Practicing Interpersonal Communication

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Adopt the "Continuous Learning" Approach to Living

Living as Learning

Looking at each day of your life as an opportunity to become a more successful communicator. In this chapter I hope to get you excited about every conversation being an opportunity to practice the six skills described in the first six chapters of this workbook. That probably sounds about as exciting as washing dishes. But, as far as I have been able to discover, better listening and better self-expression are very similar to better basketball-playing, better guitar playing and better everything else. All significant human abilities develop through attention, practice and faith in your ability to develop.

In order for us to invest the necessary time and effort required to become radiantly successful communicators, it is vital for us to develop a faith in the possibilities of our own development (and in the development of our families, and of all the teams of which we are members). People everywhere plant and tend the vegetables in their gardens with the faith that there will be a harvest. Musicians practice every day with the faith that their skills will improve. At their best, parents and coaches believe in us so that, relying on their encouragement, we practice enough to have the successes that will allow us to start believing in ourselves. As your coach via the printed page, I hope the information in this chapter (and readings) will support you in believing in yourself more deeply, so that you will practice enough to discover your own many capacities for skillfulness and excellence.

Could practice matter more than talent!

A recent statistical analysis of Olympic gold medal winners produced a result that is both startling and reassuring. The single most important factor in winning a gold medal was having practiced longer than one's competitors. The analysis showed that the winners had consistently started to practice their skills earlier in life than everyone else in the contests. The evidence strongly suggests that gold medal winners are not necessarily more talented than everybody else. They just work much harder and much longer at being athletes than everyone else does. What this implies to me is that, with intensive practice, most skills are within the reach of most people.

Over-learning

There is an important psychological principle at work in all skill development and that principle is called overlearning. If we learn something just well enough to do it once successfully, we will not actually remember how to do it for very long. To master a skill, we have to practice it a lot more than would seem necessary. In order to remember better communication skills in the middle of arguments and tense negotiations, a person needs to feel very competent and comfortable in using those skills, just as an accomplished musician can play musical scales without even thinking about it. (Even the greatest of musicians still practice many hours a week). The reward for practicing your communication skills is that you will feel better about yourself and your connections to the people around you, and be able to face conflict situations more confidently. You will probably also be able to get more of what you want -- by being skillful enough to help your partners in living and working get more of what they want, too.

Doing what comes naturally

It might seem as though we ought to be able to get through life by just "doing what comes naturally," that we should not have to try so hard. I certainly wish that were possible. But if you stop to reflect on how humans learn to talk, it is clear that, as far as communication skills are concerned, we are born knowing how to cry, how to nurse, and how to learn everything else. That's about it. Almost all of what seems ‘natural' to us now is the result of intense learning all through our lives. As natural as it may feel to use sarcasm or ask self-defeating questions, these are actions we actually learned by copying others. We can learn new skills that will in time feel as natural as the old ones. In fact, learning new skills is the most natural thing in the world. It is what we are designed to do as creatures with big brains and multipurpose hands.

A homework assignment for the rest of our lives

Mastering the communication skills described in this workbook means:

learning to see more opportunities to practice them, and
learning to link together long chains of the six conversational actions described in chapters 1 through 6.

This involves seeing everyday conversations and disagreements in a new light, seeing them as opportunities to learn, grow, practice your skills and enjoy being skillful.

Self-forgiveness, the secret partner of learning

As you see more and more opportunities to practice your skills each day, you will make an important discovery: Learning to listen and express yourself in new ways involves trial and error – you will make mistakes along the way and sometimes feel clumsy. If you interpret every mistake you make to mean that you are a terrible person, you will probably want to hide from your mistakes rather than learn from them. Consider learning to play basketball as an example. You go out on the court and throw the ball toward the basket. Sometimes the ball goes in, most of the time it does not. If you concluded, the first time the ball missed the basket, that you were a terrible basketball player and deserved to be punished for your badness, then I guarantee that you would never learn to make the ball go in the basket. Focusing on your "badness" and your feelings of shame means that you are not watching the ball. It is only by carefully watching the ball (observing your own performance) that you can learn to throw better. Did it go a little to the left? A little to the right? What did your arms and legs feel like when you threw the ball? How could you throw the ball differently?

Embracing the trial and error of living

Self-forgiveness is an important part of learning because it allows us to calm down and pay more attention to exactly what we are doing and exactly how we are doing it. The only way to learn something new is to embrace your mistakes as learning opportunities. No human person is born with all the skills and knowledge they will need in life. No one can perfectly anticipate the thoughts, feelings and needs of others. And because life is full of utterly new situations, hardly anyone ever fulfills their responsibilities as well as they would like. Thus life is one long process of exploratory trial and error in which making mistakes is inevitable. We can learn an enormous from the mistakes we make, but only if we can face them and admit them. Two of the greatest temptations in life involve avoiding embarrassment by either pretending that we never make mistakes or trying to justify actions that we ourselves know were or are mistakes. But if we fall into either of those patterns, we risk becoming entangled in a web of rigid artificiality that makes learning new communication skills nearly impossible.

Instead, I suggest that you adopt an attitude of compassionate forgiveness toward yourself for all the mistakes you have made and will make, and commit yourself deeply to learning what each mistake has to teach you about improving. If we get in the habit of learning from our many small mistakes by becoming more attentive and observant persons, we will make fewer big ones.

You can also announce to all your important conversation partners that you are trying new ways of talking and listening, and may have to work at it for a while to get good at it. Most of the people around you are in the same situation as you: wanting to function more successfully in life but afraid of looking or sounding clumsy when they try something new. So it would be a good idea, along with forgiving yourself, to create an atmosphere of patience and forgiveness at home and at work so that both you and others can start over as often as needed. (The attitude of forgiveness I am recommending here is central to the teaching of many great saints and psychologists. However, it is also true that if someone you are close to is violent or is abusing drugs or alcohol, you need to see a counselor right away to help you set appropriate boundaries and work out relationship agreements).

On the following page you will find my list (one interpretation, of course) of the basic situations in which people talk and listen, seen as opportunities to grow (and make many fruitful mistakes!). Each of these situations represents an open horizon: there is no limit to how much awareness, skill, and compassion we can bring into each of these communication activities. And there is no limit to how good we can feel when we do them well.

Our homework assignment for this Challenge is to continue the process that began at the moment of our births: to keep on learning about the life that lives between us. One way of helping that learning happen is to keep a journal of your experiences as you try new ways of listening and expressing yourself, new ways of asking questions and expressing appreciation. You can think of your journal as a patient listener who is available twenty-four hours a day! In addition to daily learnings, your journal can be a place where you make periodic reviews of your progress. For example, how do you feel about your overall level of skill, satisfaction and development in each of the activities listed on the following page? If you write down your answers to this life-inventory every year or two in your journal, you will begin to see more clearly the dimensions of your own life journey.

Conversation: Creating The Life That Lives Between Us (and within us, too)

Talking about my thoughts, feelings, experiences and wants with the people who are close to me in my life...