Conversation Tips for Surviving the Holidays | Angie McArthur

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Sometimes, you just can't relate to your relatives. Whether it's sports, politics, or past events, gathering around a dinner table during the holiday season can be a daunting prospect. Communication expert Angie McArthur explains some of her cardinal rules for connecting with your family and friends, and she identifies one of the biggest errors people make: asking the wrong questions. The root of the word 'question' is 'quest', as in endeavoring to know something—but how often is that really our motivation? As society reaches a new peak of polarization, in tense moments we may find ourselves asking questions just to prove our own points correct, which Angie McArthur explains are called leading questions. There is a more powerful method you can use: open questions, which are fueled by genuine curiosity, connection, and lead to a meaningful exchange. Chief among her tips, McArthur advises that this holiday season, you ask the questions you *don't* already know the answer to. Keeping these tips in mind, you might not merely survive the holidays—you might actually enjoy them. Angie McArthur is the co-author of Reconcilable Differences: Connecting in a Disconnected World.

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ANGIE MCARTHUR

Angie McArthur is Professional Thinking Partners' acting CEO. She has been an integral part of PTP since 1998, co-facilitating and designing global conferences, leadership retreats, training programs, and ongoing one-on-one Thinking Partnerships in organizations from non-profits to Fortune 500s. She is also one of the creators of the Worldwide Women’s Web, a network formed in 2001 to retain women in corporate leadership roles. As an expert in perceptual learning patterns, she has developed communication strategies for authors, corporations and CEO's, and the Executive Champions Workshop. She has also designed interactive web assessments and products for corporate training programs.Angie has co-authored two books for Random House with Dawna Markova: Collaborative Intelligence (2015) and Reconcilable Differences (2017).

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TRANSCRIPT:

Angie McArthur: One of the most powerful tools that we discuss in the book is open questions. And what we mean by that is, open questions are those questions that you possibly cannot know the answer to. And what this does is allow us to be authentic. Many of us are trained in asking leading questions, meaning: “Don’t you think that…?” or, “If you had the choice, wouldn’t you…?”

Those are leading you or prompting you into a specific answer, and people feel that right away—they feel “done to” in kind of a strange way. An open question is the opposite. It’s a question that, again, I couldn’t possibly know the answer to, so it would be like: “What was the most important Christmas or holiday you remember growing up, and why was that?”

It’s that genuine curiosity in which you’re asking another person questions, that they feel received, and they feel like there’s something there that you’re really questing. I mean it’s really interesting, the root of the word “question” is “quest”; I’m questing to learn more about you as a person. We can’t fake that, nor should we. And this is so often forgotten, especially with those who are actually even close to us—family members—we forget this very innate ability we all have to be genuinely very curious about one another. It’s like the first time you fell in love or the first time you met someone: you’re really interested for the first time, you’re so curious about them and asking them open questions, like, “Why did you take that job that you did? I’m so curious to learn that.” It’s that type of questioning. Those are open questions.

And never before has it been so difficult. We’re very polarized in so many ways right now. So being at the dinner table, what I would offer is first spending time, before entering into family events, to consider: what do you most want out of this?

And I think if you can answer that question truly from an authentic place it often is an answer of, “I want connection; I want to spend time with my dad who maybe he doesn’t have 20 more Christmases”—who knows what it is, but being very, very clear on your intention for that family gathering, that’s one.

The second is using inquiry styles to, again, create bridges. Having political discussions or having discussions about even sports teams can often lead to heated places, so remembering your intention in ...

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