Say the truth to yourself in private before you have to say it to someone else in public.

Hard facts tend to get discovered rather than disclosed, and the discovered version is always worse. Admitting something to yourself first means you arrive at the conversation already steady, already knowing the shape of it, instead of hearing it for the first time out of somebody else’s mouth while trying to respond.

If something is true and you have been talking around it, write the plain sentence down somewhere nobody will see, and read it back. Then decide who needs to hear it and when, which is a much easier decision once you have stopped arguing with the fact.