I used to go to bed late on a Sunday night just to stop Monday coming so quickly. Welcome to episode four Breaking the Circle for Leaders. I'm John Manning, and if you're a middle manager who's ever driven home replying a conversation the whole way, wishing you'd said something differently, wishing you'd had the answer to that question, you're in exactly the right place. You see, a good few years ago I used to work for Gregg's. I managed the daily fresh products across five hundred stores in London and the South East. Hundreds of products, thousands of decisions every week. Too little stock, and you got lost sales. Too much, you had waste, and waste cost profits. The pressure was constant, always coming from somewhere. Then the company restructured. A new operations director came in. I'd never worked with him before. He was new to the company and I was new to my role. And every week we'd sit down for a meeting. Every week he'd ask me detailed questions I couldn't always answer. Why did those ten shops not get enough donuts yesterday? What happened to those product line last Thursday? Five hundred stores. It was impossible to know every detail. But I'd still drive home that evening replaying the conversation. I wish I'd just said something differently. Something that just made me sound more capable, more confident, more on top of it. And after a while I started to tell myself a story that maybe I just wasn't capable of doing this role. That went on for about six months. And it wasn't just the meetings. It was following me home, sitting with me at the dining room table. It was still there. Sunday evenings, that knot in my stomach arrived earlier and earlier. At its worst I was going to bed late on Sunday nights just to slow down Monday coming. You see, you put everything into a job. You care about doing it well. And when you start wondering if you're actually capable of it, that gets really heavy. So I knew I needed to do something. Does any of that sound familiar to you? So I decided to pick up a book, and it was on NLP, and it happened to be written by Paul McKenna. You may have heard of him, a very well known hypnotist. I didn't even realise at the time it was NLP. I found out that much, much later. The book said it could change my life in seven days. It certainly didn't feel like that, but it did show me some great techniques. Two of them stuck with me. One was called anchoring, even though in the book it's called something slightly different. And one introduced the idea of something called the map of the world. I can remember those weekly meetings really clearly. The room was small at the top of an old converted house. Right up in the attic. I used to dread walking up the stairs. I would slow down slightly just so I didn't get there so quickly. We'd sit down, I'd be at the side of his desk. Papers everywhere. But I'd never quite have the one I needed. Fast forward to the end of the year, my annual performance review. I'd done my prep, but I was still dreading it. First question came. How do you think this year's gone, John? Without really thinking, I heard myself saying, Well, it's been a year of two halves. He nodded and agreed. And it was at that moment I realized halfway through that year was exactly when I'd picked that book up. Here's what I understand now. You see, our brains receive an enormous amount of information every second, far more than we can consciously process. So automatically our brains start to filter. We delete things, we distort things, and then it keeps bits that match what we already believe. You see, two people can be in the same meeting, can hear the same words, and walk out with completely different experiences of what's just happened. That's what we mean by map of the world. Your map is built from everything that's ever happened to you. Your upbringing, your schooling, how your parents were with you, things managers said to you earlier in your career, your successes, your failures, moments that shape how you see yourself and others. And here's the part that really matters You cannot see someone else's. You can only see your own. So I'd been reading my director's map through my map. You see, my map said he doesn't think I'm capable. He's trying to catch me out. But his map he was new to the role too. He needed confidence that the numbers were sound. Do you know why? Because above him someone else was asking questions. He needed to be able to defend his team with certainty. He wasn't trying to catch me out, he was trying to make sure he could back me up. And here's the part that really got me. I found out later because he had the confidence in the numbers, he was defending me in his own meetings with the senior directors. He was on my side the entire time. I just didn't know it. Because the story I'd been telling myself said he had it in for me. Same man the whole time. I just hadn't been able to see his map. So it was the same man, same meeting, same questions. But the difference a completely different me walked in. And once I stopped reading his map through my map, by the end of that year everything had turned around. Sunday nights didn't seem so bad anymore. They weren't perfect, but that knot in my stomach had gone. That dread, that belief he was trying to catch me out. Because I'd learnt it wasn't true. When you understand that everyone's map is different, something shifts. You stop taking the defensiveness personally. You start getting curious instead. You start thinking what might be going on on their map right now? That one shift just that one changed everything about how you walk into that next difficult conversation. So here's what I want you to try this week. Think of one person at work who frustrates you. But before you react to them to stop take a deep breath and remember yourself. Take a deep breath and remind yourself it's on their map of the world. They probably don't mean the way you've taken it and then get curious. Just ask Why is that then? Why is that then? The one question opens a conversation up instead of shutting it down. You see picture this it's Tuesday evening, you've just come out of one of those three o'clock meetings, the kind that normally goes sideways. But this time, before you walk in, you've asked yourself that one question. And the conversation didn't spiral. You're now driving home, the radio's on, and you're actually listening to it for the first time in ages. Not because everything's perfect, but because you had the tool and you used it. You see, the second half of year at Greg's wasn't a different job. It wasn't a different director. It was a different set of tools I was using. That's it, and that's what I want for you. I don't have some magical transformation overnight answer for you, but I do have some different sets of tools for you to use. So the pressure stops following you home. If this has landed for you, and if you're thinking about your own version of that meeting room, I've put together a free guide. It's called Why Your Conversations Keep Going Sideways and The One Shift That Fixes It. It goes deeper into the map of the world and what to do with it. There's a link in the show notes below, so please feel free to download that. And if you want to keep this conversation going, come and join us in the Difficult Conversation Club. It's a free Facebook group, and that link's also there. And don't forget, please subscribe so you get reminders for next week's episode. They come out every Tuesday. So thanks for listening, and I'll see you next week. And as always, I'm rooting for you.