One of our fondest hopes is to feel a sense of belonging, to feel that we are accepted by a larger social group, that we are normal just like everyone else, and that we are okay just the way we are.

In contrast, one of our greatest fears is that we would be a social outcast, unaccepted, cast out from the group, and stigmatized.

In today's post, I want to talk more about sociologist Erving Goffman's concept of stigma.

We all get rejected.

There was a time in my academic career when I was rejected for 10 grant proposals in a row.

Ouch.

Each rejection letter was hard to receive, but some were much better than others.

It is hard to write a good rejection letter.

Rejection is intrinsically threatening to the other person's self-esteem.

If you don't do it well, you risk hurting the other person, damaging the relationship, and making yourself and your organization look bad.

But if you do it well, you can write a letter that gets the job done and preserves the relationship.

Imagine this situation:

You get up in the morning. You take a shower.

If you're a man, you shave. If you're a woman, maybe you put on your makeup.

You spend all morning making your hair look good, dressing up, and spending a lot of time in front of the mirror putting yourself together so you look great.

You go out into the world, you get to the office and someone says to you, "Hey, you look great today. What a great outfit. You're looking great."

And what do you say? You say, "Oh no, no, no. This thing? No, no, I don't look so good at all. I just threw all this together."

So why do we do that? Why do we have such a hard time accepting compliments?

Communication can be hazardous, and one of the main hazards is that we will be misunderstood.

Sometimes the misunderstandings are bad, the kind that ruin our relationships or careers.

You say something to a friend. It seems perfectly clear that you were joking.

But maybe you wrote it in an email, and there were not enough context for them to realize you were not being serious.

Or you have to give written instructions to a colleague about an important task. You think the instructions are unambiguous, but they misunderstand and screw up a task for a big client.

Wouldn't it be nice if there were a way to avoid these situations?

Being embarrassed is a terrible feeling.

The fear of getting embarrassed is one of the root causes of social anxiety.

It keeps a lot of people away from social interaction because they're so scared of being embarrassed.

I'm going to teach you 10 different strategies for recovering from embarrassment.

Imagine you have a long-standing conflict with a friend, family-member or co-worker.

This person seems extremely angry at you, and you're pretty sure they have a long list of complaints and accusations to make against you.

Just the idea of having to face them keeps you up at night.

What if I told you there was a technique you could use that allowed you to take all of the stored-up negatives and use them to your advantage in a way that defused most of the explosive potential of the interaction?

There is.

Looking for a gift for that person in your life who's into self-improvement, who wants to be a better communicator?

I'm going to list the top five communication books that make excellent gifts this holiday season.

I've read each of these. Most of them multiple times.

I've talked about all of them on this channel, at least in part before.

I think they make excellent gifts for anyone in your life who's interested in improving their communication skills, or who's generally interested in self-improvement and wants to do a better job at communicating in work, home or their relationships.

Should we be brutally honest or considerate and polite?

There are benefits to both approaches.

Being honest seems more authentic and sincere.

We can impress people with our bold provocations.

Being polite seems kind.

We can show people we care by protecting their feelings.

You are staring at the label of a prescription drug bottle and are trying to understand what you’re reading.

You are reading the doctor’s note with instructions for what to do after surgery, and you’re scratching your head over his words.

These are examples of what is called health communication.

I am going to introduce you to the concept of health literacy.

I will tell you how it's measured, and then I will allow you to measure your own health literacy.

You find yourself in a difficult conversation.

It's very emotional and heated, and there is a lot at stake.

It is an argument about what's true and what's not true.

You've planned for this conversation, but then you get in the conversation and you say the wrong thing. It comes out all garbled and just doesn't turn out right.

How do we learn exactly what to say?

How do we know to say the right thing, not just have some general principles like listen or be empathic, but how do we know exactly what words to say?

I'm going to tell you a little bit about how communication really works, that will help you learn exactly what to say in these difficult conversations.

When we think about social interaction or communication, we normally think of the most typical case, which is a two people face-to-face talking to one another.

But in fact, Erving Goffman in his discussion of the idea of participation recognized that there were many, many different ways for people to participate in social encounters.

Directly participating in a face-to-face interaction where two people are talking is the most typical prototype of social interaction, but it is not the only way in which we can participate.

In fact, participation is a complex concept in communication.

It's useful to understand it in more detail.

One of the things that makes us afraid of communication is the prospect of embarrassing ourselves.

There's no way around it.

There's a lot of ways we can embarrass ourselves in ordinary interaction.

In fact, many of the structures in ordinary interaction are there precisely to give us a way to avoid embarrassment and to repair embarrassment, should it occur.

These are everyday actions you do that can embarrass yourself or the person you're speaking to.

I'm going to make this explanation using Erving Goffman's concept of face, and Brown and Levinson's concept of politeness.

I have a close friend who is going through a difficult time.

He called me up to talk about his troubles. I listened for a (short) while, and then I gave him some advice.

That didn't turn out so well. He got upset at me.

So it got me thinking – what are the keys to giving good advice? When should we give it? How should we give it?

I will teach you my 3 Golden Rules for giving advice and 4 reasons why you might want to think twice before the next time you're tempted to give advice.

One of the reasons people fail in communication is because they're stuck inside their own heads.

They can't understand the perspective of their audience.

This is especially true if you have complex information to communicate.

I’m going to give you four simple techniques to allow you to effectively communicate complex information.

We live in an interdependent world.

We can't do everything ourselves.

At home and at work, we need to be able to influence other people to do what we want.

Learning how to do so is the art and science of persuasion, a topic that has been written about continuously for 2500 years.

There are many proven persuasion techniques.

I am going to teach you about one of Dale Carnegie's favorite persuasion tips: Altercasting.