174 PLANNING 6 http://www.myweddingmag.co.nz 6 JULY 2019
- Send + receive = communication
The key thing to know about communicating successfully is that a message must not only
be sent, but received correctly. That is the definition of successful communication – not
just the sending part!
The good thing about this is, we can get clues to know if it was received correctly. Think
about it: the last time you said something the other person understood, how did you
know? Maybe the last time you were in the passenger seat, and future spouse was driving
and asked where you’d like to go for lunch? You might have said “I feel like something
relatively healthy after this week, we’ve mostly had takeaways and fast food. How about
<insert healthy food place>?” You know your message is received when spouse audibly
agrees, and the car arrives outside said food outlet.We can apply the same to a “difficult” conversation with the same two hints that our
message has been received:
1: an acknowledgement such as “OK”, or “well, then” and
2: proof that they’re building on that message by the next action or words.
That might mean a move forward in the conversation for example “OK, so then how
about / let’s...?” Or even “OK, sounds like a good idea, would you like start tomorrow or
Monday?”.Let’s be honest, in hard conversations, those two things hardly ever happen so easily. But
it does give us the hint that our message is not being received accurately, and our non-
verbal cues probably are not helping. Now we can focus on getting that message to be
received.- The non-verbals hack - words
As we saw above with “the tone”, in hard conversations our body language or non-
verbal cues can betray our message with a strong counter-message. Accusing, telling off,
disrespecting, these are all messages our partner may hear from these cues, accurate or
not, which trumps any other message we might be sending.
We might not quite be able to stop ourselves from doing them all the time, but we can
use verbal “hacks” to downplay their effect, to a point where our real message can get
through. In the early days, before I could figure out how to stop “the tone”, I would work
hard to explain my intention as I was trying to send a message. Things like, “this is not
your fault, I’m just trying to explain how I feel.” or “I’m not asking you to fix it, I just need
you to listen.” or “please don’t take this like I’m blaming you, I just feel really frustrated
right now and I’m finding it hard to be calm, but I’m trying”.Hacking my unavoidable non-verbal cues in this way not only helped the real message be
heard, the more I practiced them the more they helped me control my tone (or so Josh
told me; I couldn’t tell for the life of me)./Cont...