In 2012, a new blog entry will appear every Monday morning (central time zone) to give you some tools, tips, or ideas to start your week. In this first entry, we cover the three pieces of enduring good news about human communication. Here’s to a wonderful 2012. Happy New Year.
Question Suggestion (Part Two): Bad Questions
Bad questions impede understanding, sow confusion, or stifle the flow of information. Even worse, bad questions often lead to conversational escalations that dramatically increase the likelihood of relational damage. Strive to keep your bad questions from seeing the light of day, and respond appropriately when someone asks you a faulty question. Read on for strategies to assist.
Calm After the Storm
Effective communicators know how to restore peace and harmony following conversations that go poorly. Negative incidents can do serious relational damage and make future conversations even more challenging. To recover from conversational trouble and protect against lasting damage to your
Key Rules for Effective Conversational Containment
Not only is this consulting free, it is meaningful.
Here are four tips to get you started on building your containment muscle. For a discussion of why containment matters, refer to Keep Conversations from Escalating.
They Asymmetry of Human Communication
The fundamental asymmetry of human communication is this: Building good relationships takes time, but damaging them doesn’t.
The type of strong, thriving, and enriching relationships that we all desire can only be built slowly, over weeks and months and years. But we can seriously damage the very same relationships in seconds with ill-advised or emotionally charged words.
Because of this asymmetry, we should approach human communication with the utmost care and reverence. There is nothing more precious than our closest relationships. And we build, protect, and maintain our closest relationships through our communication.