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Work on Me First, Us Second • Remember that the only person you can directly control is yourself. Focus on What You Really Want • When you find yourself moving toward silence or violence, stop and pay attention to your motives. • Ask yourself: “What does my behavior tell me about what my motives are?” • Then, clarify what you really want. Ask yourself: “What do I want for myself? For others? For the relationship?” • And finally, ask: “How would I behave if this were what I really wanted?” Refuse the Fool’s Choice • As you consider what you want, notice when you start talking yourself into a Fool’s Choice. • Watch to see if you’re telling yourself that you must choose between peace and honesty, between winning and losing, and so on. • Break free of these Fool’s Choices by searching for the and. • Clarify what you don’t want, add it to what you do want, and ask your brain to start searching for healthy options to bring you to dialogue.

— Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Second Edition by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and 1 other

Unfortunately, as we grow older, most of us don’t realize that this desire to win is continually driving us away from healthy dialogue.

— Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Second Edition by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and 1 other

So the first step to achieving the results we really want is to fix the problem of believing that others are the source of all that ails us.

— Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Second Edition by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and 1 other

Speak when you are angry and you will make the best speech you will ever regret. —AMBROSE BIERCE

— Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Second Edition by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and 1 other

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. —MARTIN LUTHER KING JR.

— Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Second Edition by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and 1 other

At the heart of almost all chronic problems in our organizations, our teams, and our relationships lie crucial conversations—ones that we’re either not holding or not holding well. Twenty years of research involving more than 100,000 people reveals that the key skill of effective leaders, teammates, parents, and loved ones is the capacity to skillfully address emotionally and politically risky issues.

— Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Second Edition by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and 1 other

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place. —GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

— Crucial Conversations Tools for Talking When Stakes Are High, Second Edition by Kerry Patterson, Joseph Grenny, Ron McMillan, and 1 other

His rage passes description—the sort of rage that is only seen when rich folk that have more than they can enjoy suddenly lose something that they have long had but have never before used or wanted.

— The Hobbit by J. R. R. Tolkien

Rule #12 We are powerful and natural explorers. • Babies are the model of how we learn—not by passive reaction to the environment but by active testing through observation, hypothesis, experiment, and conclusion. • Specific parts of the brain allow this scientific approach. The right prefrontal cortex looks for errors in our hypothesis (“The saber-toothed tiger is not harmless”), and an adjoining region tells us to change behavior (“Run!”). • We can recognize and imitate behavior because of “mirror neurons” scattered across the brain. • Some parts of our adult brains stay as malleable as a baby’s, so we can create neurons and learn new things throughout our lives.

— Brain Rules by John Medina

Rule #11 Male and female brains are different. • The X chromosome that males have one of and females have two of—though one acts as a backup—is a cognitive “hot spot,” carrying an unusually large percentage of genes involved in brain manufacture. • Women are genetically more complex, because the active X chromosomes in their cells are a mix of Mom’s and Dad’s. Men’s X chromosomes all come from Mom, and their Y chromosome carries less than 100 genes, compared with about 1,500 for the X chromosome. • Men’s and women’s brains are different structurally and biochemically—men have a bigger amygdala and produce serotonin faster, for example—but we don’t know if those differences have significance. • Men and women respond differently to acute stress: Women activate the left hemisphere’s amygdala and remember the emotional details. Men use the right amygdala and get the gist.

— Brain Rules by John Medina

Rule #10 Vision trumps all other senses. • Vision is by far our most dominant sense, taking up half of our brain’s resources. • What we see is only what our brain tells us we see, and it’s not 100 percent accurate. • The visual analysis we do has many steps.The retina assembles photons into little movie-like streams of information.The visual cortex processes these streams, some areas registering motion, others registering color, etc. Finally, we combine that information back together so we can see. • We learn and remember best through pictures, not through written or spoken words.

— Brain Rules by John Medina

Rule #9 Stimulate more of the senses at the same time. • We absorb information about an event through our senses, translate it into electrical signals (some for sight, others from sound, etc.), disperse those signals to separate parts of the brain, then reconstruct what happened, eventually perceiving the event as a whole. • The brain seems to rely partly on past experience in deciding how to combine these signals, so two people can perceive the same event very differently. • Our senses evolved to work together—vision influencing hearing, for example—which means that we learn best if we stimulate several senses at once. • Smells have an unusual power to bring back memories, maybe because smell signals bypass the thalamus and head straight to their destinations, which include that supervisor of emotions known as the amygdala.

— Brain Rules by John Medina

Author Judith Viorst once said, “Strength is the capacity to break a chocolate bar into four pieces, and then eat just one of the pieces.

— Brain Rules by John Medina