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?
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.
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.
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.
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?
If you're really socially awkward, it causes you to be socially isolated.
This is extremely painful and damaging to the quality of your life.
People in that situation need specific feedback about what they're doing.
I'm going to identify 10 specific kinds of behavior that might cause other people to think you're weird or socially awkward.
With each of these behaviors, there are things you can do to appear more normal or less awkward.
I want to talk about one of the fundamental concepts from Erving Goffman's Sociology of Everyday Interaction, and that is the idea of stigma.
Most of us have heard the word stigma used before or stigmatized, but we're not exactly sure what it means.
If I had to pin you down, you might not be able to give an exact definition.
Stigma means that there's something wrong, right?
It has something to do with discrimination, or feeling like an outsider.
Goffman gives a more technical definition of it. I think it is useful for understanding not just the idea of stigma, but also for understanding our normal identities.
How can I avoid embarrassment?
How can I be seen as a poised and socially skilled person?
How can I be seen as someone who is safe and comfortable to interact with?
I'm going to teach you how to do all these things, using a key concept from Erving Goffman's sociology, the Expressive Order.
Goffman uses this idea to explain, at a deep and fundamental level, how the social world works.
Listening is a skill, but many of us do it poorly.
If we can learn to do it better, it can produce dramatic improvements in our lives.
I am going to teach you five stock phrases I use when I do reflective listening, active listening, or looping back.
It goes by a bunch of different names, but it's the same basic skill.
In a series of previous videos, I've emphasized the importance of listening: reflective, empathic, and active listening.
It goes by a variety of different names, but it refers to really the same set of skills.
These are specific actions you can take when you're in an everyday conversation or a difficult one.
They'll work the same, no matter what.
But these specific behaviors constitute what people refer to as active, or reflective, or empathic listening.
There are no guarantees in life except death and taxes, so the saying goes.
I can't help with taxes, and I can't really do anything about the Grim Reaper either.
But when someone we love is bereaved and mourning, there is something we can do.
We can write them a note or letter, or these days, maybe post a message on Facebook offering our condolences.
Too often, we end up with something sincere but generic and forgettable, the dreaded "thoughts and prayers."
No doubt the sentiment behind a "thoughts and prayers" message is sincere.
But each generic "thoughts and prayers" message is a missed opportunity to deepen our connection with someone we love, to offer them real consolation, and to lift their burden, if ever so slightly.
You’re on the outside of the circle. You want to join in the conversation but you don’t know how.
What is the best way of joining in without interrupting or seeming rude?
Or, you are talking with two friends, and the person speaking finishes their turn. There’s a silence.
Who talks next? Will the speaker take another turn? Is it your turn? Someone else’s turn?
The rules of conversations can be confusing, sometimes making you feel like you’re on the outside looking in, and sometimes leaving you feeling awkward, either not knowing what to do with long silences or instead talking over other people who are trying to talk.
I am going help you master the art of turn-taking in conversation by teaching you the three simple rules that govern every conversation.
Body, Self, and Story in Chronic Illness
Many of you are living with a chronic illness. If you are young, it’s likely to be depression or anxiety, or maybe cystic fibrosis or asthma or type 1 diabetes.
If you are older, it may be hypertension, diabetes, heart disease, lung disease, or arthritis.
The doctor says it’s incurable, that you have to live with it the rest of your life.
You can live with the physical pain and inconvenience of daily regimens and clinic visits, but there is a deeper source of anxiety and suffering that the doctors and pills and procedures don’t seem to deal with at all.
You’re in a tough situation.
You want to be kind and thoughtful, but you also need to get your point across.
You want to preserve the relationship, but you also want to tell the truth.
You don’t want to hurt their feelings, but you need them to change their behavior.
You don’t know what to say.
We’ve all been in these tough situations. Sometimes it turns out well, and sometimes it doesn’t. Is there any kind of general advice we can follow that will help us handle difficult conversations more effectively? I think there is.
Social Perception Versus Message Production
In my last post, I talked about the development of communication skills from childhood to adulthood, and I described how we might use the lessons of normal development to improve our own communication skills.
I noted how our mental maps of the social world tend to get better as we mature. As people learn and grow, they acquire more dimensions (i.e., more adjectives) for representing the social world.
The dimensions get more abstract, and they get more interconnected. The analogy was that we move from low-resolution, black and white to high-resolution color maps of the social world, and the improved representations help us navigate the social world more skillfully.
This developmental progression is mostly about perception. But at the same time, there is a parallel process of development in our ability to produce effective messages.
We’d all like to improve our communication skills. The best example of natural improvement is what happens to kids as they grow up.
Kids are not as not as articulate as adults. They have smaller vocabularies. They are less polite. They are less tactful. They don’t always know what to say. They sometimes say the wrong thing.
But as they mature, they get better fast.
If we understood how kids improved so quickly, we could use their secret to improve our own skills.
Opportunities to Comfort Are All Around Us
Life is not easy. We all experience pain, disappointment, and loss. One of the great joys of friendship, and the great satisfactions of life, is to be able to comfort a friend or family member in their time of need.
And of course, when we ourselves are hurting, we long to hear soothing words from our friends.
These words, if chosen well, have tremendous power to ease our pain.
With the rise of social media, it seems we have more opportunities than ever to offer words of comfort and support.
The social social world can be very scary.
It feels like, at any moment, we could make fools of ourselves.
For some of us, this fear is just a nuisance.
We just go on with our lives, trying not to think about the possibility that our fly is unzipped, or that we'll say or do the wrong thing and reveal ourselves to be much less cool, polished, and poised than we liked to think we are.
But for others, the fear of being humiliated can rise to the level of full-blown anxiety, a feeling so strong that it makes them avoid socializing entirely.
One of the of the most impressive properties of human communication is the ability to mean more than we say.
And communicating indirectly is not rare. Most of the content of what we communicate is not said directly but is instead inferred by the hearer. What we say is just a clue to what we mean.
The rest is pieced together by the hearer, using common sense, knowledge of the world, knowledge of you and your past relationship, knowledge of cultural norms and conventions, and knowledge of certain rules about when to make inferences and when to stick with a literal interpretation of what is said.
But how do we know when to take a person literally and when to search for inferences beyond what was said explicitly?
We are all looking for an edge, to improve our relationships, advance in our careers, be happier.
In my work training health professionals to talk with patients and families, I have stumbled on a powerful and simple way to perform at a higher level, especially when it comes to communicating in difficult situations.
In my academic job, I try to make healthcare safer for patients, especially when it comes to using medications. And I work on improving the way healthcare systems respond when things go wrong and patients suffer unexpected harm.
Some of us are great communicators. Some of us are, how should I say, somewhat less than great. All of us can improve. Communication skill can continue to improve throughout our lives.
I assume that anyone reading a blog called "How Communication Works" is interested in improving their communication skills. In upcoming blogs and videos, I want to talk to you more about how we measure communication skill, how communication skill develops, and what you might do to advance your own skills to the highest level.
But before I do that, I want to give you a chance to assess your own skills.
Some communication tasks are easy, and some are hard.
An example of an easy communication task is to describe your home or apartment. Faced with this task, most people complete it easily. Interestingly, most people approach it in the same way—they provide a verbal “tour” of their house:
As you come in the door, there is an entry way. To the right is the dining room and to the left is the living room. Straight ahead is a short hallway with the stairs to the right and the entrance to my office straight ahead...
Easy communication tasks involve few goals. There is only one dominant goal in the apartment description task—describe it accurately. Maybe there are sub-goals, e.g., be amusing, be brief, make your home sound nice.
When I ask people what they want to learn about, the most common answer is ‘how to handle difficult conversations,’ or as one friend put it, ‘how to tell people things they don’t want to hear.’
Let’s use an example given to me by an old friend (and blog subscriber!). This person runs a company and often has to refuse plum assignments to valued employees or has to let long-time employees go when they are no longer a good fit for the company.
Imagine a valued employee comes to you asking for a plum assignment outside their normal area of expertise, e.g., your best salesperson wants to lead a big new marketing campaign. As good as she is at sales, you know she does not have the skills to do this important marketing task, and you cannot afford to risk the company’s reputation by letting her perform in an area where she is out of her depth. What do you say?
