Transform Your Conversations: A New Approach to Effective Communication
Next time you’re engaged in a difficult conversation – whether it is with your romantic partner, or a child, or your parent, or a work colleague, whomever it might be – I would like to invite you to remember this tip and see how things unfold. It is one of the single most powerful tools that we can practice in relationships.
The tip is to take a different perspective on the nature and purpose of communication.
For various reasons, many of us see communication as being something quite rigid. We present our thoughts and we feel protective of them. And we can receive others thoughts as something that perhaps we need to protect ourselves from, particularly if we sense that they may be in tension with our own.
What I would like to suggest is that we see communication instead as a creative and collaborative endeavour. It isn’t the case that we come to conversations with total presence and a full and complete sense of what we need to communicate. Or that the other person does the same. Instead, we speak, we hear ourselves, we experience ourselves reflected back to us, and we continue to order and make sense of our thoughts and feelings. Thinking helps us to speak, and speaking helps us to think.
So before you respond to what’s being said to you, take a collaborative position with the person that is speaking. Genuinely try to understand their meaning. Not to respond, but to reflect it back to them. This will give you the chance to check first of all whether you have understood what they have said; and second of all whether what they have said accurately reflects their intended meaning.
This gives us the best possible chance of taking opportunities to learn and grow as individuals and in our relationships; and it also in many cases will immediately defuse conflict.
Give it a try and let me know how it goes. Whether you are applying this to your romantic partnership, or to any other relationship (family, friends, colleagues), consider joining an upcoming workshop or booking in for a private consultation to develop your awareness, tools, and skills.
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