Assuming that you do reach some kind of agreement or manage to explain it in the end, it’s often possible to then look at/think about the dialog you had and condense it down to points of shared agreement or an explanation that would have communicated the thing to the other person faster if you’d just thought of giving it earlier.
Sometimes (if this was over text) you can also just copy-paste the most essential pieces of what you said in the conversation, adding some bridging sentences as context. My post on applying NVC was also stitched together from messages I wrote in dialog with someone. When it has this bit:
I think one of the most important parts of NVC is the idea about distinguishing observations and interpretations, where an “observation” is defined as something that you could objectively verify (e.g. by capturing it on camera) and an interpretation is something that blends in more stuff, such as generalizations or assumptions about intent the other person’s intent.
For example, “You’re always late” and “You don’t care about my time” are interpretations, “On the last three times when we agreed to meet, you showed up 15 minutes after the agreed-upon time” is an observation.
If you can separate those, you can then go into a potentially charged conversation by transforming something like “You are always late, why don’t you care about my time” to something like “On the last three times when we agreed to meet, you showed up 15 minutes after the agreed-upon time. I found that frustrating because I made sure to be on time and could have spent that extra fifteen minutes to do something else”, which is often quite helpful.
This doesn’t mean you’d need to keep detailed records to express things as observations. If you don’t remember earlier specifics, you can just say something like “Hey you were fifteen minutes late today and I think that’s happened before too”. The main intents are to...
In the original conversation, this was two messages from me, with the second one being an answer to someone’s question:
Me: I think the most important thing is the idea about distinguishing observations and interpretations, where an “observation” is defined as something that you could objectively verify (e.g. by capturing it on camera) and an interpretation is something that blends in more stuff, such as generalizations or assumptions about intent
e.g. “you’re always late” is an interpretation, “on the last three times when we agreed to meet, you showed up 15 minutes after the agreed-upon time” is an observation
if you can separate those, you can then go into a charged conversation by transforming something like “why are you always late” to something like “on the last three times when we agreed to meet, you showed up 15 minutes after the agreed-upon time. I found that frustrating because I made sure to be on time and could have spent that extra fifteen minutes to do something else”, which is often quite helpful
Other person: One problem I personally have with this is it feels like it requires me to keep more detailed records of things than I naturally do, which in turn feels like I’m point-scoring
Like for me to be able to give a good observation about something more than a one-off, I’d have to write it down, which naturally puts me in an adversarial mindset
Me: I think it can be useful if you can point to previous cases in detail but I don’t think it’s actually necessary, like you could just be like “hey you were fifteen minutes late today and I think that’s happened before too”
Assuming that you do reach some kind of agreement or manage to explain it in the end, it’s often possible to then look at/think about the dialog you had and condense it down to points of shared agreement or an explanation that would have communicated the thing to the other person faster if you’d just thought of giving it earlier.
Sometimes (if this was over text) you can also just copy-paste the most essential pieces of what you said in the conversation, adding some bridging sentences as context. My post on applying NVC was also stitched together from messages I wrote in dialog with someone. When it has this bit:
In the original conversation, this was two messages from me, with the second one being an answer to someone’s question: