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.

The focus of the past nine pod casts has mainly been about creating this personal peace within ourselves. It is my current plan to address over the coming months what I personally believe to be the largest deterrent to one developing personal peace. And that is being involved in relationships with unhealthy people. Just as a chain is only as strong as its weakest link, a relationship is only as healthy as the sickest person in it.

When I was teaching addicts in the

In the future I plan to go into greater detail in what I consider to be the fundamentals of healthy relationships. Building trust through communication, developing intimacy, and identifying the various stages that healthy relationships go through – how to determine just how healthy your relationships are. I’ll provide you with techniques for having those difficult conversations, the goal being to articulate our inarguable feelings in such a way as to reduce the defensiveness of those you are having that difficult conversation with. I’ll give you a tool far more valuable than the “Golden Rule” in developing trust in healthy relationships – something I call the “Platinum Rule”. I’ll provide you with a method to reduce the stress that comes with miscommunication. All of this with the understanding that the cornerstone of healthy relationships is personal growth.

Because I value and appreciate your time, it is my desire that each one of these pod casts provide you with some information that you can use to positively impact your life, I’d like to end this pod cast by giving you something to think about, and an exercise to work on.

‘Opposites attract’ may work very well for magnets, but it doesn’t always work very well for people. Take a look at the relationships you have in your life. Who are your friends? Are they people who have nothing in common with you, or are they people you share lots of common interests with? Okay – here’s the exercise.

First, you’ll need a pencil and paper. Then what I’d like for you to do is to create a list of the traits that you look for in a friend. So for example, what you’ll find on my list – number one is a low-maintenance friend. I want somebody who can handle their own life without bringing too much drama into mine. I’m also looking for somebody who is optimistic about the future and is working to create a brighter future for themselves and everybody else. That’s just a couple of things. Your list can have as many different things on it as you’d like, but create a list that identifies the character traits that you are looking for in a friend. One of the reasons that this is one of my favorite exercises is that there is this great ‘aha!’ at the end of it. When I did this with my students, what they thought they were doing was creating a list of what they were looking for in a friend. But what they were actually doing was creating a blueprint for the person that they want to be.

Remember – ‘opposites attract’ works with magnets, not people. So if you’re looking for somebody who is low-maintenance, then you have to be low-maintenance to attract them. If you value honesty, then you have to be an honest person. If you are not an honest person, you can attract an honest person, but that relationship won’t last very long. If they are healthy and they value honesty they will soon see that you are a dishonest person, and they will distance themselves from you. Because healthy people have boundaries and they enforce them. If they are honest and they are not healthy people then what they will do is they will take on your dishonest character traits; because unhealthy people either don’t have boundaries or they have them, but they don’t enforce them. If you value physical health, where will you find physically healthy people? They’re out getting healthy – they’re outside doing things. They’re not sitting on a couch. So you have to get out and do those things where you will find physically healthy people.

So there you have it – a list of what you’re looking for in a person, and a blueprint for who you want to be. Now after looking at your list, if you deem yourself to be falling short in any of these areas, I’d like to recommend that you go back to the October pod cast, “You Can Change Without Growing, But You Can’t Grow Without Changing.” There you’ll find information on a process for change, some of the barriers to change. There you’ll find a downloadable document that you can use to create your own master plan for success regarding behavioral changes.

I look forward to any comments or questions you have on the subject of building healthy relationships. Next month look for a pod cast on how to build trust and reduce stress using good communication skills

While teaching this part of the curriculum, I developed a strategy that I refer to as a “Recipe for Peace.” To better understand this recipe for peace, I’d like to first share with you what our curriculum suggested was the process for anger. I used two metaphors for describing the process for anger to my students. One was an ‘anger stew.’ The meat and potatoes of anger stew is stress. The carrots and onions are triggering thoughts. The two main triggering thoughts are ‘shoulds’ and ‘blames.’ So the recipe works something like this: If a person is highly stressed and they can find somebody to blame for what’s going on in their life, it gives that highly stressed person an excuse, a rationalization, to act out in some dysfunctional, destructive, angry way. Likewise, if a person is highly stressed and they can find somebody that they think should be doing something and isn’t, or shouldn’t be doing something and is, it also gives them the rationalization to act out in some angry fashion. So again, the recipe for anger is stress plus triggering thoughts equals anger.

Now the constructive opposites for this anger recipe, what I call the recipe for peace, goes like this: Proactive stress management plus personal responsibility and acceptance equals peace. So let’s look at this recipe for peace in more detail.

To help my students better understand the connection between stress and anger, I gave them another metaphor. I suggested that they try to see themselves as balloons, and the air in the balloon is the stress. Every day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, they are either putting more air into their balloon until they pop, or taking air out. The proactive stress management aspect of the peace recipe is just about that. Taking air out of the balloon. It’s important to understand that there’s no such thing as no stress. A certain amount of stress is necessary just for us to be able to stand. We call it ‘muscle tension.’ We’ve all seen babies who can’t even hold their heads up; that’s no stress – that’s no muscle tension. In future podcasts we’ll discuss this in much greater detail, but I would like to give you five simple things that you can do right now to reduce the stress in your life so that you can get further and further away from living on the edge of anger.

The fastest and easiest thing that you can do to be proactive in your stress management is deep breathing. To prove this point to you, let’s do an exercise really quickly. Keep track of your pulse for 15 seconds. Then multiply that number by four. … Ok, now take three long, slow, deep breaths. … Now take your pulse again for 15 seconds and multiply that number by four. … In the vast majority of instances when I have done this exercise with my students, they found that their pulse rates dropped – significantly in some cases – just by taking three deep breaths. When they took five deep breaths, their pulse rate dropped even more. So the most immediate thing we can do to reduce the stress in our lives is deep breathing. Something that works for me is that I have environmental cues that remind me to stop and take a couple of moments to re-center myself. Currently I’m working at a grade school with developmentally disabled kids. And as you might imagine in a grade school, bells are ringing all the time. So every time I hear a bell, I stop, take a couple of deep breaths, and that re-centers me. That re-focuses me. It allows me to reduce any stress that I might have acquired since the last bell rang.

There are other fundamental things that we can do, such as eating healthy, taking vitamins, getting exercise, getting the proper amount of sleep. If any or all of these behaviors are things that you are currently doing in your life, then I’m sure that you are well aware of the benefits. However, if you’ve had difficulty instituting these behaviors into your life, a previous podcast entitled “You Can Change Without Growing, But You Can’t Grow Without Changing” provide processes so that you can begin to institute these healthy behaviors.

The most beneficial thing we can do for ourselves is to have healthy relationships with healthy people. Dr. Drew Pinsky in his book, Cracked, suggested that healthy people use their relationships to regulate their emotions. Healthy people do not bottle up their emotions and then explode later because somebody isn’t doing something that they think they should be doing. Proactively managing our stress also benefits us in other ways. It keeps us healthy. If you look at the word ‘disease’ – d-i-s-e-a-s-e – disease – it’s in the word – dis-ease. Not at ease. The more stressed we are, the more sick we become. Stress is a major contributing factor for everything from the common cold to cancer.

Another debilitating aspect of being highly stressed is that it constricts our reticular activating system – the part of the brain that helps us see options. The more stressed we are, the less options we see. Conversely, the less stressed we are, we begin to see not only the black and the white, but all of the gray in between. Future podcasts will be devoted to processes, that when practiced, can have a profound impact on the quality and quantity of one’s personal peace.

The second aspect in the recipe for peace is personal responsibility. The December podcast entitled “Putting a Man on the Moon” is entirely dedicated to personal responsibility – being responsible for our actions, our thoughts and our feelings.

The third component in the recipe for peace is acceptance of oneself and acceptance of others. Acceptance is closely aligned with personal responsibility. It’s very important to understand that people change their behavior only when they see the benefit in changing their behavior. We can’t make people do anything that they don’t want to do. How many hours of our lives have we spent trying to convince somebody to do something that they didn’t really see the benefit in doing. How much stress and anxiety have we brought upon ourselves engaging in this fruitless endeavor? People change when they see the need to change. And we need to accept that. Personal responsibility in relation to the acceptance of others rests in how long do we allow ourselves to be exposed to behaviors and attitudes that we do not believe serve our best interest. If we have friends and family or acquaintances whose behavior we allow to adversely affect us, it is our responsibility to protect ourselves. And in some cases that may mean ending relationships. But we have to take the responsibility for being as healthy and as peace-filled as we can possibly be.

It’s been my experience that being accepting and tolerant of other people is often easier than being accepting and tolerant of ourselves. Acceptance of ourselves requires that we learn to forgive ourselves for our past transgressions. One of the videos that I used to show in my class was a Les Brown video. And in this video he said, “If you wouldn’t do it today, you’re convicting an innocent person.” When I heard that the first time, it was like a lightning bolt struck me out of the sky. I realized at that moment that I was beating myself up for things that I hadn’t done in 10, 15, 20 years. And that I’m a different person today. And there’s no good point to me holding myself emotionally hostage to behaviors that I haven’t done in 20 years. One idea can change your life, and that single sentence, “If you wouldn’t do it today, you’re convicting an innocent person,” enabled me to set down baggage that I’ve been carrying around with me for most of my life.

Many of my students when talking about stress and anger management had the misconception that once they had completed that part of the curriculum that they would never be angry again. Perfection is not the goal. Perfection is impossible. Jesus Christ, the Christian physical embodiment of peace and tolerance, snapped when he saw that money changers had turned the temple into a marketplace. The goal is to have reasonable responses. And lower stress levels allow a person to do just that – have a reasonable response. Something other than the ‘fight or flight’ mentality.

It is my belief, and I have seen it work in my life and the lives of others, that the recipe for peace is proactive stress management plus personal responsibility and acceptance of ourselves and others. When these three behaviors and attitudes are practiced we begin to develop more peace within ourselves, which ultimately leads to more peace in the world. We are responsible for creating the peace in our lives. And it doesn’t take much imagination to see that world peace can become a reality when each person finds peace within their own heart.