This post is a continuation of Stepping Up to Difficult Conversations: Know Your Strongest Hopes.

I wanted to know what my students would tell others about the act of stepping up to a difficult conversation, now that they had, albeit by force of assignment, completed their own. Here’s what they told me:

• It’s freeing. It releases you from something holding you down or holding you back.
• Stepping up with intention makes you a better person, helps you find a center in a chaotic world.
• You shouldn’t be afraid to step up and look into the big black hole. You will not lose yourself in that hole!
• You won’t be alone in that conversation for more than a heartbeat, because the other will join you fully when you know how to do it. They’ve been waiting, too.
• It’s empowering because you’re deciding not to be a victim of the conflict.
• At the other side of the conversation, I found myself—the person I had lost for all the years I had avoided that conversation.

At the other side of the conversation, I found myself. Can there be anything more powerful than that?

I’m humbled by what my students did, because sitting there in that classroom with them, I could see that they had really, truly stepped up. They had spoken up and gotten to the heart of what mattered. They had made a difference in their own lives and in the lives of another person. And in mine.

What difficult conversation have you been avoiding and how can I help?

Conflict Zen® by Tammy Lenski is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Based on a work at ConfictZen.Lenski.com.