TRULY effective communication

One way to increase your return on life is to improve communications with those you interact with. You've probably all heard that a good communicator has one mouth and two ears for a reason. Steven Covey references "seeking to understand." I had a recent learning in this area: it's not just surface listening, but deep listening, that is required to truly communicate well.

My husband loves cars, and he tends to get bored with whatever vehicle he has after a couple of years. I am the complete opposite--as long as a car gets me where I want to go, I wouldn't care if I owned it for ten years. We've gotten used to each other's preferences in this regard, but I was still missing something about this until not long ago. I had noticed that when we did get a new vehicle, it was only a matter of weeks before Steve began talking about the latest and greatest vehicle that was being developed and pointing out every new car on the road. I found myself thinking "Wow, he's already unhappy with the car we just got, he already wants the newer, better one." You can imagine I was feeling stressed, because the last thing I wanted to do at that point was think about a new car.

I finally said something to him about it, and an amazing thing happened: I found out that it wasn't at all that he was unhappy with the current car, he just LOVES CARS! He notices every new model and what he likes and dislikes--probably like some people are with clothing fashions. He was just enjoying looking and talking about it.

By voicing my frustration, I found out that I had made an incorrect assumption and was feeling stressed as a result. Since I now understand what's actually going on in his head, I can actually enjoy his passion of the cars and not be consumed with thinking we were headed off to the new car lot immediately!

I imagine you are aware that you need to listen to others to communicate well, but are you REALLY listening? It's not as easy as we think!