One of the most interesting portion of this book, imho, is this idea that every time we have a conversation (difficult or not) our own identity is somehow at stake. I wonder, though, how this may be different than the rest of our outward expressions on a given day. It seems like every time we get dressed in the morning, our identity is at stake. Every time we decide what radio station to put on, every time we decide which poster to hang, which restaurant to take our significant other out to, which potato dish to serve at a formal dinner, each time we make a decision, the possibility that our conception of our own identity might be altered is very real.
This idea brings me back to Lynch, George, and Cooper's ideas that learning something about yourself is possibly the reason students are unwilling to take a complex inquiry into a given topic. It's not so much that students will change a topic based on the research they do, but rather that a topic, if startling information threatens to unseat the carefully constructed reality of that student, might work to change the student. Like I talked about on the blog last week, this can be the scariest thing of all.
But while L, G, & C call for keeping the possibility of change open, even encouraging it in our students, I'm not sure Stone, Patton, and Heen make that same assertion. In Difficult Conversations, especially in the "Identity Conversation" section, we see many interesting strategies for understanding what your conversational counterpart is going through. The authors instruct that we keep their identity in mind, that we realize the complexity of the identities in question, and that we learn to ask for help when we just can't make the expectations of the identities mesh. The one aspect missing, however, is the idea that our identities are evolving. In this section, there doesn't seem to be any acknowledgment that difficult conversations can change our identity, can help us see ourselves in a different light. There is plenty of anxiety caused by people holding too much stock in their own identity, but the scary possibility that we might be an evolving identity is never quite addressed.
Who knows, someday I may want to hang the framed painting on my walls instead of the Angus Young poster....
