Many of us have more resistance than we realize because much of it is buried in the subconscious.
We need to protect ourselves. Homo sapiens is a vulnerable creature in a dangerous world. However, some methods of protection arrest our development while others work positively for us. One of the key elements in learning communication skills is to discover how to protect oneself adequately while reducing unnecessary defensiveness. Guidelines in various sections of this book will help you protect yourself from needless risk while you learn to use these new skills.
FIVE SETS OF SKILLS
Five clusters of skills critical to satisfying interpersonal relationships are taught in this book:
Listening skills: These methods enable a person to really understand what another person is saying. They include new ways of responding so that the other person feels his problems and feelings have been understood. When these methods are used appropriately, the other person often solves his problems without becoming dependent on you.
Assertion skills: These verbal and nonverbal behaviors enable you to maintain respect, satisfy your needs, and defend your rights without dominating, manipulating, abusing, or controling others.
Conflict-resolution skills: These abilities enable you to deal with the emotional turbulence that typically accompanies conflict—abilities that are likely to foster closer relationships when the strife is over.
Collaborative problem-solving skills: These constitute a way of resolving conflicting needs that satisfies all parties—it is a way of solving problems so they stay solved.
Skill selection: These guidelines enable you to decide what communication skills to use in any situation in which you find yourself.
These are the basic communication tools required for effective human relationships. They are the fundamentals.
Part of the strength of this program of communication training lies in the wide range of skills it includes. Many programs concentrate on listening skills, but do not teach people how to assert constructively. In recent years, people have been flocking to programs that help develop assertiveness, but ignore the need for attentive listening. Courses that combine listening and assertion seldom give adequate attention to methods of resolving the conflicts and solving the problems that are inevitable in all human relationships. It is even more unusual to find a communication skills program that helps you figure out when to use the skills being taught and when they are inappropriate. It is futile to use a skill well but use it in the wrong situation. Our program includes what we believe are the most fundamental skills of interpersonal communication.17
What is excluded from this book, however, is as important as what is included. Many books on interpersonal communication include such a broad range of skills to be developed and theories to be explored that the reader’s energy is dissipated. Skill development requires a sharp focus—a concentration of energy. In the teaching of basic communication skills, as in so many other areas, the guideline of a famous architect holds true—“Less is more.” One of the reasons for our success in helping people communicate better has been our insistence on sticking to the fundamentals. People learn best when they are not overwhelmed with too many topics and too much detail.
SUMMARY
Although interpersonal communication is humanity’s greatest accomplishment, the average person does not communicate well. Low-level communication leads to loneliness and distance from friends, lovers, spouses, and children—as well as ineffectiveness at work.
Research studies indicate that, despite a tendency toward defensiveness, people of all ages can learn specific communication skills that lead to improved relationships and increased vocational competence. These more desirable ways of relating will be presented in succeeding chapters of this book.
CHAPTER TWO
Barriers
to Communication
A barrier to communication is something that keeps meanings from meeting. Meaning barriers exist between all people, making communication much more difficult than most people seem to realize. It is false to assume that if one can talk he can communicate. Because so much of our education misleads people into thinking that communication is easier than it is, they become discouraged and give up when they run into difficulty. Because they do not understand the nature of the problem, they do not know what to do. The wonder is not that communicating is as difficult as it is, but that it occurs as much as it does.1
—Reuel Howe, theologian and educator
COMMON COMMUNICATION SPOILERS
Sue Maxwell, a woman in her mid-thirties, sighed as she said, “Well, I blew it again. We took the family to visit my parents over Thanksgiving weekend. They have been under heavy emotional and financial pressure this year, and I resolved to be very gentle and caring with them. But they started criticizing the way I handle the kids and I got mad. I told them they didn’t do such a great job with me and my brother. We argued for half an hour. All three of us felt very hurt.
“This type of thing happens each time I return home,” Sue continued. “Even though they have no right to say some of the things they do, I love them and want our visits to be pleasant. But somehow, we almost always say things that hurt each other.”
Sue’s experience is, unfortunately, a common one. Whether it is with parents, children, bosses, employees, colleagues, friends, or “all of the above,” people usually long for better interpersonal results than they commonly achieve.
Since there is in most of us a strong desire for effective communication, why is it so rare and difficult to establish? One of the prime reasons is that, without realizing it, people typically inject communication barriers into their conversations. It has been estimated that these barriers are used over 90 percent of the time when one or both parties to a conversation has a problem to be dealt with or a need to be fulfilled.2
Communication barriers are high-risk responses—that is, responses whose impact on communication is frequently (though not inevitably) negative. These roadblocks are more likely to be destructive when one or more persons who are interacting are under stress. The unfortunate effects of communication blocks are many and varied. They frequently diminish the other’s self-esteem. They tend to trigger defensiveness, resistance, and resentment. They can lead to dependency, withdrawal, feelings of defeat or of inadequacy. They decrease the likelihood that the other will find her own solution to her problem. Each roadblock is a “feeling-blocker”; it reduces the likelihood that the other will constructively express her true feelings. Because communication roadblocks carry a high risk of fostering these negative results, their repeated use can cause permanent damage to a relationship.
What specific barriers are apt to hinder a conversation? Experts in interpersonal communication like Carl Rogers, Reuel Howe, Haim Ginott, and Jack Gibb3 have pinpointed responses that tend to block conversation. More recently, Thomas Gordon4 devised a comprehensive list that he calls the “dirty dozen” of communication spoilers. These undesirable responses include:
Criticizing: Making a negative evaluation of the other person, her actions, or attitudes. “You brought it on yourself—you’ve got nobody else to blame for the mess you are in.”
Name-calling: “Putting down” or stereotyping the other person “What a dope!” “Just like a woman….” “Egghead.” “You hardhats are all alike.” “You are just another insensitive male.”
Diagnosing: Analyzing why a person is behaving as she is; playing amateur psychiatrist. “I can read you like a book—you are just doing that to irritate me.” “Just because you went to college, you think you are better than I.”
Praising Evaluatively: Making a positive judgment of the other person, her actions, or attitudes. “You are always such a good girl. I know you will help me with the lawn tonight.” Teacher to teenage student: “You are a great poet.” (Many people find it difficult to believe that some of the barriers like praise are high-risk responses. Later, I will explain why I believe repeated use of these responses can be detrimental to re
lationships.)
Ordering: Commanding the other person to do what you want to have done. “Do your homework right now.” “Why?! Because I said so….”
Threatening: Trying to control the other’s actions by warning of negative consequences that you will instigate. “You’ll do it or else …” “Stop that noise right now or I will keep the whole class after school.”
Moralizing: Telling another person what she should do. “Preaching” at the other. “You shouldn’t get a divorce; think of what will happen to the children.” “You ought to tell him you are sorry.”
Excessive/Inappropriate Questioning: Closed-ended questions are often barriers in a relationship; these are those that can usually be answered in a few words—often with a simple yes or no. “When did it happen?” “Are you sorry that you did it?”
Advising: Giving the other person a solution to her problems. “If I were you, I’d sure tell him off.” “That’s an easy one to solve. First …”
Diverting: Pushing the other’s problems aside through distraction. “Don’t dwell on it, Sarah. Let’s talk about something more pleasant.” Or; “Think you’ve got it bad?! Let me tell you what happened to me.”
Logical argument: Attempting to convince the other with an appeal to facts or logic, usually without consideration of the emotional factors involved. “Look at the facts; if you hadn’t bought that new car, we could have made the down payment on the house.”
Reassuring: Trying to stop the other person from feeling the negative emotions she is experiencing. “Don’t worry, it is always darkest before the dawn.” “It will all work out OK in the end.”
WHY ROADBLOCKS
ARE HIGH-RISK RESPONSES
At first glance, some of these barriers seem quite innocent. Praise, reassurance, logical responses, questions, and well-intentioned advice are often thought of as positive factors in interpersonal relations. Why, then, do behavioral scientists think of these twelve types of responses as potentially damaging to communication?
These twelve ways of responding are viewed as high-risk responses, rather than inevitably destructive elements of all communication. They are more likely to block conversation, thwart the other person’s problem-solving efficiency, and increase the emotional distance between people than other ways of communicating. However, at times, people use these responses with little or no obvious negative effect.
If one or two persons are experiencing a strong need or wrestling with a difficult problem, the likelihood of negative impact from roadblocks increases greatly. A useful guideline to follow is, “Whenever you or the other person is experiencing stress, avoid all roadblocks.” Unfortunately, it is precisely when stress is experienced that we are most likely to use these high-risk responses.
The twelve barriers to communication can be divided into three major categories: judgment, sending solutions, and avoidance of the other’s concerns:
1. Criticizing
2. Name-calling
3. Diagnosing
4. Praising Evaluatively
JUDGING
5. Ordering
6. Threatening
7. Moralizing
8. Excessive/Inappropriate
Questioning
9. Advising
SENDING SOLUTIONS
10. Diverting
11. Logical Argument
12. Reasuring
AVOIDING THE OTHER’S CONCERNS
Let’s look in greater detail at each of these major categories of high-risk responses.
JUDGING:
THE MAJOR ROADBLOCK
Four roadblocks fall into this category—criticizing, name-calling, diagnosing, and praising. They are all variations on a common theme—judging the other person.
Psychologist Carl Rogers delivered a lecture on communication in which he said he believes the major barrier to interperpersonal communication lies in our very natural tendency to judge—to approve or disapprove of the statements of the other person.5
Few people think of themselves as judgmental. Yet in that lecture, Rogers convinced many of his listeners that the tendency to judge was more widespread than they realized:
As you leave the meeting tonight, one of the statements you are likely to hear is, “I didn’t like that man’s talk.” Now what do you respond? Almost invariably your reply will be either approval or disapproval of the attitude expressed. Either you respond, “I didn’t either. I thought it was terrible.” Or else you tend to reply, “Oh, I thought it was really good.” In other words, your primary reaction is to evaluate what has just been said to you, to evaluate it from your point of view, your own frame of reference.
Or, take another example. Suppose I say with some feeling, “I think the Republicans are behaving in ways that show a lot of good sound sense these days.” What is the response that arises in your mind as you listen? The overwhelming likelihood is that it will be evaluative. You will find yourself agreeing, or disagreeing, or making some judgment about me such as “He must be a conservative,” or “He seems solid in his thinking.”
In that same speech, Rogers made another important point about the human inclination to be judgmental:
Although the tendency to make evaluations is common in almost all interchange of language, it is very much heightened in those situations where feelings and emotions are deeply involved. So, the stronger our feelings, the more likely it is that there will be no mutual element in the communication. There will be just two ideas, two feelings, two judgments missing each other in psychological space. I’m sure you recognize this from your own experience. When you have not been emotionally involved yourself, and have listened to a heated discussion, you often go away thinking, “Well, they actually weren’t talking about the same thing.” And they were not. Each was making a judgment, an evaluation from his own frame of reference. There was really nothing which could be called communication in any genuine sense. This tendency to react to any emotionally meaningful statement by forming an evaluation of it from our own point of view is, I repeat, the major barrier to interpersonal communication.6
Criticizing
One of the judgmental roadblocks is criticism. Many of us feel we ought to be critical—or other people will never improve. Parents think they need to judge their children or they will never become hard-working, mannerly adults. Teachers think they must criticize their students or they will never learn. Supervisors think they must criticize their employees or production will slip. In later chapters we will see how some of the objectives we are trying to accomplish with criticism (and the other roadblocks) can be achieved more effectively by other means.
Meanwhile, it is worth observing our interactions with others to see how frequently we are critical. For some people, criticism is a way of life. One husband described his wife as being on a constant fault-finding safari. An admiral once gave White House aide Harry Hopkins the title of “Generalissimo of the Needle Brigade”7 because of the latter’s critical nature.
Name-Calling and Labeling
Name-calling and labeling usually have negative overtones to both the sender and receiver. “Nigger,” “Wasp,” “intellectual,” “brat,” “bitch,” “shrew,” “autocrat,” “jerk,” “dope,” “nag”—these all attach a stigma to the other. Some other labels, however, provide halos: “bright,” “hard worker,” “dedicated,” “a chip off the old block,” “a real go-getter.”
Labeling prevents us from getting to know ourselves and other individuals: there is no longer a person before us—only a type. The psychologist Clark Moustakas says:
Labels and classifications make it appear that we know the other, when actually, we have caught the shadow and not the substance. Since we are convinced we know ourselves and others … [we] no longer actually see what is happening before us and in us, and, not knowing that we do not know, we make no effort to be in contact with the real. We continue to use labels to stereotype ourselves and others, and these labels have replaced human meanings, unique feelings and growing life
within and between persons.8
Diagnosing
Diagnosis, a form of labeling, has plagued mankind through the centuries, but has been even more prevalent since the time of Freud. Some people, instead of listening to the substance of what a person is saying, play emotional detective, probing for hidden motives, psychological complexes, and the like.
A secretary who went to work for a psychologist resigned within a month. When a friend asked why she left the job, she explained, “He analyzed what motives were behind everything I did. I couldn’t win. If I came to work late, it was because I was hostile; if I came early, it was because I was anxious; if I arrived on time, I was compulsive.”
Perhaps you have found, as I have, that communication tends to be thwarted when one person informs another that she is being defensive, or self-deceiving, or that she is acting out of guilt or fear or some other unconscious motive or “complex.” Praising Evaluatively
There is a common belief that all honest praise is helpful. Many parents, teachers, managers, and others endorse praise without reservation. Praise “is supposed to build confidence, increase security, stimulate initiative, motivate learning, generate good will and improve human relations,” says Haim Ginott.9 Thus, at first sight, praise seems to be an unlikely candidate to qualify as a roadblock. However, positive evaluations often have negative results.
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