avoiding | Jonathan Fields

0:00Jonathan Fields: So there's a conversation that I need to have with someone I love. I have known this for a while, longer than I'd like to admit, honestly. I know the general shape of what I want to say. I know this person well enough to make some reasonable predictions about, you know, how it might go. And I have thought about it in the car at two in the morning, in the middle of other conversations that are not the one I actually need to be having. And yet, I keep not having it. there's something almost impressive about the architecture of avoidance a reasonably intelligent person can construct. The timing is never quite right.

0:39Jonathan Fields: There's always something just more pressing. The relationship is in a good place right now. And why would I introduce turbulence? I mean, I've probably built this up in my head and the actual conversation would be fine. Maybe I'm oversensitive. Maybe I've already processed this enough that saying it out loud isn't really necessary anymore. These are not things I believe. These are things I tell myself. And I wonder if you have one of these, a conversation that exists fully formed somewhere in your interior life that you have rehearsed in some form, that some honest part of you knows is overdue, not an argument, not a confrontation, just a true thing that needs to be said to someone who probably suspects it anyway, and hasn't heard it in your actual voice because you haven't said it.

1:38So today, we're going to go there.

1:42Jonathan Fields: I'm going to talk about why we do this, what it actually costs us, and maybe, and hopefully most usefully, what happens when we finally don't. So excited to share this exploration with you. I'm Jonathan Fields, and this is Good Life Project.

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2:40Jonathan Fields: Good Life Project is sponsored by Gab Wireless. So our executive producer, Lindsay, was telling me about juggling weekday routines with her two young kids, and she wanted them to play outside and gain independence, but still have a reliable way to just check in. So she got her nine-year-old a GabWatch 3E and said it really hit the sweet spot. He can tap to call or send a simple message, and Lindsay can see basic location info without any of the endless apps that steal attention. This isn't about control. It's a gentle, practical step towards independence. Think of it as slow technology connection at the right pace so kids learn freedom and parents keep peace of mind.

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3:57Jonathan Fields: We all do it and it never works. Thankfully, there's Amazon Health AI. It can connect your symptoms with your medical history to offer personalized care 24-7. So call off the search. Amazon Health AI is here. Healthcare just got less painful. So I want to start with a story. It's a little embarrassing in the specific way that only true stories about your own behavior can be embarrassing. So lean in a little. I had a friend, someone I'd been close to for over a decade. We've been through a lot together. the kind of friendship that forms in your 30s, 40s, when you're both building something, you're scared in the same ways, and you find each other at exactly the right moment.

4:42Jonathan Fields: Those friendships have a particular quality. They matter in a way that's hard to articulate, but it's very easy to feel. And somewhere, I don't know, maybe a decade in, something shifted, not dramatically. There was no falling out, no event, no moment I could point to. It was more like the friendship just very slowly began to operate on a different frequency. He was going through significant changes in his own life. His priorities were reconfiguring in ways that just made total sense for him. And I, well, I mean, I had my own version of that. And in that drift, something happened that I never quite addressed.

5:24Jonathan Fields: A thing was said in passing at a moment when he probably didn't even register it as significant. but I registered it and I held onto it, not in an angry way. I'm not someone who actually carries grudges particularly well. They're just kind of too heavy, but in a quiet way, a way that created just enough distance that I stopped being fully myself in his presence. I started managing the friendship a little, curating it and showing up as a slightly edited version of the Jonathan that didn't include the part that I had felt. And I don't know, maybe overlooked. Diminished is probably too strong a word, but kind of something in that neighborhood.

6:09Jonathan Fields: For a long time, I told myself that, you know, I wasn't saying anything because there was just nothing to say. No, we were fine. The friendship was fine. Why introduce drama into something that was, by any reasonable external measure, kind of working? And he had no idea anything was different. I was being mature. I was protecting something I valued. That story was so clean and so available that I almost believed it. What I was actually doing, and this took me an embarrassingly long time to see clearly, was protecting myself, not the friendship, myself. and from a discomfort of a potentially awkward conversation and from the chance that he might get defensive or not understand or that I'd say it wrong and make something that was currently fine into something that was actively broken.

7:07Jonathan Fields: I was running a very detailed simulation of all the ways it could go sideways and then using that simulation as evidence that staying quiet was just the wiser move. which if you've ever tried to conduct a difficult conversation entirely inside your own head, where you control all the variables and everyone says exactly what they're supposed to say, you know is not actually a conversation. It's an elaborate, extremely convincing, entirely private theater production with very good special effects and a terrible third act. So eventually, you know, I got to a point where I just, I said the thing. Not because I've ended near the perfect moment.

7:56Jonathan Fields: I hadn't. Not because I'd finally found the exact right words. I hadn't done that either. I said it because enough time had passed that the distance between us had started to feel kind of permanent. and I didn't want a permanent distance from someone I actually cared a lot about. And it went differently than I had rehearsed, not worse, just kind of more human. He heard me differently than I expected. He said something I definitely hadn't written into my version of the script. And at the end of it, something shifted, not dramatically. I mean, we didn't score some cinematic reconciliation moment.

8:39Jonathan Fields: And we went and got coffee, but I felt lighter in a way that I hadn't even fully noticed that I'd been heavy. And the friendship became one I was actually in again, rather than one I was just carefully maintaining from a safe distance. And I tell you that not because my story is your story. It probably isn't. I mean, not exactly, but because I've come to believe that most people, especially in midlife, were carrying at least one version of this, often more than one. And carrying it, it doesn't make you conflict avoidant or emotionally immature or bad at relationships. It makes you human. And midlife, specifically midlife, it's the season when the weight of unsaid, it tends to make itself known in ways that are just increasingly difficult to ignore.

9:37Jonathan Fields: So let's talk about why and then what to do about it. Let me describe a particular category of conversation and we'll see if it lands for you. It's not a conversation you haven't thought of. You have probably many times. It's a conversation you lack words for. If someone locked you in a room and told you to write down what you'd say, you could probably fill a page without much trouble. It's not even a conversation you're convinced would necessarily go badly. You just haven't had it. It lives in this kind of permanent waiting room in your interior life. Waiting for the right moment. Waiting until things calm down.

10:19Jonathan Fields: Waiting until the relationship is in a better place, which would actually be easier to achieve if you had the conversation. But let's not get into that particular loop right now. So I want to give this some shape because I think the more clearly you can see what we're actually talking about, the more useful this exploration becomes. These are the conversations that I mean. A truth you want someone who matters to you to know about themselves or about you. a need that has gone unnamed for so long, it's started to feel like just the way things are. Or a sense of distance from someone that you used to feel close to that you've noticed but never really spoken aloud to them.

11:05Jonathan Fields: Or maybe it's a question about the future, you know, of a relationship, a living situation, a family structure that both people are kind of orbiting without actually landing on. or something you've told yourself that you forgave, but you have never actually said so, leaving the other person to live inside your unspoken verdict. Maybe it's something you're still carrying from the past that's just never been directly acknowledged by the person who gave it to you. And notice that none of these require a capital V villain. This is not about blaming someone. If anything, it's not about winning an argument.

11:51Jonathan Fields: The hardest conversations in my life, in my experience, they're almost never the ones where somebody is clearly the quote, bad person. They're the ones where two people who fundamentally care about each other have somehow let something important go unsaid for long enough that saying it now requires clearing its throat first. And here's the piece that I find just particularly interesting. Midlife doesn't cause these conversations, but it does something that makes them harder to avoid. There's this body of research, Laura Carstensen at Stanford has done landmark work here on how our relationship with time changes as we age.

12:37Jonathan Fields: So, you know, when we're young and time feels essentially infinite, we invest broadly in lots of relationships, lots of experiences, really keeping options open. But as our sense of time becomes more finite, in midlife is when the shift often begins in earnest, something in us, it just kind of recalibrates. And we start caring more about depth and meaning in our close relationships. we become more honest, at least internally, about what actually matters to us. And in that shift, in that turning toward what actually matters, the things left unsaid and the relationships that matter start to press.

13:23Jonathan Fields: Not because something has gone wrong, but because something actually has gone right. You're paying closer attention. now where did these kinds of conversations where do they tend to live in my experience they cluster around five column territories and i want to walk you through each of them not to tell you which one is yours but to make it easier for you to recognize it when i describe it so let's talk about territory one these are conversations with your partner the relationship closest to you it's often where the most is left unsaid precisely because it's the one that you feel like you can, you know, like you can least afford to get wrong.

14:09Jonathan Fields: Sometimes it's the desire conversation. And I don't just mean physical or sexual desire, though that is often in there. I mean, the broader question of how you want your life and your partnership to actually feel, you know, and which may have also changed significantly since the version of yourself who made that original arrangement was present. Sometimes it's, you know, the what are we actually doing next conversation, the shape of the chapter ahead, which assumes a shared vision that may have never been explicitly talked about or negotiated. Sometimes it's simpler and in some ways harder. You know, the things you notice about them, the things you value about them, the things you admire about them that you've just simply stopped saying out loud because you assume they just know.

15:01Jonathan Fields: And they've stopped saying it back because they assume that you know. And in that mutual assumption, something quietly goes cold that doesn't have to. There's this statistic from John and Julie Gottman's decades of research that I find genuinely sobering. They've been on the show in the past, and every time I'm just, my jaw drops when they share this insight. Couples in troubled partnerships wait on average six years after problems begin before seeking any kind of help. Six years of the conversation not happening. And the problems don't get smaller in that time, they just get layered. So that's territory one.

15:51Jonathan Fields: Let's talk about territory two here for these conversations. And that is with aging parents. This one in particular has a ticking clock that most of us are acutely, uncomfortably aware of and still somehow manage not to act on. You know, sometimes it's the logistical, but actually emotional conversation about what they want when they can no longer fully care for themselves, which feels like talking about death. So we don't, even though it's actually a conversation about love and dignity and what it means to take care of someone well. And, you know, sometimes it's something older and unresolved history, something from your childhood or young adulthood that was never acknowledged or that you've told yourself and maybe even told a therapist or a friend that you've made peace with.

16:48Jonathan Fields: And maybe mostly you have, except when you're in their presence for more than 48 hours, and then it's just, it's there again. And sometimes it's the simplest, most urgent one, the things you actually want to say to them while you still can, not because anything is necessarily imminent, but because you're old enough now to understand that eventually it will be. So there is a particular grief that people describe when a parent dies before a specific conversation happened. Not estrangement, not argument, just something left unsaid that they thought they had more time for. And that's worth sitting with.

17:32Jonathan Fields: So let's talk about Territory 3. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Good Life Project is brought to you by Peloton. So I spend a lot of my day in my head building things, solving problems, creating. And one of the most reliable ways I found to move from stuck to clear is to just move, not think about moving, not plan the perfect workout, just go. And that's the idea behind the new Peloton Cross Training Tread Plus, powered by Peloton IQ. It removes the cognitive load completely. Peloton IQ handles the rep counting, the form correction, the programming, so you can stop overthinking and just be in it.

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21:39Jonathan Fields: And neither of you may have formally noticed that both of you have actually become really different people since then. And sometimes it's a renegotiation conversation. Essentially, hey, I'm not sure I'm still the person you need me to be in the way that you need me to be it. And I kind of like to talk about that. Sometimes it's a disappointment conversation carried in both directions, often for years often beneath the performance of a perfectly functional family relationship. And sometimes it's the reverse of all that, you know, the specific and slightly disorienting realization that an adult child or a sibling has become someone you actually genuinely admire.

22:23And you've never said so because, I mean, when do we start saying that to each other?

22:28Jonathan Fields: Which is, of course, the answer to why you should. And that brings us to territory number four. These are conversations with friends. And friendship has no formal contract, which is both its freedom and its particular vulnerability. There's the drift conversation, the one that begins simply, hey, I miss you. And, you know, I'm not sure where we went. And I'd really like to find out if we can come back. There's the kind of archived hurt, the thing someone said or did years ago that you got over and you definitely have not gotten over, except it's still there when you reach for it. And then there's the authenticity conversation, the slow recognition that you've been performing a version of yourself in a friendship that really doesn't quite fit who you've actually become.

23:23Jonathan Fields: And you're not sure that the friend knows who that is anymore. And you kind of miss actually being known by them. And that brings us to the fifth territory, the conversation with guess who? Yourself. Then there's the one that doesn't require another person in the room, right? which in my experience sometimes makes it the hardest one of all the internal conversation you keep not finishing the honest accounting of whether what you're building with your days is actually what you want you know the thing that you've been almost knowing for a while that you've been managing to keep just slightly out of full view again of yourself because if you look at it directly, really directly, you might actually have to do something about it.

24:16Jonathan Fields: The conversation that you can't quite have with someone else often begins with a conversation you haven't yet finished having with yourself. Okay, so we've named the territory or the five territories now. I want to get into the psychology of why we stay out of it. Because understanding this, understanding why we don't have these conversations, why we stay on the sidelines, really understanding it, turns out to be surprisingly useful. So here's the thing I find genuinely fascinating. And also, I'll be honest, a little humiliating about all of this. We are systematically and reliably wrong about how these conversations will go.

25:03Jonathan Fields: Not occasionally wrong, not sometimes wrong, consistently, predictably, in a very particular direction, wrong. Nick Epley, a behavioral scientist at U of Chicago, he spent years studying what he calls undervalued conversations, meaningful conversations that people are avoiding. And what his research shows over and over, it's that people consistently and significantly overestimate the awkwardness of these conversations and dramatically underestimate their value. The imagined version, you know, the one you've been running in your head is almost always more uncomfortable than the actual one. The other person is more receptive than you predicted.

25:51Jonathan Fields: The relief is more immediate. The relationship more often strengthens and ruptures. you know it turns out that we are in a very precise and specific sense frightening ourselves out of something that isn't nearly as frightening as we've made it and the question is really why and it's because the avoidance it doesn't feel like avoidance This is the part I really, I want you to hear. It feels like wisdom. It feels like maturity. It feels like a considered decision made by a thoughtful person who has carefully weighed the costs and benefits and concluded that staying quiet is the right call. And I am raising my hand right here saying, I have told myself that this is the wise person making the wise decision exactly for this reason.

26:46Jonathan Fields: So many times, it feels like protecting the relationship. I don't want to rock the boat. It feels like maturity. I've made peace with this. It feels like good timing. This isn't the right moment. It feels like consideration. They have so much on their plate right now. It feels like discernment. Is this really worth a disruption? And look, these are not lies. They contain real thoughts, real considerations, but They're also, and I say this with the full self-awareness of somebody who has used every single one of them and will again, they're the most sophisticated rationalizations your very capable mind can produce for doing the thing that feels safer, which is nothing.

27:36Jonathan Fields: Behavioral economists, they have a name for the pattern of avoiding information or conversations that might produce discomfort, the ostrich effect. Named, of course, for the popular but entirely inaccurate belief about what ostriches do with their heads. And what makes it so sticky is exactly what I just described. It doesn't register as avoidance. It registers as wisdom. And wisdom is very difficult to argue with, especially when you're the one generating it about yourself. So what's exactly underneath it? Well, in my experience and in the research, the real reasons tend to cluster around these three fears.

28:22Jonathan Fields: And I think naming them clearly without judgment is more useful than trying to talk yourself out of the avoidance before you even understand what's driving it. So the first is the fear of losing control over the outcome. And when the conversation, it lives in your head, you control it completely. The other person says what you need them to say, the interaction, it goes the way you scripted it. The moment you have the actual conversation, you give up control. And for people who are good at managing things, which describes a lot of people probably watching and listening to this right now, giving up control of something that matters is genuinely and non-trivially hard, sometimes straight up terrifying.

29:13Jonathan Fields: So the second fear is what I call identity disruption. Now, some of these conversations, if you have them, they will require you to kind of update the story that you've been telling about the situation, about the other person, about yourself. And that is not a small thing. We are narrative creatures. the stories we carry about our relationships and our histories, they're part of how we understand who we are. And revising them has real psychological weight. And our minds resist that revision, even when the revision would ultimately be healthy. And the third, the deepest one, the one that's kind of hardest to own, is the fear that what you find out will be harder than what you currently almost know.

30:08Jonathan Fields: The conversation might close the gap or it might confirm the gap is real. And then you have to deal with it being definitively, undeniably real, which feels, it feels harder than leaving it in the category of possibility. If you never quite look at it directly, you never quite have to reckon with it fully. So there's a kind of a fragile comfort in that, a comfort that in the end, it costs more than it saved. Because, you know, the conversation that you're avoiding is not protecting you from a hard thing. It's guaranteeing you a slower, quieter, more private version of the same hard thing indefinitely.

30:53So where do we go from here?

30:56Jonathan Fields: I want to make an argument now that I think is really important that runs counter to how most people think about this. Choosing not to have the conversation is not the same as the conversation not happening. Let me say that again. Choosing not to have the conversation is not the same as the conversation not happening. Silence is not neutral. Silence communicates. And the person on the other end of your science is reading it, even if they don't know they're reading it. And they're almost certainly not reading it the way that you intend it. So, you know, when you stay quiet in a partnership about something significant, what gets communicated, it not what you mean, but what lands can be, you know, I've decided this is just how things are between us, or I don't trust this relationship to hold an honest to change.

31:59Jonathan Fields: Even if you mean neither of those things, even if you're staying quiet specifically because you do trust and do value the relationship, right? So when we stay quiet with a parent about something that's between you for decades, what gets communicated can often be, well, everything important between us has already been said. even when it hasn't. When you stay quiet with a friend about a growing distance, let's say, what gets communicated can often be, well, I've assessed this relationship and I've decided it doesn't merit the risk of honesty. Even when you would never in a million years choose to communicate that or feel it, the other person doesn't have access to your reasoning.

32:48Jonathan Fields: They can't read your mind. They only have access to your behavior. and your behavior right now is silence. There's also what the Gottman's research shows about what happens to unaddressed things over time in close relationships. They don't stay stable. They don't quietly resolve themselves. They calcify. They compound. Minor unaddressed irritations, they become significant resentments, not because the original thing was that large, but because the pattern of non-address, it communicates something that this person's feelings or this dynamic between you isn't worth direct engagement. And that message, it accumulates and eventually you stop addressing the original thing and start dealing with the entire weight of the accumulated pattern, which honestly is almost always a much heavier lift.

33:46Jonathan Fields: You know, it's the conversation that is hard to have today that will be harder to have in two years. Not because two years will bring clarity, because two years will just bring more and more layers. And then there's the thing that I want to say that is less kind of research-based and more, I don't know, observational. There's a weight to carrying a significant unspoken thing. It's often not dramatic. It's often not crushing. It's more like a background hum, a low-grade energy cost that's kind of easy to miss because you've been paying it for so long. It's just starting to feel like just the baseline cost of being you.

34:32Jonathan Fields: James Pennebaker, who's actually been a guest on this show before, has spent decades studying what happens to people when they move from suppressing significant emotional content to expressing it. And what he found, what actually even surprised him is that the physical health benefits of honest emotional expression are measurable and consistent and often huge blood pressure, immune function, rates of depression, not because the problem gets solved by the expression, but because the suppression stops and there is a harm caused by that suppression. I want to be careful not to overstate this in a clinical direction, because that's not really the point that I'm trying to make here.

35:19Jonathan Fields: The point is more human than that. It's just, what would it feel like to put down something you've been carrying, even partially, even imperfectly, even without the guarantee of how the other person receives it? Because it turns out the drawer that you've been kind of stepping around for years isn't protecting anything. it's just heavy. And we'll be right back after a word from our sponsors. Good Life Project is sponsored by the podcast Stories from a Stranger. So, you know, one of the things I believe deeply, and honestly, one of the reasons I've been doing this for 14 years is that every person is carrying a story worth hearing, not just the famous ones, not just the experts, everyone.

36:05Jonathan Fields: So when I came across a show called Stories from a Stranger, I felt that same pull that I feel when a conversation goes just somewhere real and unexpected. Host Hunter Prosper started with a simple idea. Walk up to strangers, ask a question, and then just listen. What happens next is really remarkable. People open up about love, loss, regret, the moments that crack them open and rebuild them. The stories that are raw, they're intimate, and genuinely human in a way that's hard to find right now. So if you're someone who believes like I do, that connection is one of the most powerful forces in a life well lived, this show will remind you why.

36:42Jonathan Fields: It's a quiet antidote to the noise, proof that we are far more alike than the world sometimes wants us to think. Listen to stories from a stranger wherever you get your podcasts. I think you'll love it. Good Life Project is sponsored by ADT. So have you ever had one of those days where everything just finally feels aligned? You're out enjoying a beautiful dinner, leaning into a moment of just pure presence, and suddenly the phone buzzes. You look down and you see an alert that a window has been broken into at home. In an instant, that sense of peace, it just evaporates because you're miles away.

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37:50Jonathan Fields: When every second counts, count on ADT. Good Eye Project is sponsored by Hero Bread. So this time of year, I always find myself kind of thinking more about what I'm eating, not in a punishing way, just more intentionally. And one of the things I have genuinely wrestled with is bread because I love bread. A real sandwich, a good wrap, pasta night, these aren't just meals. They're comfort. They're kind of ritual. So when I saw Hero Bread in my local market, I don't know, maybe six months ago I first saw it, I admit I was skeptical because anything that promises to give you the, you know, quote, real thing without the usual trade-offs, I tend to question.

38:24Jonathan Fields: But it took a chance. I am so glad I did. The texture is actually soft and fluffy. It tastes like bread is supposed to taste. My personal go-to has been the Hero Everything Bagel. I literally can't get enough of them. Toasted with whatever's in the fridge. I actually love making egg sandwiches with them. They genuinely hold up. Plus, it's got 19 grams of protein, zero grams of sugar, and only 140 calories. And it tastes like an everything bagel is supposed to taste. I don't think about it as a substitute. It's just what I eat now. And it's not just bagels. Hero makes sliced bread tortillas, and they just dropped Hero Noodles, which have 12 grams of protein and only 80 calories per serving.

39:01Jonathan Fields: So pasta night is back on the table, literally, if you're working on smarter choices this season. Without giving up the meals to actually make you happy, Hero Bread is worth a real look. Go to hero.co, that's H-E-R-O dot C-O, and use the code goodlife at checkout for 10 % off your order. So I want to shift now because this exploration is not supposed to leave you feeling heavy. it's intended to leave you feeling like you actually have a door, a door out. So here's what I have observed in my own life, in the stories I've gathered across thousands of conversations over the years of doing this work about what happens when the conversation finally does happen.

39:47Jonathan Fields: First, the relationships that matter most to us are almost always more resilient than we give them credit for. We protect them with silence because we believe, you know, kind of on some level that they're fragile. And that's a hard conversation, you know, because we think the conversation might crack something. But in doing so, when we hold back, we deprive them of the one thing that actually makes them strong, honest contact, real contact. The experience of being fully in the presence of someone rather than the carefully managed version of yourself you've been presenting. A conversation that brings something true into the open, even if it's uncomfortable, even if it's imperfect, even if it goes slightly sideways before it goes better, which frankly it often does, it's almost always better for the relationship than the same thing living unspoken between the people who care about it.

40:56Jonathan Fields: Not because it resolves everything, but because it demonstrates something. It proves something. It proves that we can be real with each other. And that proof, it's the actual material that trust is made of. So second thing here, you almost always learn something you didn't know when you have the conversation. And this is where the story shifts in a direction that surprises people because the learning is also almost never what you are dreading or even expecting. You know, you dreaded defensiveness. You got something more like recognition. You dreaded being dismissed and you found out they've been carrying their own version of the thing.

41:41Jonathan Fields: Or you dreaded that saying it would make the gap permanent and maybe saying it was actually what showed you the gap was crossable. The imagined conversation and the actual conversation are rarely the same conversation. And the actual one, the real one with its mess and its unexpected turns, is very often more useful than the one you'd rehearsed. And third here, the one I want to leave you with from this part of the conversation, because I think it's kind of underrated. you become someone who said the true thing. There's a quality to that. There's an integrity to that. There's a knowing to that sense of identity that gets built around it.

42:28Jonathan Fields: It's not necessarily visible to anyone else, but you carry it. The knowledge that when something important needed to be said, you said it. That you were in the relationship rather than managing it from a safe distance, that you trusted both the relationship and yourself enough to be honest. And that is no small thing. That actually is the thing. The relationship becomes one where you're actually in it when we do this, rather than when you're curating from that distance. Okay, so let's get really practical here. and I want to start with a question that may sound kind of basic to you, but that I think is worth actually spending a few honest minutes with before you do anything else.

43:22Jonathan Fields: And that question is, what are you actually trying to do? I'll say it again. What are you actually trying to do? Because these conversations, they come in different flavors and knowing which one you're having, it matters. Sometimes you're trying to be known, not to resolve anything, not to extract an apology, not to change a situation, just to let someone see something true about you that they haven't seen. Sometimes you're trying to repair something, you know, to address a distance that's grown and that you'd like to close. Sometimes you're trying to just release something, to say out loud what you've been carrying.

44:07Jonathan Fields: So it stops living just exclusively inside you. So someone else holds it with you. And sometimes, you know, you're trying to understand something to find out what the other person actually thinks or feels about something that's kind of stayed ambiguous. These are different conversations and they require different openings and different amounts of vulnerability and different things from the other person. So knowing which one you're actually having, being honest with yourself about that, it means you're less likely to be disappointed when the conversation doesn't accomplish something you weren't even consciously going for.

44:51So now here's something I find genuinely useful

44:54Jonathan Fields: that I want to offer as a reframe. You don't have to have the whole conversation at once. I know that the moment I say that, some of you will immediately use it as a new form of delay. Oh, I'll just have the small version of it starting next week, maybe. I see you, I have been you, and I will be you again. So let me be specific about what I actually mean here. There's almost always a smaller opening to these conversations, kind of an appetizer, Something that doesn't require laying everything on the table in one sitting that begins with the process of honest contact that signals to the other person and often to yourself that something real is trying to come through.

45:43Jonathan Fields: Now, practically, that may sound like something like, hey, there's something I've been wanting to talk with you about, and I haven't quite known how to bring it up. Can I try? or maybe it sounds like, hey, I've been aware of something between us lately that I think I've been contributing to by not saying something and I want to try and say it or maybe, you know, and I actually find this approach disarmingly effective, simply something like, hey, I'm going to be a little bit vulnerable here and I want to tell you that up front so you know I'm not coming at you. I just, I have something I want you to know.

46:25Jonathan Fields: And these openings, they do something important before the content even arrives. What they do is they signal care. They give the other person a moment to receive rather than defend. They lower the temperature on a conversation that your nervous system has been imagining at about 900 degrees to something closer to the actual temperature in likely reach, which is usually kind of warm, occasionally uncomfortable. but almost never catastrophic. So a few things to actively not try to do in these conversations because these are the traps. First, don't try to win. Winning a conversation that matters is a pyrrhic achievement at best.

47:12Jonathan Fields: You get the point and lose something more important. These conversations are not debates. They're conversations. Two, don't try to convince. If the other person leaves the conversation with a different view than they arrived, you know, that's theirs. Your job is to say the true thing, not to engineer a specific response. The outcome is not in your control. Say the true thing. then we move on to um this other sort of like piece of guidance here which is don't try to resolve everything at once one conversation it rarely closes a long open account you're trying to open the account properly not zero it out and maybe maybe the most important sort of like guidance here also is on the don'ts list.

48:12Jonathan Fields: I feel weird about having don'ts lists, but kind of works here is don't try to be perfect. The carefully rehearsed version of, of what you want to say delivered flawlessly. It'll just land as a performance and, and the person across from you will experience it as one, you know, I don't know exactly how to say this said honestly from your actual face is a far more powerful opening than the version you've scripted in your head because it is real. And real is what this whole thing is about. So one last thing on timing here, because timing is the most reliable, probably delay mechanism in the avoidance toolkit.

49:00Jonathan Fields: And I'd probably be doing a disservice if I didn't name it directly. There are genuinely bad moments to have these conversations. When either person is exhausted or flooded or in the middle of something else that requires a full attention, those are real and they matter. Consider them. But the right moment as a general principle, it doesn't exist. It will not arrive. You won't wake up one day and find that all the conditions have aligned and the conversation is finally risk-free. If you're waiting for that moment, you're going to be waiting a really long time. And the conversation is going to be older and heavier when and if you finally have it.

49:48Jonathan Fields: You know, the right moment is the one you create imperfectly on purpose because you've decided the conversation matters more than your comfort with the idea of having it. so I want to leave you actually with one question and I want you to take it seriously which means don't actually try to answer it right now let it just kind of ride with you for a day or two as you're thinking about these conversations that have been living inside of you that you haven't been having and maybe had to have them, right? Just let the answer to this question find you rather than trying to force it. The question is, what is the conversation you keep not having?

50:41Jonathan Fields: What is the conversation you keep not having? Don't reach for the easy one here. Don't reach for the one about someone you already kind of are a little irritated with where it wouldn't take much vulnerability to bring it up. Reach for the one you actually already know is there. The one that you've been living around carefully for a while. The one with the person who genuinely matters to you. The one about the thing that's actually true. You don't need to have it tomorrow. You don't need to have it perfectly. I hope I've made that case to you by now, right? Perfection is not the goal and actually is counterproductive.

51:33Jonathan Fields: You don't even need to know exactly what you want to say, but I'd invite you to stop pretending you don't know it's there. Just let yourself know it consciously, clearly. this is a conversation I'm carrying and I'd really love to finally put it down. So in my experience, that's enough to start. The beginning has its own momentum. You don't have to see the whole path. You don't have to map it out. You don't have to script it out. In fact, I strongly advise you don't. You just have to be honest about where you are on it. You know, when I finally had a conversation with my friend, the one I told you about at the top, what I remember most isn't what was said.

52:18Jonathan Fields: It's the feeling afterward of being in the friendship fully again and not managing it, not curating it, just in it. with him knowing something real about me and me knowing something real about how he'd received it and both of us just somehow closer for having found out. That's what's available on the other side of the conversation you keep not having. And I think that's worth it. So let's talk about some of the big ahas and actionable takeaways from this conversation. The thing I keep sitting with is one phrase I use somewhere in the middle, the private theater production. The idea that when we rehearse a difficult conversation entirely in our own heads, where we control all the variables and everyone says what they're supposed to say, we're not actually doing the work of the conversation.

53:10Jonathan Fields: We're doing the work of avoiding it while feeling like we're preparing for it. A few things I want you to walk away with here. One, the architecture of avoidance is real. And the more capable you are, the more convincing it looks. noticing it is not a self-criticism. It's just clarity. Two, there are four different kinds of difficult conversations, being known, repairing distance, releasing something, and seeking to understand. Knowing which one you're actually trying to have, it changes everything about how you begin. And three, the smaller opening. You do not have to lay everything out all at once.

53:55Jonathan Fields: You just have to signal that something real is trying to come through. The content, it can follow. If there's a conversation you have been kind of living around carefully, I'm not asking you to have it tomorrow. I'm just asking you to stop pretending that you don't know that it is there. In my experience, that's enough to start. Hey, before you leave, next week we're sitting down with Alexandra Sifalin. to talk about why nearly everyone will experience a wrong or misdiagnosis in their lifetime and what the best diagnosticians in the world actually do differently that has nothing to do with medical genius.

54:31Jonathan Fields: Be sure to follow Good Life Project wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss that or any other episodes. Do me a personal favor, a seven second favor. Share this episode with just one person. Then use it as a reason to actually talk about what you both discovered, what landed, what it brought up, because that's how we all come alive together. This episode of Good Life Project was produced by executive producers, Lindsay Fox and me, Jonathan Fields. Editing help by Troy Young, Chris Carter crafted our theme music. And of course, if you haven't already, follow us wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss a conversation.

55:08Jonathan Fields: Until next time, I'm Jonathan Fields, signing off for Good Life Project.

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