What do elephants and vampires have in common?
 
They will both sabotage your team if you let them. 
 
Elephants in the room are the issues that you have not addressed, and they will stomp on your morale and teamwork if you don’t address them. 
 
Energy Vampires are the people that suck all the positivity out of your culture, and they drain your time, team and energy. 
 
Too often leaders ignore the elephants in the room and energy vampires on the team and as a result the issues, problems, and negativity only get worse. 
 
The key is to identify your elephants and discuss them and confront your energy vampires and transform or remove them. 
 
Both require you to have difficult but necessary conversations! 
 
And here in lies another challenge. Too often we avoid difficult conversations and that’s why we don’t deal with the elephants or vampires. 
 
We avoid conversations and conflict that make us feel uncomfortable. We also avoid them because we don’t know how to adequately have these conversations. 
 
These reasons are precisely why Amy P. Kelly and I wrote Difficult Conversations Don’t Have to be Difficult. We created a STAR3 Model to have difficult conversations that will make your conversations easier and your team whole lot better. 
 
While you still may feel uncomfortable at first when implementing the model, we have found that the model gives you confidence to move through the fear, embrace the discomfort, and grow in the process. 
 
After all, discomfort leads to growth if we step out in faith, utilize smart strategies, and take action! 
 
So you don’t have to get the garlic and wooden stakes to take care of your vampires and there’s no need to harm elephants. We love them!

They actually provide an opportunity to utilize the strategies in the STAR3 model to have growth conversations that will make you and your team stronger and more unified than ever! 
 
You can read Difficult Conversations Don’t Have to be Difficult now before it comes out next week by preordering it now and joining our launch team (you'll also receive a free downloadable Action Plan and other bonus resources).

Go to difficultconversationsbook.com to order the book and sign up!

- Jon