Not all conversations fall into the “I feel great!” “This is wonderful!” “I love you!” categories. Some very necessary conversations by way of their content will be more difficult than others. To my mind, the goal of healthy communication is to be understood – not to be right. It has been my experience that when I approach even the most trying of conversations from that perspective, that I simply want to be understood, that a lot of the defensiveness inherent in these difficult conversations goes away. Whereas on the other hand, when I approach conversations with the need to be right, and if someone else has a different point of view than I do, then I’ve made them wrong before I even start. And that, more times than not, leads to defensiveness and further frustration. So one of the things I have for you in this podcast is a five-step process for having those kinds of conversations where you think going in that the person you’re going to have it with may be a little bit defensive, or maybe not so receptive.

As I describe this process, I will not only provide you with the steps, but I’ll also try to provide you with some of the logic behind each one of them. One thing that is important to know about this process is that these five steps are sequential. So follow them in order, and no skipping around.

Step number one is check for timing. Is the person that you’re going to have this conversation with ready to listen? Are they tired, are they busy, are they upset? It may be wise to set an appointment: something along the lines of, “Hey, I have something I’d like to talk to you about. When is good for you?” If there’s never a good time, then a very loud and clear message is being sent. The message is, “I don’t care what’s on your mind.” If you’re unfortunate to find yourself in one of those kind of relationships, then I have something for you during the last half of this podcast.

Step two is state the facts. What has happened that has caused you to want to have this conversation? A couple of things about stating the facts: you want to avoid using words like always and never. If you were to say something like, “Well you’re always late,” if that person can think of one time when they weren’t late, then you have just undermined your entire case. Likewise, if you say something like, “You never think of me,” if that person can think of one time when they’ve thought of you, again, you have undermined your case. When you’re stating the facts, what you want to do also is avoid opinion. You know what opinions are like: everybody’s got one, and most people are highly vested in theirs.

Step three: state your feelings. No one knows how you feel until you tell them. You also want to speak for yourself. If you were to say something like, “Everybody thinks that you’re a slob,” if the person you’re talking to can find one person who doesn’t have that belief, then again, you have undermined your argument. Also when you’re stating your feelings, it’s very helpful to use the words I feel because nobody can argue your feelings – nobody can rightfully tell you what you should or shouldn’t feel. Here’s where people who are not used to identifying or articulating their feelings go off the rails. When teaching this process to my students, I used to get answers like, “I feel you’re wrong.” Well, “you are wrong” is a thought, it’s not a feeling. It’s an opinion. So in order to do step three you’ll need to sit down and identify how you feel.

Step four: state your needs. What do you need to have happen? What do you need this other person to do? Have a solution. Now during step four, behavior discussions are fine, but character discussions are not. You can talk about the person’s behavior, but you cannot call them names. These are not conversations that you can have by the seat of your pants. To do this process correctly, to get the maximum benefit from it, you’re going to have to sit down, and you’re going to have to think about what are the facts, how am I feeling, what are my needs? The more time you spend preparing for these difficult conversations, the better chance you have of being understood.

Finally, step five: ask for a response. Check for understanding. This is where mirroring works really well. You can ask, “What did you hear me say?”

Obviously this five-step process works best if all parties involved want a healthy relationship. But what if you are involved with someone who is either unwilling or unable to participate in a healthy relationship? Ernie Larson has a process that he calls, “Stuck in Wait.” In other words, you feel like you’re stuck in a relationship waiting for somebody else to modify their behavior to something more healthy and beneficial. Stuck in Wait is very similar to the difficult discussion process. It allows a person to set some boundaries. It also allows a person to remove themselves from an unhealthy relationship knowing that they have done everything that they could possibly do to save the relationship.

In step one, you decide how long you will wait. This immediately gives you some semblance of control in the relationship, as you are the one who is setting the time frame. Six months, nine months, a year, six weeks – it’s purely up to you, but what you want to do is you want to keep that number to yourself. This allows you to change your mind. I’ll use a very common example from the classes I’ve taught on drug and behavioral addiction and recovery. Let’s say that you have decided to wait six months for somebody to get into a recovery program. You keep that time frame to yourself because if you tell somebody that you’re going to wait six months, and then things get too bad and you can’t wait six months, that person can come back at you and say, “But you said I had six months!” It also allows you to decide to wait longer if you want to. So again, step number one: decide how long you will wait, and keep it to yourself.

Steps two, three, four and five are exactly the same as the process I described earlier in this podcast. State the facts, state your feelings, state your needs, and check for understanding.

There’s a sixth step to the Stuck in Wait process – Ernie Larsen calls it Creating a Crisis. It works something like this: Let’s say you’ve decided you will wait three months for somebody to get into a drug and alcohol recovery program. You’ve kept that time frame to yourself. You’ve mentioned the facts, that drug and alcohol use is causing damage to the family. You’ve said how you feel – you’re scared, you’re frightened, you’re confused. You have stated your needs; you’ve checked for understanding. At the end of that three months, the person has not changed their behavior. So step number six is again, Creating a Crisis. This crisis has to be something that will mean something to the person you had the conversation with. If the crisis that you’ve created is meaningless to this other person, then there’s no point to creating the crisis. One last note on creating a crisis: you cannot be bluffing. You have to have said what you meant, and meant what you said. If you have said that you are going to leave, and then you don’t, then you never have to be taken seriously again by that person.

It is my sincere hope that all of your conversations are free and easy, and that none of your relationships ever get to the Stuck in Wait point. But I believe that it’s better to have these tools in your toolbox and not need them, than it is to need them and not have them.

In any verbal communication, there is a person who is sending the message: the sender. And there is at least one person who is supposed to be receiving the message: the receiver. In between the sender and the receiver there are several things that distract from and/or distort the information being conveyed. You see both the sender and the receiver have filtering systems, which are comprised of their personal beliefs, their personal histories, and how they physically and emotionally feel at the moment that they are trying to communicate. Are they tired? Are they angry? Are they distressed over something? Between the sender’s and the receiver’s filters is something called noise. In this case, the definition of the term noise is not limited strictly to those things we hear with our ears. Noise consists of anything that you can perceive through your five senses. Some examples might be: a sound outside the room that you’re in, a strange smell, a physical pain you’re experiencing, an attractive person walking by in the background as you are trying to listen to the conversation. Noise also includes anything you might be saying to yourself while the conversation is going on – your self-talk – it’s cold in this room, I’m hungry, what is this person talking about – anything that distracts you from hearing the message is considered noise.

Gordon Graham, a leader in the field of self-image psychology, working in both the change management and the addiction/recovery fields, suggests that due to what goes on in the communication process the average person hears only every third word. That might sound something like this, “Gordon leader field image in change the fields that what in the process person every word.” While that might put you on the same page, some conversations require that we be on the same paragraph. Some require that we be on the same sentence. And some require that we be on the same word. How many times has it happened to you – you thought you heard what the other person was saying, but you missed it – either by a lot or by a little. And because you missed it by a lot or by a little, not you’ve got trouble.

For this podcast I want to illustrate how to build trust through communication. And I want to provide a method of communication that is in effect an insurance policy against the complications that come from miscommunication.

Your insurance policy is something that I refer to as mirroring. It works like this: it’s a four step process.

The first step is that the sender sends an uninterrupted message. Step two is that the receiver repeats back in their own words their interpretation of what the sender said. Step three – and this is your insurance policy – the receiver asks the question something along the lines of, “Did I understand you correctly?” “Is that what you meant to say?” “Is that right?” Asking a question like that allows the receiver to be 100% wrong in their understanding of what the sender was trying to communicate. Step four – the sender confirms that the message heard was correct or not, and if not, the sender restates the part of the message that was misheard or the entire message if need be. And then you begin the process again, until both the sender and the receiver are satisfied.

It’s very important to understand that the goal of communication is to be understood – not to be right.

To help you visualize both the mirroring process and the communication process, there’s a document that you can download on the optimisimisaskill.com homepage.

In our last podcast, When Your Feet Hurt, Everything Hurts, I suggested that when you’re involved in an unhealthy relationship, every other aspect of your life suffers. Now I’m not going to define what is or isn’t a healthy relationship, except to say that healthy relationships require that all participants either be healthy or be sincerely working towards it.

The cornerstone of healthy relationships is communication. Without communication, caring about someone as an individual is impossible. Now that’s not to say that we don’t care about our brothers and sisters around the world who suffer from either natural or man made disasters and sometimes both. I want to suggest that to truly care about another individual, you have to truly know that person as an individual. And the best way for that to happen is through healthy, effective communication.

One of the more underrated components of healthy communication is trust. Think about it. If you don’t trust someone, do you even really care what they’re trying to communicate to you?

So how do you build trust? Well, there’s two ways, really. First, through your actions – you do what you say you’re going to do, when you say you’re going to do it. And the second is through verbal communication. In the mid- to late- nineties, I worked for a management consulting company, and we had a technique that we referred to as “the Platinum Rule”. The Platinum Rule says that we treat people the way that they want to be treated, not the way we want to be treated. Let me give you an example of how that works. After leaving that company I became a teacher, and for about eight years I taught drug- and behaviorally-addicted parolees how to get into recovery, change their dysfunctional behaviors into healthy ones, and hopefully stay out of prison and get off parole. Now I consider myself to be a very open person – I’m one of those touchy-feely kind of people – I like to get involved and rub elbows and get in people’s space so that I can get to know them, and they can get to know me. Dealing with the clients that I was dealing with in these classrooms, that was a prohibitive barrier to reaching understanding. Due to the hostile environment in which many of these men and women were either living in or had just come from, these were people who needed at least three feet of space before they could begin to feel comfortable. So if I’m leaning over their shoulder trying to show them how to do an exercise, they’re not listening to me. Because what they need is their space. My preferred communication style is not only not relevant – in this case it’s a deterrent – the noise in their head, their self-talk, is saying, “Get away from me.” It’s so loud that communication is next to impossible. If I treat them the way I want to be treated, then communication is lost. But if I respect how they want to be treated, their defenses come down, and there’s a better chance to be heard.

OK, so how do you get to the specific information – and specifics are the key, that will tell you how a person wants to be treated? For a person you don’t know very well or at all, say a new co-worker or someone new to the neighborhood, they key is to observe. Go slow and watch. And if you pay attention, you will get the information that you’re looking for. Now if it’s a person that you are already in an established relationship with, say a friend or family member, what you do is you ask.

In our next podcast I will give you specific questions to ask that will provide you with the specific information that you’re looking for. Again, the goal is to communicate in a manner that is meaningful to those you want to be in a healthy relationship with.

I believe that relationships are a measure of the quality and quantity of the amount of Peace that individuals live with. And as I’ve stated many times, world Peace can become a reality when enough people find Peace within their own heart. To be involved in an unhealthy relationship only takes us further and further away from the Peace, love and understanding that we all crave.