Effective Communication

Dr. Mark Goulston, clinical psychiatrist turned business coach, describes in a column of his in Fast Company his meeting with a certain high-powered personality.

Ed is a highly competent and successful CEO, respected and admired by many in the business world. He has good manners and for the most part, is respectful of others. On the other hand, his modus operandi is characterized by that typical signature-tune of highly pressured, impatient executives: "Gimme the bottom line!"

"Leaders like Ed," observes Dr. Goulston, "are superb problem-solvers when given the data,
and like data machines, they can't stand it when people belabor points with irrelevant details and stories."

So the writer tells Ed that he's highly impressed with his fine character and all his abilities and accomplishments. On hearing this heartwarming praise, Ed already senses that there's a "but" coming, and he asks Dr. Goulston what it is. His reply, apparently, was totally unexpected, and although Ed was somewhat puzzled by it, he did not dispute it:

"I wouldn't want my sister to marry you!" Why? "Because she would die of loneliness."

Dr Goulston explains: "What Ed failed to appreciate - as do many leaders who are goal driven to a fault - is that, especially at the end of the day, especially at home, the telling of the story is the data. The story itself is not all that matters. And for the data to compute in the right way to be satisfying (instead of frustrating) to the person talking, Ed and leaders like him need to provide unhurried and undivided attention."

In other words, when busy, goal oriented, and- inevitably - intimacy-challenged business people and professionals like Ed and his ilk finally touch base with their spouses at the end of the day, "Get to the point" or "Spare me the details" just won't cut it. In fact, a demand to "get to the point" is missing the point. Totally. No way to sustain an intimate relationship.

Dr Goulston quotes the eminent psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion who talks about the overriding need to "listen without memory or desire." Listening with "memory" means you have an old agenda you're trying to plug someone into; when you listen with "desire" you have a new agenda you're trying to do the same thing with.

But in either case, these are your agendas not the other person's. And the other party isn't fooled for a second.

For more insight on this topic, read the gripping but sad tale of the mysterious Harold Burwell, everybody's dream boss. Or check out my own contribution on the subject.

Labels: family life, interpersonal relationships

Stumble It!

A word, phrase, sentence or other communication is called ambiguous if it can be interpreted in more than one way. With regard to single words, the most problematic are those whose various senses express closely related concepts.

"Good", for example, can mean "useful" or "functional" (That's a good hammer), "exemplary" (She's a good student), "pleasing" (This is good soup), "moral" (He is a good person), and probably other similar things.

If I say "I have a good daughter," can you be sure what I mean exactly? Am I saying she has high ethical principles, or that she's very popular, or that she's in good shape physically, or perhaps something else?

Technically speaking, the kind of confusion I want to talk about is not correctly termed ambiguity, but vagueness. Only since most people tend to think of it as ambiguity, I'll stick to that term. Let's begin with a simple example.

"I'll be a little late tonight," Jack calls out to his wife, Jill, as he picks up his briefcase and heads out the door after breakfast. "Some clients are coming around for a quick meeting on their way home."

On an average working day, Jack gets home around 6.15. On this night, he makes his appearance at precisely 8.08. Jill is furious; she needed Jack to attend to something important that could have been completed in less than two minutes, but could only be done before eight. Jack just can't understand what the fuss is about. Didn't he tell her in advance that he intended to be a little late?

But then, he didn't mention a specific time frame, did he? To Jack, "a little late" meant one thing; to Jill it meant another.

People see things in different ways. A "carefree" attitude to one person may be "irresponsible" to another. What I call "relaxation", you may call "laziness". What's a "convenience" to you, may be "life-sustaining to your spouse; he or she may call "extravagance" what you view as "essential spending". The potential for conflict is obvious.

But even where ambiguity doesn't lead to open conflict, there still can be plenty of room for misunderstanding, confusion and doubt. Consider this scenario:

A usually ravenous teenager sits down at the dinner table. His mother notices he is doing a good job on the potatoes and salad, but is barely touching the chicken.

"Don't you like the chicken, Jim?" asks a concerned mother.

"Yeah, well, um..ah..."

"Why aren't you eating it?"

"Well, because it's white meat and I like dark meat!"

Mother explains that chickens have only two legs and this time his brothers got to them first. Had they been millionaires, she would have bought several chickens, or maybe pre-cut parts. As the reality was, Jim should realize that this was not a five-star hotel....

"It's okay, Mom, "interrupts Eli. "These potatoes are really good and I won't drop down dead if I skip the protein for one meal."

"Quite so, Jim, but by the same token, why don't you eat the white meat just for once? You're getting too picky when it comes to food. When I was your age...."

But Jim didn't hear the rest of the story because something his mother had just said made a bell go off in his head. It was all on account of one sentence he had overheard while she was speaking on the phone a few days previously. He didn't normally eavesdrop on his mother's conversations, but he had just happened to be at the right place at the right time.

Jim's parents had decided to have new kitchen cupboards installed and they had just returned from an excursion to the craftsman's showroom. His mother was discussing their exciting experience with a good friend on the phone.

"There were so many different styles on the floor, and about a dozen different shades of wood to choose from," she had said. "I just couldn't make up my mind. My husband got really impatient and said I was too picky. I told him that wasn't being picky - I was merely making a 'preference analysis.' "

So when exactly does the (illegitimate) habit of being "picky" become a (legitimate) "preference analysis"? What's the difference between being choosy with your food and being choosy over a color scheme? Teenagers are pastmasters at spotting ironic inconsistencies. To Jim, this was a glaring example if there ever was one.

We're all human. Is this kind of situation completely avoidable? I'm not sure.

But certainly, we see here once again how important it is that parents (and teachers) strive to be consistent at all times in all their interactions with their children.

Labels: family life, interpersonal relationships, marriage

Stumble It!

They're calling it the sandwich generation, since the protagonists of the drama, usually middle-aged or getting close to it, are "sandwiched" between aging parents and growing children. Others like to refer to the phenomenon as the Cluttered Nest Syndrome.

Whatever the terminology, it's a situation increasingly common in a society where, on the one hand, couples tend to marry at a later age than they did in earlier generations, and on the other, their parents, thanks to medical advances, are living longer. What this means is that more people who still have the privilege and responsibility of caring for minor children, are accepting upon themselves the additional privilege and responsibility of caring for aging parents who no longer find it easy to look after themselves.

Many writers would be inclined to substitute the word burden for privilege and responsibility on either or both sides of the equation. I do believe, though, that the words I have chosen more accurately reflect the attitudes and values of at least the majority of "sandwiched " folk. And I say this without underestimating the awesome challenges these people face day in and day out.

Indeed, it's not difficult to understand how caring for a partially or fully incapacitated parent can exact a heavy emotional toll not only on the caregiver herself, but indeed on her entire family.

I've just read a moving account of the aftermath of one dedicated mom's decision to bring her own ailing mother into the home. The stresses and strains that this placed on her relationship with her husband and children were perhaps inevitable. Yet, the way she turned a potentially volatile situation into a positive experience makes for an instructive case study in effective communication as well as in family unity.

Sarah (not her real name), a psychotherapist by profession, convened a meeting of her large family to ask for their blessing to bring her mother with Alzheimer's disease to stay with them. Some of the children were a little apprehensive, but they all agreed. Probably, they wouldn't have been so quick to assent had they realized what the intrusion would mean in the days ahead.

As Grandma's condition gradually worsened, the children became increasingly resentful of how she cling to their Mom more and more, demanding time and attention that had in the past been exclusively theirs. Their father requested that Grandma be fed earlier, so that dinner would once more be the hour of the day when the family could enjoy each other's company in relaxed fashion.

Meanwhile, the great strain, physical and emotional, of exerting herself to remain faithful to all her responsibilities was exacting its price on Sarah herself. Moreover, a special irony added to her feeling of stress. She was making sacrifices for a mother who, on account of bouts of depression and other emotional issues, had herself not given the support she had needed in her formative years.

Sarah quickly understood that she could not continue in the role of a suffering martyr forever. She called the family together again and shared with them her conflicting feelings, fears and doubts, without holding anything back. She described her physical and mental exhaustion, her frustration that she was spreading herself too thin and her feeling of despair that she was probably not doing right by anyone.

Through being completely open and frank and conceding her helplessness and vulnerability, Sarah was able to enlist the help as well as empathy of her husband and children.

A roster was drawn up and duties were allocated. From now on, each member of the family would contribute to Grandma's care on a regular basis. Whenever appropriate, Sarah would consult with her husband and children on problematic issues that arose in the course of caring for the patient. And they were not the only ones she confided in. Notwithstanding her own professional qualifications and intellectual sophistication, she didn't hesitate to seek the unbiased opinions of experienced and well-informed colleagues on such matters as conflicts between her various commitments as wife, mother and daughter.

After Sarah's mother passed away a couple of years later, Sarah had time at last to sit back and reflect on this most trying period of her whole life. In retrospect, she realized that it had also been a season of great personal achievement. For one thing, nurturing the mother who many decades earlier had failed to provide her with the mothering she had so badly needed, helped, paradoxically, to resolve the lingering issues of Sarah's childhood and promote a sense of healing.

And what's more, she had transformed a negative situation that had threatened the stability of the family into a very positive one that imprinted on the children's minds a certain perspective, and equipped them with practical skills, both of which would be invaluable in their future lives. What had almost tore the family apart had brought it closer together!

Nobody's pretending that it's easy, but the challenge is light when compared with the ultimate rewards. The most difficult situations in life provide the opportunity for the greatest growth.

Labels: family life

Stumble It!

In my previous post, we discussed how some social and interpersonal problems are often blamed on "poor communication skills" or the like. Unfortunately, however, people are inclined to confuse cause and result. They fail to distinguish between the symptoms and the disease itself, the outward manifestations and the underlying causes.

Not surprising really, because we all know that uncovering root causes is seldom easy. But of course, that's no excuse for not trying. We have to begin peeling away the surface layer that may be obscuring the reality. And if necessary, keep on peeling, layer after layer, asking ourselves "Why?" with each turn of the knife.

I recently read a poignant and revealing personal testimony of a young woman who during her teenage years had fallen victim to that traumatic and mysterious condition known as anorexia. Of course, nobody had the faintest idea why a highly intelligent youth - product of an affluent, caring and popular family - would want to inflict real pain upon her own body by physically making herself smaller, by starving herself. Even placing her very life in danger.

It just doesn't make sense. Until one starts to probe deeper. And deeper.

The young woman relates that she never felt anything was lacking in her home. Her parents met all her physical needs and tried desperately to fill her emotional needs. But in a home where everybody was expected to be positive and happy all the time, where negative emotions were somehow frowned upon, she had felt, deep down in her childhood soul, invisible. No wonder that by the age of ten she was obese.

The consequences of this were not only physical. Even though she enjoyed a special relationship with her grandmother, each time granny introduced her to someone she would say, "Here's my little fat grandchild." Other family members were hardly more tactful. It all hurt her beyond words, but in a home where conflict was to be avoided like the plague, she was afraid to express her pain.

The next step, a few years later, was perhaps inevitable: "I decided that if I became little, people would have to protect me. They would have to take notice. I wanted to be noticed.." In the end, notwithstanding the terrible price she knew she was paying, our young lady was at last getting all the love, attention and concern she had always craved.

The account I read does not say, but one wonders what was going through the minds of her parents during this heartrending period of crisis. If only... If only...

If only what?

One could speculate that had the girl only managed to communicate her pain and humiliation at her family's thoughtless references to her obesity, the outcome could have been very different. Not certain, but very likely.

But what were the impediments that prevented her from doing that? Why did she have such difficulty in expressing her natural feelings and emotions?

I'll leave a full analysis to you. (And in case you've forgotten, the "comments" button is right below!)

At any rate, we see how far we some times have to probe - with a very good measure of sensitivity, tact and common sense, of course - if we genuinely have the interests of our fellow human beings at heart. And how careful we have to be not to jump to superficial conclusions.

Labels: family life, parenting

Stumble It!

Communication breakdown is blamed for a multitude of sins in commerce, industry, government and even sporting circles. Using various news items culled from news media to illustrate her case, my colleague Helen Wilkie warns us that the symptoms should never be confused with the disease. Another site contributor, Tom Terez, makes the same point and drives it home with some very funny imaginary conversations.

What applies in business and the workplace applies in other environments, especially within the family unit.

In my last post, I wrote about difficulties some parents have in persuading their children not to smoke. It's very easy to ascribe such situations, where the older generation feels it just can't get through to the younger and the younger feels much the same way about the older, to "communication problems". That's not entirely wrong, but with every malady, physical or social, you have symptoms, and you have the underlying causes.

And we must be careful not to confuse the two.

I've seen a number of news items recently, particularly from Asian countries, about the increasing incidence of suicides by teenagers who believed they had let their parents down by performing poorly in important school examinations. Some reports specifically quoted the bereaved parents as saying that had they only known what their distraught sons or daughters were thinking, they would have taken pains to reassure them. This led local powers-that-be to propose urgent training courses for both teens and their parents in communication skills.

That's a praiseworthy objective. But are we merely talking about imparting some kind of technical skill? Why are the parties not communicating with each other? Because they don't know how? Are we sure we're not confusing cause and result?

I'll try to throw some light on these questions in my next post, by analyzing a case study relating to an emotion-driven - and sometimes fatal - disease that is sadly becoming far too common among today's youngsters.

Labels: family life, parenting

Stumble It!

I was about to settle down to write something on the communication problems of teenagers in distress, when I came across a revealing news report of recent research somewhat relevant to my topic. It concerned teens and attempts by their parents to get them to quit smoking. So this post will serve as an introduction to the next one.

In a joint project of journalism faculty members at the Universities of Missouri-Columbia and Kansas, the researchers asked youngsters questions on their knowledge of and attitudes towards smoking, and the type of communication they've had with their parents about it.

In short, they found that when parents "lecture" their offspring about the dangers of smoking without, in turn, attentively listening to what the kids have to say about it, their efforts may well be futile and and liable to backfire. In other words, one-sided communication just doesn't do the trick.

The researchers suggested that open discussions, especially if they that are part of a multiperson strategy would do a better job of deterring youth from smoking. Parents' first step should be to ask their children what they think of smoking and listen to their responses. Then, and only then, should mom and dad explain why their youngsters' perceptions or assumptions may be faulty or incomplete.

Over 20 years ago two erudite ladies wrote a runaway bestseller whose title says it all: How to Talk So Kids Will Listen and Listen So Kids Will Talk. The simple fact is that nobody, no matter how old or how young, likes to be lectured to. But there are ways of doing things to accomplish your objectives.

On the subject of improving your communication with your teenagers, you'll find this article on our site helpful.

Go to next post->

Labels: family life, parenting

Stumble It!

If you're familiar with my writings, you'll know that I'm a strong believer in the traditional family as the cornerstone and very foundation of any healthy, stable and progressive society.

See, for example, my article If Marriage Is Dead, We're All Dead, which is basically a rant against the conclusions of a so-called "research" study a few years ago, published in a very respectable scholarly journal, that fathers are wholly dispensable to the functioning of a well-balanced family unit.

In this context, I was intrigued by a recent piece by Nicole Gelinas in the New York Post which an acquaintance forwarded to me last week.

Apparently, people have been complaining in New York state that the powers-that-be haven't been allocating enough money for education. A group of activists have been fighting in the courts for ten years to wring more money from the state government for the public schools in New York City

But Gelinas points out that far too many kids in the city come to school handicapped by a significant deficit of another kind - one that can neither be measured in or fixed by dollars.

"All the money in the world," she writes, "can't negate the stubborn fact that schools must work with the raw material they've got: the children."

In other words, too many of the kids are coming from dysfunctional, fractured and warped family backgrounds filled with stress and strife. By the time they get into the school system, educators already find themselves at a severe disadvantage. Their young charges are no longer the pliable vessels they should be to receive the wisdom and instruction their teachers desire to impart to them.

Apparently, "little kids come to school with anger-management problems so deep-seated that, at ages 9 and 10, they're already dangers to themselves and others. Pregnant teachers must insert themselves into vicious fights between pint-sized children....Other kids are prematurely burnt out or acutely, clinically depressed..."

According to the writer, local public-school teachers are adamant that lots of their kids are smart and creative, but they live "in noisy, polluted apartments where its impossible to grow or think amid a cacophony of honking horns and blaring music. Further, "the kids must deal with their mothers' and grandmothers' endless parade of new boyfriends, new apartments and new jobs." Apparently, single moms still head more than one-third of New York City's households.

And we can be pretty sure, unfortunately, that this kind of tragedy is hardly confined to New York City or the U.S. The phenomenon is widespread in many countries.

Healthy kids from healthy backgrounds shouldn't have problems learning how to read or do basic math. As always, the Family is King!

For the poor and underprivileged, a little money never hurts.

But if we want to be parents, we have to exert ourselves to give our wonderful offspring what all the state funding, indeed all the money in the world, can't buy.

******

On the topic of our responsibilities as parents, you might find this read on the site of value: When 'Everybody Does It' Comes Back to Haunt You.

Labels: family life, parenting

Stumble It!