My title make it looks like I'm screaming, right?
During my classes, this week we talked a great deal about communication and how it can positively and negatively impact the wellbeing of a marriage or a family. When we hear about people communicating, we usually think of one person speaking to another, but there is a lot more going on when two persons are speaking, the voicer tone we use and our body language can say so much more that our spoken words, actually, Dr. Albert Mehrabian say that spoken words account for 7% of the communication, our tone of voice for 38% , and body language accounts for a huge 55 percent.
I worked in a restaurant when I was younger, and I can say that this is completely true, sometimes I had to serve people that was very bossy and diminishing to me and the rest of the staff, and even though they used the same words as the people that we felt treated us with respect, their verbal tone was so much different than the people we liked to serve, and their body language was so bossy, sometimes it came off as aggressive, sadly most of the times their tips weren’t as aggressive as we would have liked.
After four years of being married, me and my wife came to the realization that whenever we had disagreements, it was not because we tried to hurt the other or because we were just trying to be rude, it was always because we did not communicate properly, or simply put, we did not communicate properly. Sometimes sharing what we feel can be hard, sometimes we don’t even know what we are feeling and how it affects what we do or say and putting these feelings into words requires a great deal of effort and time to get to know ourselves and our reactions in different situations. Sometimes, even after getting to know what we are feeling and what triggered that feeling, I still struggle to talk about it, when there is nothing that stops me from doing so.
During class, we also learned about the five secrets of effective communication, which I will call the EAR method from now on. This name is an acronym for Empathy, Assertiveness and Respect. It teaches how to talk and not just talk, but communicate properly with someone when there might be issues related to miscommunication, things that are hard to talk about, situations when someone might get hurt by our words, or when we have to talk about serious topics.
Basically, this is an explanation of what each letter in the ear method works and some information on how to apply it”
Empathy: Hearing what the other person is saying, and trying to get into their mindset to figure out what they are thinking and feeling these are some techniques on how to practice empathy in communication:
- The Disarming Technique (DT): Find the truth in what they are saying, even if you disagree.
- Thought Empathy (TE): Restate what the other person said in your own words to show you understand (and give them a chance to correct if you got it wrong)
- Feeling Empathy (FE): Guess what the other person is feeling in light of what they just said (and give them a chance to correct it if you got it wrong)
Assertiveness: Communicating what you are thinking and feeling in a way that the other person can understand and more easily empathize with, some techniques you can use when trying to be assertive are these:
- Communicate Your Feelings (CF): Tell the person how you feel using "I Feel" statements.
- Only communicate feelings that you are having, not things like "I feel attacked" which is the same as saying "You are attacking me". The feeling should be about you. If it ends in "ed", make sure it is something about you (like I feel tired), and not something about them like I feel disrespected (same as You are being disrespectful). If it is not about you, it's not a "feeling" for the purposes of EAR communication.
Respect: Let the other person know that you love and respect them by finding something good to say about them even when you are feeling hurt and defensive.
- Stay calm and respectful and point out some genuinely good things about the other person. This means seeing their kindness even if they are not showing it right now. What do you like about them? You can still be angry, and let them know it, but point out the good things about them that make you like them too.
Feelings Wheel
One extra resource I’d like to add, is the feeling circle, sometimes we don’t know how we feel and this can affect communication, this wheel can help you find exactly what you are feeling, and help you find what is causing those feelings and you can think of ideas on how to help yourself overcome those feelings:
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