Bruce Lambert
Should You Be Honest Or Polite?

When you have something difficult to say, something that might hurt or embarrass the person you're talking to, how should you say it?

Should you come right out and say it, bluntly and honestly?

Or should you be tactful and indirect?

What values should guide us in these situations?

Is honesty the highest value? Or is kindness?

Should You Be Honest Or Polite?
Bruce Lambert
Improve Your Communication Skills Today: One ...

I want to tell you a story.

In addition to being a college professor, I'm a consultant. The most common kind of training I do, as a consultant, is communication skills training.

I specialize in training health professionals how to talk to patients and families who have been harmed by healthcare.

These are very difficult conversations. We focus a lot on empathic communication skills, which is a topic I've taught a lot about.

I'm going to teach you the single most important step you can take to begin to improve your communication skill.

Improve Your Communication Skills Today: One Critical Step
Bruce Lambert
How to Persuade People: The Hidden Power of ...

Our own behavior is killing us.

If you look at the top 10 causes of death, you'll see at the top diseases like heart disease, cancer, and stroke, but it's actually our own behavior, smoking, drinking, not exercising, having a poor diet, which lead to the problems.

If you want to change people's behavior, you have to stop giving them information.

Information alone simply isn't persuasive. Most of the time, people already have a lot of the basic information like smoking causes lung cancer, but it doesn't change their behavior.

If you want to actually change people's behavior, you have to put this information into a story.

How to Persuade People: The Hidden Power of Stories
Bruce Lambert
Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life

Living in 2021 with all of its illness, despair, and violence makes us long for a way of communicating with one another that could produce better outcomes for all of us.

We want a way to communicate that could allow all of us to have our needs be understood and met while meeting other people's needs as well.

I'm going to talk about a technique for communicating called nonviolent communication.

It was developed by an author named Marshall Rosenberg back in the late sixties, early seventies.

It helps us communicate in a way that expresses our feelings, expresses our needs, and respects the needs and feelings of other people.

Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life
Bruce Lambert
What Is Empathy? Karla McLaren's Six Essential ...

Empathy is one of the most important communication skills.

In many ways, all other communication skills depend on empathy.

But what is it?

What is the difference between empathy and compassion? Is empathy only about feeling other people's emotions?

Empathy and sympathy?

How much of empathy is about feelings and how much about thoughts? What does emotional regulation have to do with empathy?

What is empathic accuracy?

What Is Empathy? Karla McLaren's Six Essential Components

The Key to Understanding Others is to Be a Good Detective, Not a Code-Breaker

The Key to Understanding Others is to Be a Good Detective, Not a Code-Breaker

The Big Picture

The purpose of this site is to help you achieve your own goals by improving your communication skills. Better personal relationships. More success at work. Deeper connections with your parents, kids, spouses, friends, and lovers.

As in the previous post, I will give you tips, techniques, and strategies for handling all sorts of common communication tasks. But more than that I want to give you the big picture, to teach you how communication works in general. In the long run, you will rely less on tips and techniques. Instead, you will use your in depth understanding of communication and the social world to analyze and solve even the trickiest communication problems.

How to Make Sure People Understand You

How to Make Sure People Understand You

“I never said that!”

“That’s not what I meant!”

“You’re taking me the wrong way.”

A man shows up at the emergency room: nauseous, vomiting, heart racing.

When the nurse asks what's wrong, he says it might be a bad reaction to the nicotine patch he is using to quit smoking.

He takes off his shirt, and the nurse sees ten or more nicotine patches all over his torso.

Asked why he had so many patches on, he said that the doctor told him to put the patch on a different spot every day.

So he just kept applying patches to a different part of his body every day.

Nobody said anything about taking off the patch from the day before.

How was he supposed to know?