Noting the other person’s body language: “Your face is beaming today.”“Although interpersonal communication is humanity’s greatest accomplishment, the average person does not communicate well. Low-level communication leads to loneliness and distance from friends, lovers, spouses, and children—as well as ineffectiveness at work.”
“Communication skills, no matter how finely structured, cannot be a substitute for authenticity, caring, and understanding. But they can help us express these qualities more effectively than many of us have been able to do in the past.”
In a nutshell
Good people skills not only get you what you want, they bring out the best in your relationships.
In a similar vein
Daniel Goleman Working with Emotional Intelligence (p 130)
Carl Rogers On Becoming a Person (p 238)
Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, & Sheila Heen Difficult Conversations (p 272)
Often the best books are those that authors needed to write for their own use. In the preface to People Skills: How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts, Robert Bolton notes that he would never have got into the communications field were it not for the fact that his own people skills were so bad.
The book was written over a six-year period while he was running a consulting firm, and the material was tested on thousands of people doing the company’s communication skills workshops. Participants involved everyone from top executives to hospital workers to small business owners to priests and nuns.
There are virtually no jobs where communicating well does not make a big difference to our success. As many people have found, particularly those in a more technical field, the actual “work” is only part of the job; the rest is managing or dealing with people. Therefore, if we can communicate well, this can account for at least half our achievements.
People yearn for a closer connection with one another, Bolton notes. They may be lonely not because they don’t have others around them, but because they cannot communicate well. Yet if we can put a man on the moon and cure virulent diseases, why aren’t we all great communicators? It is partly because we learn a good deal of our communication skills from our family; chances are our parents were not perfect communicators, and neither were their parents.
Nearly everyone wants better communication skills, yet often without knowing it our communication is full of roadblocks that prevent real communication with others. Two of the main ones are judging and sending solutions.
When talking with someone, it is difficult to listen to what they are saying without putting in our “two bits’ worth.” This is the nicer side of judging. The other is criticism and labeling. With people close to us we feel we should be critical, otherwise we don’t see how they will ever change. With others, we feel the need to give them a label such as “intellectual,” “brat,” “jerk,” or “nag,” but by doing so we cease to see the person before us, only a type. Our “good advice” is in fact rarely constructive, because it usually represents an affront to the other person’s intelligence.
We may be so used to having roadblocks that we wonder what will be left if we remove them from our style of conversation. What remains is the ability to understand and empathize with other people, and to make our concerns clearly known.
Are your conversations a competition in which “the first person to draw breath is declared the listener”? Not many people are good listeners. Research has found that “75 percent of oral communication is ignored, misunderstood, or quickly forgotten.”
There is a huge difference between merely hearing and listening, Bolton notes. The word “listening” is derived from two Anglo Saxon words, hlystan (“hearing”) and hlosnian (“waiting in suspense”). The act of listening therefore means more than just something physical, it is a psychological engagement with another person.
Listening is not a single skill, but if genuinely practiced involves a number of skill areas, which are described below.
The common estimate given in research papers is that 85 percent of our communication is nonverbal. Therefore attending skills, which are about the extent to which we are “there” for someone when they are speaking, are vital to good communication. You are not looking somewhere else in the room, but through your posture, eye contact, and movement show the other person that they are your focus; you are “listening with your body.”
Bolton describes when painter Norman Rockwell was creating a portrait of President Eisenhower. Even though the President was amid the worries of office and about to enter an election campaign, for the hour and a half he sat for Rockwell, Eisenhower gave the painter his full attention. Think of anyone you know who is a great communicator and they will be the same: They fully attend to you with their whole mind and body.
Following skills relate to how we follow up what someone says to us. Though commonly we advise or reassure, a better way is to provide a “door opener” phrase. This may involve:
Noting the other person’s body language: “Your face is beaming today.”
Inviting the other person to speak: “Tell me more.” “Care to talk about this?” “What’s on your mind?”
Silence: giving the other person space to say something if they want to.
Our body language: offering the message that we are ready to listen.
Doing any of those things shows respect; the other person can talk or not talk as they wish. There is no pressure. Bolton comments that a lot of people are initially uncomfortable with silence, but with a little practice it is not hard for us to extend our comfort zone.
In developing our skill at following, we become adept at discovering exactly how the speaker sees their situation, unlocking or bringing out whatever is waiting to be said. This is valuable to both parties.
Bolton defines paraphrasing as “a concise response to the speaker which states the essence of the other’s content in the listener’s own words.” For example, when someone is telling us their problems, we report back to them in our own words, and in one sentence, what they are saying. This lets them know we are really listening, and indicates understanding and acceptance. We may feel strange doing this at first and think the other person will wonder what the hell we are doing, but in fact most of the time they will be glad that their feelings are being recognized.
This type of listening provides a mirror to the speaker so that the state or emotion they are in is recognized. Bolton gets us to picture a young mother on a morning when everything is going wrong. The baby cries, the phone rings, the toast gets burnt. If her husband notices this and says something like “God, can’t you learn to cook toast?” the woman’s reaction is likely to be explosive.
But picture an alternative. The same events happen and the husband says, “Honey, it’s a rough morning for you—first the baby, then the phone, now the toast.” This is a reflective response, acknowledging what his wife is experiencing without any judgment or criticism. Imagine how much better she will feel!
Reflective responses work because people don’t always wish to spell out what they are really feeling. They beat around the bush. Only by being reflective, not reactive, are we able to discern their real message. Psychologists talk of the “presenting problem” and the “basic problem.” What presents is what a person says is the matter, and behind it is the real problem. This is why we have to listen for the feeling in a conversation. That points us in the right direction, whereas a common mistake is to try to make sense of the words only.
People complain that reflective listening takes more time and effort. It does in the short term, but it is likely to avoid major troubles that blow up later on as the result of poor communication.
Bolton likes to think of listening as the yin (the receiving aspect) of communication, while assertiveness is the yang (the active aspect).
Because of the poor communication skills most of us have been taught, when we want something we choose between either nagging or aggression, or we avoid the issue altogether. These responses stem from the basic “fight or flight” modes we operate with as animals. But as humans we also have a third option: verbal assertion. We can stand our ground yet not be aggressive. This is easily the most effective means of communication for most situations, yet most of us either forget assertion or don’t know how to use it.
The whole point of assertion statements is to produce change without invading the other person’s space. There is no power or coercion involved, as the focus is on a result. We can remain very angry, and the other person knows it from what we are saying, yet at the same time it allows us not to be hostile or aggressive. They are left to decide for themselves how to respond to the message, which allows them to retain their dignity—while we have taken a big step in getting what we want.
What we really want in life is situations where everybody wins. Bolton presents the counterintuitive idea that if we define a problem in terms of solutions, one person wins and the other loses. To get win–win outcomes, we have to focus not on the solution but on each party’s needs.
For instance, he worked with a group of nuns who only had one car between them. Several of them needed the car to make visits and go to meetings, so there were inevitable clashes. When one person had the car, the others lost out. But Bolton asked them what each of them needed. The need they identified was transportation, and use of the group’s car was only one solution to that. Seeing the situation in terms of needs meant that many other possible solutions appeared.
As the old saying goes, “A problem well defined is a problem half solved.” Bolton provides a step-by-step process for identifying needs, which then lead to a solution. Using this method surprisingly elegant answers can be found to questions we may have thought were intractable. But it first requires us to really listen to what other people require to make them happy.
People Skills has been around for a quarter of a century and still sells well. What is the secret of its longevity? First, the book rests on a strong intellectual foundation, referencing ideas from the likes of Carl Rogers, Sigmund Freud, and Karen Horney. Secondly, it sticks to the fundamentals, not trying to cover every aspect of interpersonal relations but focusing on three vital, learnable skills: listening, asserting, and resolving conflict. Although the book seems long and there is a fair amount of repetition, it contains some highly useful tips and techniques that can be applied immediately.
Nowhere does People Skills ask us to change our personality to become a warm and fuzzy “people person.” What it does do is show us well-researched techniques that can make a dramatic difference to our effectiveness. We suddenly understand what people are really saying, and we begin to be able to communicate what we truly want in a direct fashion.
Conversely, if we still have a tendency to think that having good people skills means the ability to manipulate others into doing or saying something that suits us, not them, Bolton’s book reminds us of the three pillars of respect that really produce good relationships: empathy, nonpossessive love, and genuineness.
Bolton is the head of Ridge Associates, a training and consulting firm founded in 1972 that focuses on workplace communication and interpersonal skills. He previously created training programs for the New York State Department of Mental Hygiene and also founded a psychiatric clinic.
His other book, written with his wife Dorothy Grover Bolton, is People Styles at Work: Making Bad Relationships Good and Good Relationships Better (1996).