In your personal life and in your future professional life, you may have conversations that are emotionally difficult. Boyfriends and girlfriends break up. Applicants don’t get accepted into their first-choice colleges. Bosses discipline or fire employees. For these types of conversations, you need all the skills you’ve learned in this lesson plus a few more.

• Choose the right place. It’s important to have a difficult conversation in a private, quiet place. Difficult conversations don’t need onlookers.
• Don’t ambush the other person. Both of you need to be prepared for a serious discussion.
• Be polite.
• Tell the truth.
• Take responsibility for your own actions, not the other person’s feelings.
• Admit when you have make a mistake.
• Admit when you don’t know something.
• Try to keep control of your emotions, even if the other person loses control of theirs.