Difficult Conversations: An experiment in presenting Book Notes

June 2025

Every difficult conversation is really three conversations happening at once:

• What happened - the “truth” or facts of the situation
• Feelings - how we feel about it (emotions)
• Identity - what it means about us

Most arguments fail because we focus only on proving our version of “what happened” while ignoring the feelings and identity threats underneath. The key is shifting from trying to win to being genuinely curious about the other person’s perspective, acknowledging emotions (theirs and yours), and separating your self-worth from the outcome.

Book also comes with hands-on examples that I did not jot down. I’ll likely revisit this book in a year to reflect. My full notes are available on Lucidspark.

Meta: I try making notes to intensionally slow down and, hopefully, get more out of a book. I tried both Miro and Lucidspark but keep coming back to Excalidraw. Because it is open source I thought I’d try using it to present my notes in a read-only way. It also has a big ceiling for visualizing other things - like auto-generated flow-charts in a much nicer way than Mermaid. The half-assed demo is available here.