The conversation is tomorrow.
Possibly next week.
In some cases, nobody has actually confirmed there is going to be a conversation at all.
And yet you’ve already had it seventeen times.
You’ve worked out what you’ll say, what they might say back, how you’ll respond to that, what you definitely won’t say and the calm-but-firm sentence you’ll deliver if things take a particularly unfortunate turn.
There are several versions. In one, everything goes beautifully. In another, they misunderstand you completely. And in the version your mind seems particularly fond of at 11.47pm, you somehow end up having to defend a position you weren’t even planning to take.
If this sounds familiar, it can be easy to dismiss it as “just overthinking”.
But mentally rehearsing conversations can tell us something useful about anxiety, confidence and what your mind is trying to protect you from.
Your mind is trying to get there first
There is nothing unusual about thinking ahead before an important conversation. Preparing for a meeting, working out how to raise something difficult or considering how you want to explain yourself can be genuinely useful.
The difference is what happens when preparation turns into repeated rehearsal.
Often, underneath it is an attempt to reduce uncertainty.
Conversations are unpredictable. You can decide what you want to say, but you cannot completely control somebody else’s reaction. They may disagree. They may ask something you weren’t expecting. They might be disappointed. You could become flustered or struggle to find the words you had so eloquently located while unloading the dishwasher the night before.
If uncertainty already makes you anxious, your mind may try to solve that problem by preparing for every possible version.
The logic is understandable: If I can think through what might happen, I’ll be ready.
The problem is that there is no obvious end point.
For every response you prepare, your mind can invent another possibility.
So what began as useful preparation becomes an attempt to make an unpredictable human interaction predictable.
That is a considerably bigger job.
Sometimes it isn’t really about finding the right words
I often think the interesting question isn’t simply, Why am I thinking about this conversation so much?
It’s: What am I worried might happen if it doesn’t go the way I hope?
Perhaps you’re worried someone will be upset with you.
Maybe you don’t trust yourself to respond well if you’re challenged.
Perhaps you feel responsible for making sure everybody leaves the conversation okay.
Or maybe you have become so used to explaining and justifying yourself that saying something straightforward feels strangely uncomfortable.
This is where anxiety and self-confidence can become tangled together.
When you trust yourself, you don’t necessarily know how a conversation will go. You simply have a little more confidence that you’ll be able to deal with it as it unfolds.
When that confidence has taken a knock, it can feel much safer to arrive with the entire conversation pre-written.
Preferably with contingency plans.
And possibly footnotes.
Rehearsing can make you feel more prepared and more anxious
There is another frustrating part to all of this.
Repeatedly imagining a difficult conversation can make it feel as though you are doing something productive, while your body may be responding to each imagined version as something worth paying attention to.
You picture the awkward moment. You anticipate the criticism. You imagine somebody being angry or disappointed.
Nothing has actually happened, but emotionally you have already started experiencing parts of it.
Do that enough times and you can arrive at the real conversation exhausted by something you have technically only just begun.
You may also become so focused on delivering the version you rehearsed that it becomes harder to listen and respond naturally to the person actually sitting in front of you.
The preparation that was supposed to help you feel more in control can leave you feeling even more under pressure to “get it right”.
Preparation has an end point
So I’m not going to suggest that the answer is to stop thinking about conversations beforehand.
That wouldn’t be particularly realistic, and sometimes preparation is exactly what helps.
Instead, it can be useful to notice whether you are preparing for the conversation or trying to remove all uncertainty from it.
Useful preparation might mean knowing the main thing you want to communicate, thinking about what matters to you and perhaps deciding on a boundary you want to keep.
You probably don’t need to know your response to twelve hypothetical reactions that haven’t happened.
And you certainly don’t need to find the perfect combination of words that guarantees nobody will misunderstand you, disagree with you or feel uncomfortable.
There usually isn’t one.
Part of becoming more confident in difficult conversations isn’t learning how to predict them perfectly. It is building enough trust in yourself to know that you can pause, think, clarify, say you need a moment or even come back to something later.
You are allowed to participate in a conversation rather than perform a rehearsed version of one.
If you recognise how much time you spend anticipating conversations, managing other people’s possible reactions or trying to find exactly the right thing to say, it may be worth looking at what is sitting underneath that.
That is the sort of thing we can explore in 1-to-1 work: not simply how to have one difficult conversation, but why these situations create so much anxiety or self-doubt for you in the first place, and what might help you approach them differently.
You don’t need to wait until you’ve worked that out yourself before contacting me. Get in touch, tell me a little about what’s been happening, and we can arrange a conversation.
Preferably without you having to rehearse that one seventeen times first.
Jx