Proper Communication

Do you ever feel like you're pouring your heart out to someone and they are just not understanding. Communication is difficult, but it is also necessary in relationships. In order to communicate you need to encode a message and send it to the receiver through some sort of medium, then the receiver must decode it. A lot of issues come in when the receiver does not decode the same message that the sender encoded. Luckily in order to help us decode messages we can watch facial expressions, body language, hear the tone of their voice and receive the words they are speaking. All of these things come together to get us closer to the encoded message. This is one of the problems with texting, or even phone calls. When you use those medium it takes away one of our essential tools of decoding. 

With no visual or vocal tone cues we get easily lost and miscommunications spring up where they would easily be avoided.

So what do you do when miscommunication happens and an argument starts to arise? Let me suggest that you use the five keys of communication. First: The disarming technique. To use this you find the truth in what they’re saying, it doesn’t matter how ridiculous their words sound, there is always at least a little kernel of truth in it. So find the kernel of truth and acknowledge it. My mom is the perfect example of this. My brother would throw a fit every time he got in trouble, whining that she hated him and he was always punished more and on and on. She told him that he was right, he does get punished more than the rest of us. He was stunned.  This will throw them off so much that it will give you the opportunity to move on to step two. Step two is to have empathy with their thoughts and feelings. My mother instantly swooped in and said that it must be hard to feel picked on all the time. She then transitioned effortlessly into step three which is a gentle inquiry. She asked him what they could possible do together to make it better, asked what made him lash out in the first place so that he was punished. They talked for a while about he felt. Them came step four, an I feel statement. These statements are best formatted as When  _____________ I feel___________ because________ I would like__________.  This step is very tricky, it is not meant to assign blame or make them feel bad, it is meant to clearly explain your feelings. The statement my mon gave was something like this, When you misbehave then yell at me I feel upset because it makes me think that I was not a good enough parent and that I did not do enough to teach you I would like for us to both use our words and hopefully you can talk to me instead of lashing out. Step number five is to express genuine appreciation and admiration. She told him that she really loves having him as part of the family and that she would never want to do anything to hurt him. The biggest key to that is that she was genuine and sincere.