Everything Is a Potential Conversation

Hey there -

A few years back, I sent a client a proposal and, right after hitting send, realized I had left out a chunk of work that was going to eat a serious amount of my time.

The budget I gave her didn't reflect the work. And the email was already in her inbox.

In that moment, I did what any self-respecting Type A person would do. Panic. 😂 Then I decided I had two options. I could honor the proposal as written and absorb the cost, or I could look like a rookie at this business ownership thing. Since option two was unthinkable, option one it was.

When I shared this with a colleague, she said something that gave me pause. "Everything is a potential conversation."

The light dawned over Marblehead.

I had decided, on my client's behalf, what she would and wouldn't be willing to discuss, and I did it without even asking her. I built myself a box, climbed right into it, and then felt trapped by my own making.

I share this with more than a little embarrassment, because I ask leaders all the time, "Have you had the conversation?" I “should” know better. But it's easier to be objective about someone else's situation than your own, and in the moment it genuinely did not occur to me that this was an option.

For the record, when I did tell the client I'd underestimated the scope and asked whether she'd be open to revisiting the pricing if I turned out to be way off, her answer was “Of course!” (I have the best clients!) 

The catastrophe lived only in my head. 

I’m not alone. Most of the constraints people operate under are self-imposed, even if they don't feel that way. They feel like fact and truth. The deadline is fixed. The scope is set. She'd never go for that. There's no point in asking.

Notice that each of these is a prediction about another person's response, based on no data whatsoever.

When I dig into why someone hasn't asked, it's almost always one of three things (all three were running in my own head that afternoon):

1. Not trusting the relationship. You assume the ask will cost you something, so you protect a relationship that isn’t really at risk. In my case, I had years of history with this client, and I didn't trust it enough to say "I made a mistake."
   

2. Not being willing to advocate for yourself. This one is especially common in people who advocate ferociously for their teams and go oddly quiet on their own behalf. You'll fight for your analyst's promotion and then accept a scope change you know is unreasonable, because asking for yourself feels like going too far.
   

3. Putting someone else's imagined preferences ahead of your own actual needs. Not their stated preferences. Their imagined ones, which you invented, and which are usually less generous than what someone else is willing to offer.

Here’s your call to action this week: Identify a place where you’ve decided something is cast in stone without checking. What are you currently absorbing, tolerating, or resenting because you've concluded the other person will say no?

Now go have the conversation. Worst case, you’ll find out you were right. The better case is you might be pleasantly surprised.

S

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