Clear Communication
Clear communication is the mindset of stating our needs and preferences clearly and to listen to others with the intention of understanding them fully. When communicating clearly we express our thoughts and feelings with clarity and accuracy, using words and behaviour that convey our meaning successfully. When listening clearly, you are seeking to understand the meaning of the other person’s message from their perspective as communicated by their words and behaviour.
The truth is more important than the facts.
Would that it were that simple. There are many things that make clear communication challenging and it helps to be aware of what they are if we want to understand others and be understood by them. People do not always say what they mean. The same words have different meanings for different people. We sometimes “filter” what we hear so it isn’t what was said. We can be so occupied with thinking about what we want to say next, that we are not attending closely to what is being said. We do not check out if we understood what was said. People put up barriers to protect themselves (we all know the frustration of people who will NOT listen!). We criticise, blame, threaten, moralise, advise – none of which creates a situation where clear communication is possible.
I’ve spent years learning and training other people in the skills of clear communication because that is basically what people training to be counsellors learn. We have discovered that clear communication has the power to heal us. But it is a human, not a specialist skill. We are all capable of communicating clearly. It is a skill that can transform our relationship with others.
Active Listening
There’s a lot more to listening that just hearing what the person said. If we’re talking and the person we’re talking to simply shuts up and doesn’t say anything, we will falter to a halt. Try it out. We just cannot keep talking without getting some sort of response from the other person. Training as a counsellor is basically learning to do consciously and more skilfully something we all do all the time. There are tricks that help
- Let the person know what you’ve heard. Put it in your own words. “so what I think you’re saying is…” and listen carefully for the correction.
- Go beneath what’s being said, the story, the content and pay attention to the feelings, the process, the source of the upset.
“I get the impression that you are feeling confused by all the different things going on in your life” or
“If I was in your shoes, I’d be feeling really angry right now” – when it comes to uncomfortable emotions, it’s a good idea to give people the space to choose whether or not they want to own that feeling right now. I’ve had people in counselling rooms who’ve been red in the face with fury and have all but shouted “I’m not angry!” - Join them in your heart. Whatever people share with us, we will somewhere along the line, know an experience that resonates with what they are saying. That’s the basis of empathy, the ability and willingness to stand in their shoes and accept their feelings.
Speaking your truth.
Possibly the single most important skill I have learnt in the last twenty years is to “speak from the ‘I”. When we choose to speak from the ‘I’ (e.g. instead of saying “you never listen to me” say “I feel you are not hearing what I am saying”) we are taking responsibility for our own thoughts, our own feelings, and our own behaviour.
It is also a skill I have taught lots of people and it takes time and awareness to develop. When something that someone else does disrupts us in some way the tendency is to make them responsible for our experience, to accuse. We need to practice taking responsibility for our own experience. Whatever they are doing, it is our experience of it, filtered through whatever lens we are using to interpret the meaning of their actions that is the source of our discomfort. Practise. Learn how to start sentences with “I see…, I think…, I feel…, I want…,Speaking from the ‘I’ is a skill that is invaluable in working through issues with others but it takes practice and if we are to have it when we need it, we need to have developed it as a habit.
The Golden Rules of Relating
- Rationality: even if they are acting emotionally – balance emotions with reason.
- Understanding: even if they misunderstand you, understand them.
- Communication: even if they are not listening, consult them on matters which affect them.
- Reliability: even if they are trying to deceive you, you neither trust nor deceive. Be reliable.
- Non-coercive modes of influence: even if they are being coercive, neither yield to their pressure nor pressurise them. Be open to persuasion and be persuasive.
Communicating clearly in conflict
Beneath every conflict, is a desire to connect.
One of the demands that the mindset of clear communication makes, is that we undertake to communicate clearly regardless of how the other person behaves; that we follow the golden rules of relating no matter what they do. It’s one thing to talk to people when we are in harmony with them but another when their behaviour is challenging us. We often make assumptions based on people’s behaviour. We decide that we know what it means, and we don’t check it out with them if our interpretation is right, we just react on the basis of our own assumptions. Which generally leads to an accusation
“Don’t roll your eyes at me! What the hell is wrong with you?”
Speaking from the ‘I’ opens up a possible way of addressing this more positively using the DESC format.
The DESC Model
- Describe – What you saw -i.e. actions, expressions
- “When I saw you…”
- Effect – Identify feelings, how it affected you
(i.e. confused, hurt, angry) - “I felt…”
- State the assumption
- “I assumed you…”
- Clarify/invite them to clear their intent
- “I’m wondering what all that was about…” Or
“I’d like to know what you intention was in doing this.”
And the above example becomes
“When I saw you roll your eyes and heave a sigh, I was angry. I assumed that you were dismissing what I was saying. So I’d like to know what was it about?”
If you’re reading this thinking, well that’s grand in theory, but it’s near impossible when the blood’s up, you’re about right. It’s all very stilted and formulistic and it takes time for it to become more natural. Like when you’re learning to drive a car and are conscious of all the different things you have to remember to do, keep practising and over time behaviour becomes habitual. Whenever you speak from the ‘I’, or recognise and check out your assumptions, or focus on understanding clearly what the other person is saying, you will reap the benefits of communicating more skilfully.
My experience of Clear Communication
In the book with the tarot pack I use Liz Green describes the King of Cups as “the wounded healer, the figure who through compassion and empathy can heal others yet who cannot heal his own hurt.” I got this card over and over again in the years I lived in Derry. I encountered people as a counsellor, supervisor, trainer, lecturer, group work facilitator but never just as me. I taught communication but I rarely just talked to anybody.
The illnesses we get always make sense. I got hyper-thyroidism and had a goitre the size of a grapefruit. There was a lot I was not saying. I was hiding behind a professional mask and growing increasingly isolated; I had trained myself into the idea that my job in life was to listen, not to speak. It was not balanced.
I arrived in Glastonbury a couple of years back as a seriously burnt out case. I’ve found my voice here but for all the wonderful things I’ve learnt, when it comes to interacting with people I don’t know, I seem to mess up my communications about as much as anybody else does.
But on the other hand, I have the most amazing relationship with my daughter. My connection with my mother was a rope woven of equal amounts of love and hate and it seemed that at every encounter it became more knotted. I grew up in a world where the rule was never to say what was going on. We lived in a complex web woven from my mother’s pain and the way that twisted her perceptions of the world. Nobody ever said what they meant, nothing that was really going on was acknowledged; it was confusing, crazy-making.
So it’s quite something to have the open warm affectionate relationship I have with my daughter. It is not perfect but we have amazing conversations and I have the communication with her that I wished I could have experienced with my mother. Yet when I look at it truthfully, the only real difference between how I handled things and how Mum did (for I am truly her daughter) is that there is now, and always has been, permission to tell it like it is. That’s what clear communication is about, telling it like it really is, hearing it like it really is. We can all do it if we want to.