Our Ground Rules for Difficult Conversations

A reflective guide and workbook for creating shared agreements around difficult conversations.

The resource explores four ground rules — physical safety, keeping voices at a listenable level, avoiding personal attacks and staying with one issue at a time — alongside reflection on responsibility, pauses and how to return to a conversation when things become difficult.

Our Ground Rules for Difficult Conversations is built around four shared agreements for difficult conversations.

The ground rules focus on physical safety, keeping voices at a level where listening remains possible, avoiding insults and personal attacks, and dealing with one issue at a time. They are intended as shared agreements to return to when a conversation becomes difficult, rather than as rules one person uses to monitor or score the other.

The workbook slows each agreement down and gives space to reflect on what it means personally. It explores individual responsibility within a shared agreement, taking a pause without abandoning the conversation, recognising when a ground rule has been crossed, and finding a way back where that remains possible.

It also includes pages for thinking before a difficult conversation and reflecting afterwards: what the conversation is actually about, what I want understood, how I want to behave, whether a pause may be needed and what may still need clarification or repair.

This resource may be useful for people who want clearer shared expectations about how disagreement is handled, while keeping responsibility for their own behaviour firmly in view.

What’s included

• printable one-page Ground Rules reminder
• reflection on four shared agreements
• individual responsibility within a shared agreement
• taking a pause without abandoning the conversation
• reflection on what to do when a ground rule has been crossed
• pages to use before and after a difficult conversation

Format

14-page digital PDF workbook designed for reading on screen or printing at home on A4 paper.

Your purchase is for your own personal use.