Communication as a Noncontact Sport
THE LAST THING Dr. George J. Thompson wants is for Verbal Judo to be merely an entertaining collection of true-life cop stories. Admittedly, it has its share of back-alley fights suddenly neutralized with left-field offers, suicide attempts derailed by wily candor, and domestic squabbles defused by a cop who knows how to intrude and do nothing. But Verbal Judo is much more.
A former college English literature professor, George Thompson is a black belt in both judo and tae kwon do karate, a combination that made one unusual police officer when he first put on a badge at age thirty-five.
Today, through his Verbal Judo Institute, he primarily trains cops how to use their mouths instead of their night-sticks and guns. He is also in demand by schoolteachers, hospital administrators, salespeople, and business executives. He has trained people at organizations ranging from IBM to the FBI, and from the U.S. Forest Service to Metropolitan Life. It is cops on the street, though, whose lives hang in the balance if they don’t use language properly.
Among George Thompson’s students have been six thousand five hundred members of the Los Angeles Police Department. In fact, the four officers videotaped in the Rodney King incident were one week away from taking his Verbal Judo class. George Thompson believes that violence could have been avoided had the officers spent a day in his classroom.
In training tens of thousands of officers throughout the United States, George Thompson has developed foundational, state-of-the-art communication skills that are easy to learn and will work for anybody. He believes that Verbal Judo principles can save ordinary citizens unnecessary conflict, tension, and abuse. This book is intended for anyone who wants to reduce stress by using the most effective and powerful communication techniques available today. It is for people who like to get what they want by using responsible means—whether convincing a contractor that they have been overcharged or getting a boss to stop sexual harassment. Verbal Judo also effectively teaches parents how to motivate their children to do better in school—or how to protect themselves on the street.
Verbal Judo is designed for people who want more open and satisfying relationships—with their families, their colleagues, their employees, and their friends. Its techniques for establishing rapport and empathy can also help people enjoy improved relationships. It is not uncommon for students to approach George Thompson after a class and ask, “Where were you two marriages ago?”
Verbal Judo is a manual for those who want a powerful communication breakthrough that can improve their lives.
What differentiates Verbal Judo from other books on communication is that it offers solutions that work when people are under pressure. It provides techniques that have been tested on the street by men and women responding to life-or-death situations.
Verbal Judo can develop in you habits of thinking and acting that George Thompson developed in his extensive study of the martial arts. It blends the best of an Eastern-style mind-set (particularly the notion of using the energy of negative situations) with such Western philosophies as the Golden Rule and even Aristotelian rhetoric, which Dr. Thompson studied in post-graduate work at Princeton.
Verbal Judo will teach you to respond—not react—to situations. Using what George Thompson calls “the most dangerous weapon on the street today: the cocked tongue,” you will learn to adapt and be flexible, just as practitioners of physical judo do. You will learn to use your words to redirect the negative force of others toward positive outcomes.
You don’t have to understand complex philosophies to become proficient in Verbal Judo. George Thompson teaches by simple example, through his own real-life experiences. He tells how he and other “salty old police dogs” cleverly talked their way out of danger. And he provides amusing anecdotes from his years as a parent, trying to outwit three gifted children.
In Verbal Judo you’ll learn to speak with anybody without causing or escalating conflict. You’ll learn to praise without sounding manipulative. And you’ll learn to constructively criticize with more empathy so people remember what was said with less injury to pride and their feelings, become motivated to change, and continue to feel like valued team members. Verbal Judo also has solutions for dealing with people under the influence of liquor, drugs, fear, rage—or plain stupidity.
With George Thompson’s tactics for mind-mouth harmony, you will learn far more than how to throw words around to live more safely in a treacherous world. You will learn a new habit of mind, a gentle approach taking control of situations without creating stress, without frustration, and without conflict.
As he clarifies in Chapter 17, “Nowhere did I learn these principles more clearly than on the streets as a cop. I use a lot of police examples, because I believe it is easy to transfer the principles to everyday civilian situations. My hope is that people might see police anecdotes as the essence of Verbal Judo in stark clarity. In other words, if it doesn’t work on the street, you can’t use it in the home or at the office. And if it does work on the street, well, see for yourself . . .”