How to Break Down Someone’s Communication
Have you ever been in the situation where you knew the person you were talking to was wrong, or limited in their perception, but couldn’t figure out how to help them understand? What did you do?
In this post, we’re going to go into exactly how you can prevent communication breakdown.
Likely you went and tried to convince them the error of their ways. You told them by using logic and words that they needed to see your perspective of things. You told them the insight that they were missing and you did this with all good intentions, but more likely than not, you got nowhere.
When we are communicating with others we often want them to see our points of view and agree with us. Usually what we don’t understand is that their path to understanding is their own and only they can come to the conclusion that suits them best. While you might think this is limiting, this is empowering in the most beneficial way possible.
You can stop trying to convince others of things. You can stop trying to get others on your side. It is no longer necessary to win in conversations. Instead you can influence and inspire what may come.
Richard Bandler and John Grinder first found the Meta Model many years ago. Using NLP and what worked in therapy, they learned how to ask the right questions in order to allow others to see new perspectives. While in-depth knowledge of this is highly beneficial, I am going to give you something that you can use right now.
Behind everyone’s problem is a linguistic expression of that experience. By knowing how that expression is limited, and how to better show the other person how the expression is limited, we can help lead the person we are communicating with to a new way of thinking.
“He makes me so angry!”
When you hear something like this some kind of alarm should go off in your head. You may or may not know this, but there is no way that one person can make another person feel a certain way. Let us explore…
Me: “How specifically does he make you angry?”
Them: “He doesn’t listen to me and it makes me feel bad.”
Me: “So by him not listening to you it causes you to feel bad?”
Them: “Yes.”
Me: “Then your mood is dependent on this other person, correct? When did you decide to let this person’s actions dictate how you feel?”
Them: “Umm…”
Me: “Might it be that you can choose to feel bad or good no matter what this external person does? Can you allow yourself to feel really good right now just talking to me here?”
Them: “Oh wow, I never thought of it like that.”
Me: “The truth is that we have control over our own emotions. And in the same way that one person can react differently to two different people who do the same thing to them, we also have the choice of how to feel about those actions at any time.”
When you can explore elegantly another person’s map of the world you will find that there are times where some information is missing and thus why they are having a problem.
Because the mind cannot be a full representation of our experience it distorts, deletes, and generalizes all the information taken in.
This causes problems because reality isn’t the same as our experience. When we can point to these pieces of missing information elegantly, we can help a person see new points of view. Likely they will even agree with us.
