How to Handle Anxiety About Difficult Conversations with Amy Gallo

Morra Aarons-Mele (0:00)

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Hi, I'm Morra Aarons-Mele, host of The Anxious Achiever. Today, I'm going to bring you one of our most downloaded and one of my most favorite episodes from our archives. It's a classic. The Anxious Achiever has been at it for a long time. We have over 300 episodes, and honestly, they're all still more relevant than ever. You may hear details in this episode that reminds you it's from another time, but I guarantee that the advice you get will be as crisp and meaningful and the stories as resonant as before. If you have a favorite episode of the show, let me know. I'd love to air it again or even re-record it for you fresh. Enjoy this classic Anxious Achiever episode.

Do you avoid conflict and difficult conversations at work? If you're human, you probably do. It's kind of a superpower and I've met people who can do it. But I think most of us, we don't like feeling conflict. It makes us anxious. It's really hard. It's common to get flooded with emotions in the middle of a tough conversation, right?

The stakes feel high. And so we avoid feedback and criticism and difficult conversations, both giving it and receiving it. But conflict expert Amy Gallo says, honestly, avoiding conflict, it's worse for your anxiety in the long run. And it's healthy to have conflict at work. We just need to understand how to manage it. And that's what she's going to help us do today.

I'm Morra Aarons-Mele, and this is The Anxious Achiever, the show that looks at the intersection of mental health and leadership and work, and asks, how can we do it all better? I want to just leave you with a tidbit as we head into the show. Amy and I are going to talk about lots of practical approaches to managing conflict, especially if you're an anxious achiever.

Something that really has changed managing conflict for me, especially difficult conversations, is just a little phrase that I learned, and actually my husband helped me with it. And it's kind of a catchphrase. When I'm heading into a difficult conversation, I prepare myself, I write out bullets and talking points. And when I get flustered and when I get anxious in the moment, I pause and I might say, Hey, that's not how I see things. When I go into sort of emotional hijacking, I can always come back to this neutral phrase.

So we'll talk about sort of emotional heuristics that we can all use to manage conflict more healthily and make it a tool for growth at work. Here's my conversation with Amy Gallo.

Hi, Amy Gallo. Hi, Morra.

Amy Gallo (4:16)

It's so nice to hear you, see you, be with you.

Morra Aarons-Mele (4:19)

Well, same. I'm going to ask you a question that I actually, I don't think even though we know each other, that I know the answer to, which is that you are an expert on managing conflict in the workplace and difficult conversations.

How? Why? What started this journey for you? Gosh.

Amy Gallo (4:45)

I mean, if I really think about it, it started with having divorced parents and having sort of navigate having two households and being the daughter of two people who didn't speak to each other.

I think from an early age, I was really interested in how people handled contentious interactions. And then, you know, fast forward to my early career, I was a management consultant. I worked for a firm that focused on strategy and organization. The most fascinating part of that job for me, while my colleagues were very interested in like, what's the best strategy for this organization? You know, let's create a really fascinating deck for them. You know, I was really intrigued on what happened in the meetings. So what was being said, what wasn't being said, how could you bring up issues that were going, you know, unspoken so that people could talk about them? And honestly, the more contentious things got, I thought the more interesting because for me, that was where the work was actually happening. The work of sorting through what is it we need to do? How are we going to interact with one another?