A BAKER’S DOZEN GREAT SUGGESTIONS FOR IMPROVING RELATIONSHIPS AT HOME AND WORK
By Bill Cottringer

Our main source of happiness comes from good work and personal relationships; and our main source of unhappiness comes from bad work and personal relationships. The main thing that contributes to the good or bad direction of these relationships is communication. Below are twelve great suggestions that are sure to improve your communication and increase your happiness in personal and work relationships.

1. In the beginning of any relationship, devote considerable time and effort to build good rapport and trust (and frequently re-establish these things later) with others to establish a solid foundation that won’t crumble with the first bit of conflict that will inevitably come along. Take the time to show real interest in others and demonstrate that you care and are a good listener.

2. Make a special effort to learn what to say and how to say it for the best impact. When the what and how of your communication creates a positive, supportive and enabling climate communication is good; when these things create a negative, defensive and disabling climate, communication deteriorates. You can create the best climate by communicating in a way that conveys the main pleasing values that we all hold dear, such as acceptance, honesty, equality, tentativeness, freedom, spontaneity and sensitivity, and then doing what you can to avoid their annoying, unlikeable opposites—judgment, dishonesty, superiority, over-certainty, over-control, strategy, and insensitivity.

3. Focus on communicating your likeability in a likeable manner. Research has shown that most people like others who are positive, good listeners, empathetic, real, able to control their negative emotionality, polite, funny, open-minded, energetic and appealing; on the other hand, people are not generally liked who are negative, poor listeners, insensitive, phony, emotionally volatile, rude, over-serious, close-minded, lethargic, and unappealing. Trying to increase your likeability is really a no-brainer.

4. Learn to practice two-eared listening. This is aggressive listening to catch what is being said or not said, below the noisy way of how it is being said. Good listening is the foundation of good communication and the best way to practice the Golden Rule and convey the things people want to see and hear most—respect, acceptance and understanding.

5. Make a point to catch yourself in the act of making assumptions that you understand the other person and that he or she understands you. Challenge yourself to verify what you are assuming. When you stop to think about it, our brains, ears and mouths are all programmed to speak, hear and interpret differently, and so misunderstanding is probably more likely than understanding (at least not without a good concerted effort).

6. When you have something important or delicate to say, be thoughtful and plan exactly what to say to assure correctness, clarity and completeness, and how to best say it for maximum understanding and impact. Also, this is when you need the advantages of good rapport, a supportive climate and your likeability most.

7. It is good idea to know what the brain prefers so that you can improve your chances of hitting a bulls-eye when it counts most in communicating. The brain generally prefers simplicity, concrete examples, reasonable certainty, little risk, something that fits easily into what it already knows, good organization, interesting creativity, positive emotionality, and win-win alternatives

8. It is also a good idea to know how your “audience” processes information. People generally prefer to use one of three main processing styles—visual (seeing pictures), auditory (hearing verbal instructions), or kinesthetic (hands-on doing). Matching congruence between styles is the best way to connect, especially in difficult communication.

9. Forget about expressing problems and complaints to someone else who already has his or her own share of these things; instead use the energy you save from not doing these unproductive things to think of solutions that are likely to be successful in making things better.

10. Don’t let misunderstanding or miscommunication of any form linger on without making an honest attempt to clarify the issues apart from the feelings. The negative emotionality from such misunderstanding can be very destructive to relationships and it can become impervious to rectifying once you go past the point of no return with it. Become more sensitive to when you are approaching this point before it comes and goes.

11. Try your hardest to avoid the nasty habit of malicious gossiping. The one question you may want to consider in deciding to participate in this widespread habit is, Why do I want to say this about someone else to this other person? If there is no positive reason, then resist the temptation. And when you get good at that, start being more assertive and suggest that such gossiping isn’t really helpful or productive the next time it occurs.

12. When ugly conflicts occur, which are inevitable, consider viewing the conflict as a good opportunity to improve your ability to communicate past it, rather than avoiding or running from the unpleasantness of the situation. Conflicts are usually the perfect opportunity to apply all these other twelve great suggestions on improving communication.

13. Finally strive to be a master of speaking the two voices of life in their right order and proper amplitude: (a) shouting acceptance and unconditional love of the other person loudly and frequently, and (b) gently and kindly whispering encouragement for him or her to improve, at the right time (when asked for your opinion).

Practice a few of these suggestions and you will significantly improve the quality of your personal and work relationships and increase your happiness. Practice them all and you will be the expert on excellent communication and great relationships and be as happy as you can be. Why are these suggestions worthy of consideration? Because they all fit the best known truth standard—they are all doing the right thing in the right way for the right reasons to get the right results.


William Cottringer, Ph.D. is President of Puget Sound Security, Business Success Coach, Sport Psychologist, Writer and Photographer from Issaquah, WA. He is author of Passwords To The Prosperity Zone, You Can Have Your Cheese & Eat It Too, and The Bow-Wow Secrets: How Dogs Live Simple Lives & people Don’t. Bill can be reached for comments and questions at (425) 454-5011 or bcottringer.pssp.net