Elevate your Communications, Part 2

Last month I shared some wisdom from Thom Bond in his seminal work on communication, including how most of us make common mistakes that shut down communication, alienate others, and foster judgment rather than empathy. I left you with the question “Okay, if what we’re doing isn’t working, what can we do instead?”

So there are a couple of things I want to share that might be of assistance to all of us as we’re making efforts to clean up our communication, speak our truth, and create space for deeper conversations.

The first thing I’d like to suggest is SLOW IT DOWN! Oftentimes our communication is moving so fast, especially when conflictual, that we’re not really listening or hearing what the other person has to say. A great tool for accomplishing this is the use of a talking stick. This works great when a conversation is getting very heated, when there are many people involved in the conversation, and when there are a lot of disparate opinions being offered. What it does is SLOW the conversation way down and put people in the position of listening to hear vs listening to respond; listening to ascertain the speaker’s feelings and needs vs focusing on oneself.

Here’s how it works: an item is designated as the “talking stick” which can literally be a stick, a feather, a pencil…anything that can be handed from person to person. Whomever holds the stick is the speaker; all others are listeners. The speaker speaks until s/he feels finished, then hands the stick to the next person who does the same. When the speaker is speaking, nobody interrupts, asks questions, challenges ideas, etc. All others merely listen…listening to understand, not to respond. When the stick is handed to the next person, that person can merely hand it on or can choose to speak about what’s already been spoken of or whatever else s/he chooses. The stick typically goes around the circle at least twice, to allow those who spoke early on to respond to what was said later in the process. For a particularly heated issue, the stick may go around many additional times to air all concerns. The key point is nobody speaking out of turn. The level of actual hearing of what others have to say is amazing to witness with this technique.

A second thing you can do to improve communication is REFLECT. In other words, repeat back to the other person what you heard them say. You’d be amazed at how often the message being sent is NOT the message being received. When I’ve worked with couples in the past, this is one of the first techniques I teach them to cut down on the filters getting in the way of communication. An example of this occurred recently with my daughter who said “I’m thinking of building out the basement into a master bedroom”. Rather than making assumptions about what I thought that meant, I could have reflected back “You’re thinking you’d like to build a master in the basement.”

And I know this sounds stupid as all get out, but it works amazingly well. She likely would have said “Yeah, a master in the basement would be cooler than upstairs, but I’ll probably have to wait a while to build up enough money to do that”. Then I know she’s thinking it through and is concerned about the same things I’m concerned about, including the cost. If she had stalled out at the “cooler than upstairs” part of her comment, I have some options. The best option is to…SHUT UP…leave the silence there…let her fill it in. The 2nd part of the sentence where she talked about having to wait a while might then pop up spontaneously. If the silence lasts too long, then I could also say “Tell me more about that”, thus eliciting more conversation from her.

And just a little plug for silence. I can’t tell you how well silence can serve you in a conversation! Just giving a little time for the silence to sit there can make a huge difference. Eventually the other person will speak again and usually that’s when the best stuff comes out!

Many of us are pretty uncomfortable riding out a silence so here’s a quick tool for getting through that. Start silently counting “Mississippi one, Mississippi two…” until the other person speaks. The counting helps distract you from your discomfort over silence.

And, notice that I started with silence and reflection here when discussing things you can do to improve communication. Last month, when I discussed the non-empathic responses we all tend to get caught up in, they all involved our interpretation and judgment in some way. Again, less is more…and focusing on the other person, not yourself, is key to good communication.

A third tool is DESCRIPTION. Merely describing, without judgment, what you’re noticing. For example, “I see that your hands are clenched and your breathing is very rapid and shallow”. Not “I can tell you’re pissed off!” Again, description isn’t something we’ve been taught to do. This process actually came from a parenting method, Parent-Child Interaction Therapy (PCIT), I was trained to teach when I was in graduate school at the University of Montana. The parent would be with the child on the floor playing; I’d be in another room with a headset coaching the parent who had a bug in their ear on Description and Reflection. The goal was to have the child lead the play and the parent follow…do you know how hard that is? Parents often default to questions and “suggestions” which are oftentimes off-putting to kids. Rather than saying “Why don’t you stack the blue block on top?”, I’d encourage the parent to FOLLOW the child’s lead and describe what s/he saw, “I see you’re putting the red block on the blue block”. Period. Nothing more. Just describe!

A fourth thing you can do is THINK OUT LOUD. When someone you’re talking to is quiet for a while, what do you do with that? Typically we run it through our own filters and make up story about what they’re thinking: he’s judging me, she thinks I’m stupid, he doesn’t trust what I’m saying, she wouldn’t do it that way. Worse yet, we respond from those filters…just like my daughter assumed I was thinking she wasn’t smart enough to make good decisions about a house and got defensive, when actually I was thinking she’s new at homeownership so she can’t possibly know what she doesn’t know.

So, thinking out loud…what would that be like? In the example with my daughter, I might have said out loud WEEKS ago “so there are some things I want to say about this, but I’m concerned you’re going to think I’m trying to put the kibosh on you getting a house…which isn’t it…I want to be sure you know what to look for and what to ask about, so I’m wondering whether to say anything or not and don’t know what to do here.” Then she knows precisely where I’m coming from. Which doesn’t mean it doesn’t still go through her filters, but maybe it stacks the deck a bit more in the favor of both of us seeing the situation through similar lenses.

I hope you give some of these techniques a spin and see how they work for you. In the last segment of this series, I will address how our ego (small) self can create many of the communication difficulties we experience and how to step out of that ego self so as to focus on differentiating Needs from Strategies which will help clear up communication even further.