Com101 – Conscious Practice

Reading up on healthy communication and declaring, “from now on, I’m only using healthy forms of communication,” does nothing.

The Greek poet Archilochus said, “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations, we fall to the level of our training.”  I have found this statement to be painfully true, especially when emotions get involved.  It’s like all my good intentions, plans, and knowledge get tossed right out the window.  In mere moments, both my loved ones and I are acting like two children on a playground, arguing over who gets to use the swing next.

Think about your “training” when it comes to communicating through heightened emotions and conflict.  Odds are your “training” was from the perspective of a kid who experienced emotionally charged adults interact with powerless kids, like yourself, or interacting with other emotionally charged adults.  How did the adults from your younger years handle themselves in conflict and how does it compare to the way you wish to handle yourself in conflict today?  Did they sit down and have a conversation about uncomfortable things until those things were resolved, or did they argue?  Were voices raised?  When an adult was unhappy in a store or shop, how did they interact with the staff?  How about the other adults you unconsciously modeled your behavior off like family, babysitters, teachers, and neighbors.

If you’re anything like me, your training was watching a bunch of “adults” navigate conflict when they never had any conscious training of their own.  Who would have taught them the skills of calmly and effectively communicating through emotions or conflict?  Your parents’ training was whatever they learned from their parents who also had no real training.  In my case, I realized my parents were barely out of high school when they had kids, and my grandparents had done the same thing.  I look back at a line of people who were having kids while still being teenagers.  How was it for your parents?  From generation to generation, how does your family communicate?  What was “normal” for you back then?  Which healthy and unhealthy patterns do you see in your parents and grandparents when they interact today?  How are you perpetuating or breaking those cycles?

Your training was also how you were reprimanded by adults as you grew up.  What was the parenting style of the adults you spent your time around?  Have you been trained to think communicating in conflict is simply the way your parents treated you as a kid?  Do you approach conflict communication as the other person should do what they are told or be punished?  Do you communicate with your friends and coworkers this way?  Do you use parenting techniques that were used on you as a child as if these techniques are okay to use on your peers?  How is that working out for you?

Your peer to peer communication training was probably how you interacted with others at school, on playgrounds, and on group projects.  How much of it was following the rules and looking to the adults to enforce rules when someone wronged you and how much was interacting with kids and working through your own problems together.  Do you seek an authority figure to get the other person to fall in line for you or do you engage with peers directly?  When you do engage with peers directly, what’s your intentions; to get them to listen, to change their mind, to understand them, or to change your own mind?

All of this combined is our communication training, or lack of.  We’ve been unconsciously learning it all our lives.  These habits and patterns are what come out of us when things get difficult, and our emotions rise.  This is what I mean when I say, “we fall to the level of our training.”  Declaring, “I’m only using healthy communication, starting today,” does nothing for us.  We need to change the unconscious patterns that surface when we’re upset.  We need to consciously practice the new habits we want to instill in our lives until they become unconscious habits.

Stumbling as we learn these new habits is inevitable.  Therefore, we must ensure we take steps to practice in low risk ways so we don’t accidently damage our relationships or slip back into our old patterns as we build these new habits.  If we try to practice on stressful subjects in rocky relationships, we may make things worse, so don’t do that.  I learned these lessons the hard way and I would love to save you that same pain if I can.

I think of practice like building up a muscle.  If you finished a book on body building, your body would not change in the slightest until you started exercising regularly and correctly.  Knowing how to do the perfect pushup is useless if you don’t actually make time to do pushups.  If you stop working out, you will begin to lose the muscle gains and you will revert to your previous state.

That’s so obvious with muscles and so easy to overlook when building communication and personal mastery skills.

To give a slight advantage, all my suggested practice will attempt to leverage existing habits by piggybacking the new skills off existing routines.  I’m just trying to make it easy.  There have been many books written on the subject of building new habits and leveraging habits.  I’ll put a couple of them in the Recommended Resources section.  It might benefit you to know that I’m tapping into lessons from books like these when I share my practice exercises.  If something seems too simple or too easy, try it anyway. The practice is more about building the habit of doing an easy action than the difficulty of the action itself.

I also have to make it very clear; you are responsible for your own growth.  I can show you a direction and a path, but you get to decided where you will go and how you will get there.  My path works fantastically for me and people who might think and operate like me, but it’s also merely a suggestion.  In the end, I recommend you do whatever works best for you.  You are the expert on you.  You know how you might sabotage yourself and how to set yourself up for success.  Whatever you need to do to commit yourself to your own healing and growth, do that.

I strongly advise you don’t drop any expectations or obligations involving this series onto your significant other.  You reading this series does not obligate them to do anything or to practice with you.  It would be wonderful if they did express genuine curiosity about the series and in your communication skills, but it is not their job.  Your growth is not their job and vice versa.  Commit to doing what you need to do to improve your skills and then see which friends or family members are excited about practicing with you.  Maybe start a practice club if you need people to practice with (see the next heading for more details on this).  Just make sure you’re working with people who are enthusiastic about their own journey and their own personal growth and not people who feel like they are doing it for you or doing you a favor.

If your significant other is not interested, let them be not interested.  Don’t blame them or build resentment about it.  Don’t let their lack of interest become an excuse for giving up or a target for resentment.  Don’t try to force them to use the tools in this series.  That is not fair to you or them.  Instead of focusing on them and their participation, focus on your own boundaries and rules of engagement for anyone who attempts to interact with you.

It’s crucial that we all practice in safe, low risk, environments with safe, low risk, topics.  If one of your relationships is about to explode over, “what do you want for lunch,” then don’t practice these communication tools on that topic with that person.  That would be self-sabotage.  Instead, practice on little things that don’t really matter so much.  Practice in the breakroom at work or with people you bump into at the grocery story.  Practice in the comment section of social media posts on trivial topics that you have little to no emotions about.  There are so many little daily interactions that can be a wealth of low-risk opportunities to practice new communication skills.

As you successfully practice and wrack up a pile of low-risk healthy communication victories, you will find yourself graduating to practicing with medium-risk topics and getting medium-risk victories.  There is no need to rush this, it will come naturally.

At some point, your mindset will begin to change as a result of all these healthy communication victories.  Where you used to brace for impact before walking into a stressful conversation, you will instead start expecting things to stay calm and go smoothly.  Where you used to anticipate incoming attacks on whatever you have to say, you will now expect the other person to simply hear you.  It’s a combination of getting better at communicating and choosing to not interact with people who don’t meet your rules for respectful engagement.

Your idea of what “normal” communication looks like is going to change.  As it does, you will find yourself surrounded by people who somehow already have many of these communication skills.  It’s like learning to play a new sport.  In doing so, you end up with a circle of friends who already know how to play that sport.  As your skills shift, so will your inner circle.  It will become easier and easier to communicate because of who you choose to surround yourself with.

Running A Practice Group

A communication practice group is nothing more than a regular timeslot on the calendar where some people practice one or more of the exercises in this series –or some other series if that works for you.

Don’t get caught up on the name of the group or who to invite.  It doesn’t matter if you call it a “practice group”, “communication experiments”, or whatever.  What matters is that you stick to the regular time slot and run the group even if only two people show up.  Rather than scrutinizing who to invite, just announce it on whatever social media you prefer and let people opt in.  Something simple like, “hey I’m reading this web series on communication and it has some group activities.  Would anyone be interested on getting together and experimenting with some communication techniques over dinner or coffee?  The running time would be 30 minutes to an hour.”

When everyone arrives, here is a simple format for running a group.

1. Gather in a circle, either around a table or with a circle of chairs.
2. Intentions: “Welcome to this communication experiment. The intention is to get a little uncomfortable and practice healthy communication techniques.  Participation is optional.  If you don’t want to do something, feel free to say so and pass.  Out of respect for each other’s time, can we all agree to not get lost in tangents and stories?”  This would be a great time to give a quick recap of the skills the group practiced last time.
3. A clear start: Take 3 deep breaths together.  This will clearly mark the beginning of the session and serve to distance everyone from the turbulence of their individual days.  (Breathe in; count 4 seconds.  Hold 1 second.  Breathe out; count 6 seconds.  Hold 1 second.)
4. Pick a tool or exercise from this series, there is a list in the table of contents/index (coming soon). Start at the beginning of the series.  Don’t rush to new tools.  Practice tools a few times over multiple meetings before moving on to new tools.
5. Read or recap the section that explains the tool.
6. Practice the tool or do the exercise by either (a) doing it all together, like the deep breathing; (b) going around the circle giving each person a chance to do the activity while everyone else observes and gives gentle feedback; or (c) have every other person become a pair with their neighbor and have each pair do the activity together.
7. Share: go around the circle one at a time and give each person an optional moment to share anything constructive that came up for them. Use the prompt, “what stood out for you?”
8. Check in on time and the group’s energy. If more group practice is desired, either do the tool again (step 6) or pick a new tool (step 4).  Shorter meetings are better.  This could also be the perfect moment to take a small break.  (See suggestions after these instructions.)
9. A clear end: close the group by taking 3 deep breaths together again.
10. Improvements? Go around the circle and use the prompt, “what’s one thing that worked and one thing we could try next time to make the group a little better?”
11. Schedule the next meeting together.

You don’t have to follow those steps word for word, but I find it helps to have a few bullet points to ensure the group actually delivers the value it says it will.  It has been my experience that a group without a plan will flounder and end up on tangents.  A group that flounders and eats up time or a group that simply doesn’t deliver value for the attendees, is a group that people stop showing up to.

Too keep the meeting short and focused, I included a couple words in the opening about no long stories or monologuing.  If tangents and stories become an issue, I’ll introduce a 2-minute timer so everyone gets the same amount of time to talk.  If people interrupting each other becomes an issue, I’ll introduce a “talking stick” or object.  Only the person holding the stick gets to talk and when they are done, they pass the stick.

If anyone’s emotions get elevated to more than a 2 out of 10, take a timeout and a few deep breaths as a group.

It helps to keep the total time of the group shorter so people don’t get mentally or emotionally drained.  A 15-to-30-minute group is great when paired with another event like a potluck, coffee, or board games.  It can be a ritual people do before the main event or something to do during the main event.  For example, running the group before the meal or during the meal itself.

If the group is going to meet for a longer amount of time, I have found that 2 hours is about the limit of most people’s time, attention, and emotions.  If your group wants to run for more than 1 hour, be sure to take a very clear break each hour to allow some time for emotional space and recovery.  When the group continues after the break, do a couple deep breaths together to get grounded again.

The goal of the group is not to race through all the material in this series.  It’s to create a habit of having a safe space to communicate in.  The better each person gets at creating and holding this safe space, the more often they will find themselves naturally doing it in everyday life.