Dance like no one is watching . . . because they’re not . . . they are checking their phone.
Anonymous
You’re going on a long-awaited vacation, and you’re at the airport. It’s close to boarding time, and you reach for your cell phone. It’s not in your pocket. You check your other pockets and your bag and then realize you left it in the car in the airport parking lot. You could go back and get it, but you’d have to go through security again and might miss your flight. What would you do?
A few years ago, this wouldn’t have been an issue. We had a cell phone we used only for calls or emergencies. If we forgot it, we could use a pay phone. But now, our phones have become our connection to the world.
Suppose you decide not to go back to get your phone. What would you miss by not having it? Sure, you wouldn’t have the security of instant access or emergency help when needed. If you’re using it as your camera, you could buy a cheap one on the trip. You would have to check flight status or weather another way, but you could do it.
There are other things our phones will do, but they’re not essential. We’ve just become accustomed to 24/7 access. Imagine what a vacation would be like if we couldn’t access social media, search engines, or texting.
We might have to talk to each other.
How Our Lives Have Changed
How do we tell our teenagers that it’s time for dinner?
A few years ago, we simply yelled up the stairs, “Dinner’s ready!” If they didn’t come down right away, we walked upstairs to their room to get their attention. Maybe their music was too loud, or they were on the phone—or maybe they were just being teenagers.
Now it’s different. One mom said, “I just text them. They are always in their rooms with their headphones on, listening to music or playing a video game. They wouldn’t hear me if I yelled. But I know that texting is a sure way of getting their attention. They never miss a text.”
Sound familiar? Here are some other scenarios we’ve all seen:
We all need and want healthy relationships, and we value the simple conversations that make those relationships happen. When those relationships are healthy, they can be the most satisfying things we have in life. When they’re unhealthy, they cause great pain—because they’re keeping us from the connection we inwardly crave.
We don’t teach newborn babies how to drive a car, balance a checkbook, or decorate a room. But we teach them to communicate. They can make it through life without learning to drive, but communication is the most basic skill they’ll use every day of their lives. We’d call it a “survival skill.” The better they become at communication, the more effective their lives will be.
Some people assume that technology is the enemy because it’s robbing people of their conversational skills. This isn’t really a new argument. Throughout history, people complained about any tool that was different from what they were used to:
But in each case, the benefits eventually outweighed the criticism. People found ways to use these tools to connect more effectively. Tools keep changing, and the benefits keep growing. But so do the numbers of people who complain about them.
A friend told me that when he was growing up, his grandpa used his grandma as the television remote control. “Go change the channel,” he’d say—and she would get up and change it. She had to physically turn a knob on the set to get a different show.
We had next-door neighbors who were much more sophisticated. They had a device that attached to the knob on the television with a long cable that reached across the room to the couch. There was an identical knob at the other end. When they turned that knob, it turned the knob on the set across the room. We were stunned. We didn’t know technology like that existed.
The Downside of Technology
In the past, if we were standing in line at the post office, we had two options:
I’m writing this paragraph at a Starbucks. There are thirteen people in line. Eleven of them are looking at their phones. I’m guessing that if the other two people tried to strike up a conversation with one of them, those people would think, Can’t you see I’m busy? I’m not faulting them. If I were on my phone in that line, I’d probably have the same reaction.
One of the biggest areas in which technology has made an impact is in the way we communicate with each other.
One human resource manager described her frustration to me recently. “The biggest problem I run into is people who don’t know how to interview for a job. They have great degrees and great skills from great schools, but they don’t know how to have a conversation. They rarely make eye contact, and they don’t know how to engage with me when we’re talking. In fact,” she went on, “I was interviewing someone last week who interrupted me because he wanted to respond to a text he had just received.”
“What did you do?” I asked.
“I let him step outside to handle his text. Then I locked the door.”
There’s a risk here. It’s easy for the older generation to criticize the younger generation when these communication issues bubble up to the surface. “They spend so much time on their electronic stuff that they don’t know how to have a conversation. All they do is play games and work on getting high scores.”
Maybe that’s true. An older man I talked to yesterday described walking out of his house on Christmas Day and finding the street empty. “A few years ago, you’d see kids everywhere trying out their new bikes and skateboards,” he said. “But this year, the street was empty. Not a single kid anywhere. I’m sure they were all inside playing with their latest electronic toy.”
But adults aren’t innocent. Maybe they’re not playing video games or spending hours on social media. But how often do they reach for their smartphone to check their email during a meal? They might not be addicted to drugs or alcohol, but they’ve developed a new kind of addiction: technology.
In other words, we’re misusing a great tool. Technology is an awesome resource to enhance our conversations. It was never designed to replace them.
The Need for a Strategy
The good news? Because of technology, life is much easier. Information is available instantly without a trip to the library, and we can access it in our jammies.
The bad news? Because of technology, life is much harder. There’s so much information available that we get overwhelmed and want to spend the day in our jammies.
We need an action plan—an intentional, carefully crafted approach to technology. The plan starts with us making sure we discover ways to control it in our own lives.
Then we make a plan with the people in our lives. We focus on the common goals we have in our most important relationships, build the foundations we’ve discussed in this book to make them honest and effective, and design a technology plan that works for that relationship. Simply stated, technology should make our relationships better.
Sharing words in print is a form of communication, but it doesn’t convey the emotion that comes through tone of voice, facial expression, and body language. Written words can’t hold or hug. Written words can’t listen or make eye contact. A friend once told his aging grandmother, “Because you listened to me, I knew you loved me. And because you loved me, I listened to you.”
Younger people might be challenged in their conversational skills because they haven’t had the practice that develops the muscle memory for the give-and-take of conversations. When we have live conversations over a lifetime, we develop patterns of interaction that build human moments. We learn to value the uniqueness of others—learning that they don’t think like us, and that’s okay. We grow from valuing the differences in others instead of feeling the need to change them.
A Fifteen-Million-Dollar Dinner Bell
The basic principle is simple. Technology is a tool. If we learn to control it, it will serve us well.
It’s a lot easier to learn how to use our tools well than to get rid of them and do everything manually. (I’ve tried changing a tire with just my hands, and it didn’t go well trying to get the lug nuts off.) We can actually learn to love technology for what it can do instead of resisting it.
Early in our marriage, we lived a few miles from Luke Air Force Base outside of Phoenix. A man who lived a few houses away was a helicopter pilot in the Air Force and went on military maneuvers around the state every day. He had fairly normal working hours and usually came home for dinner each night. But he never knew exactly when that would be, so his wife never knew when to have dinner ready.
He used technology to create a solution. On his flight back to the base each night, he would make his final approach to the base as low as possible over his house. His wife would hear his fifteen-million-dollar aircraft overhead and know he would walk in the door twenty-eight minutes later.
Now that’s a creative use of technology.
When Conversations Get Challenging
Several years ago, I wrote How to Communicate with Confidence1 to provide tools and techniques for negotiating everyday conversations. This is an area in which many people struggle, especially those who are introverted.
When relationships advance and conversations get tough, a different set of tools and techniques is needed. The basics are still required, but the stakes are higher. For critical conversations, we need to kick our skills up to the next level.
The problem? We can’t text a tough conversation. The more that’s at stake, the more critical it is to connect in person. That’s threatening for many of us, so we try to avoid conflict by sending our thoughts electronically. Doing so feels safer somehow, because we don’t have to see the other person’s reaction. We don’t have to negotiate their emotions. But without the 93 percent of communication that takes place in person, putting confrontation in writing can be like pouring gasoline onto a quickly spreading blaze.
High emotion, high value, and low communication make the perfect storm. They’re a recipe for disaster.
Reading the Safety Instructions
It’s dangerous to write anything about technology in a book. Whatever is happening today will be obsolete by the time you read this. So we can’t discuss any one form of technology. Instead, we need to craft an approach to technology that works no matter how it changes. That way we’ll be ready when those changes take place. We can see technology for what it actually is—a tool to enhance our relationships, not to replace them. When we have that perspective, we’ll be prepared to use technology effectively rather than being used by it.
That’s what tools are for. I have a chain saw, for instance. It saves me a lot of time when I’m trimming trees. But if I don’t respect that tool, it can be dangerous. That’s why the first third of the instruction manual is about how to keep the saw from hurting me. I’ve learned to follow those safety procedures, and the saw does an amazing job.
Our technology is the same way. It can provide some amazing benefits for our relationships and our communication:
But if we don’t recognize that it can also do damage, we’re setting ourselves up to be victims of that technology.
Technology isn’t the enemy; it’s just a tool. Whether it’s positive or negative depends on how we use it. It’s like a razor-sharp scalpel. In the hands of a skilled surgeon, it’s good. In the hands of a crazed criminal, it’s bad.
We will always have relationships. Technology isn’t going anywhere either. The key is figuring out how to get them to work together. It’s like two porcupines that fall in love. They need each other but have to learn how to keep from sticking each other and causing pain.
Twenty Ways to Make Technology Our Friend
Most of us don’t have helicopters at our disposal. But we have other tools available that often irritate the people we’re in relationships with when misused. We need to get creative to find ways to put them to good use.
Here’s a short list of ideas, specifically for families (though they can be adapted to other relationships). We can start with a few of these and then work with the other people in our relationships to create other suggestions.
Take Back Our Relationships
Technology isn’t going anywhere. In fact, it’s going to increase. That’s a good place to start in healing our relationships. We can easily blame technology for the problems in our relationships because we’ve seen communication erode as technology has grown. It looks like technology is the problem.
But it’s not. It’s just a tool that has shown up in our lives without an instruction manual. We need to learn how to use it. If I accidently cut myself with a kitchen knife, it doesn’t mean that all knives are bad and I should get rid of them. It means I need to learn how to handle knives safely. When that happens, I can do some pretty productive things in the kitchen.
Technology has entered our lives like a raging river after a spring thaw. The river has the potential to be dangerous if not respected, which is why we wouldn’t let our toddler play near the banks. But if we harness the power of the river, it can produce electricity for an entire community and provide resources for thousands of people. It doesn’t do us any good to be frustrated with the river. We do better to welcome its existence and use it to improve our lives.
In our relationships, it’s easy to tell people to get off the phone and communicate. But that ignores the value of the tool. Instead, we need to talk about our common goals and determine how to use technology to help us reach those goals. We always need to see technology as a means to an end, not an end in itself. It exists for something bigger.
So Where Do We Start?
We start with ourselves. We need to analyze how we use technology in our own lives and whether it’s helping or hurting us. We need to own up to the addictions we might have to electronic devices. Do we find ourselves compulsively checking email or social media on our phones? If we figure out how to make those tools work for us, we’ve laid an honest foundation for influencing others.
When we switch from trying to change others to changing ourselves, we’ve taken the first and biggest step. Changing ourselves is a skill that anyone can learn. When we develop that skill, our influence will grow. As long as we minimize our expectations for others and maximize our expectancy, amazing things can happen in our relationships.
But change doesn’t happen overnight. It happens over time. It’s a process. If we’re at a 3, we can’t jump to a 10 overnight. Our goal is to nudge toward a 4. Once we’ve made it there, we can explore 5 and 6. We need to focus on progress, not perfection.
My wife, Diane, and I have been learning Spanish. We download our lessons, and we listen to each one while we drive or walk. The course manual suggests that we need to feel only about 80 percent comfortable with each lesson before moving on to the next one.
The first couple of lessons were easy, and we felt pretty accomplished at the end. We had hopes of being able to communicate in Spanish someday. Lesson three was more challenging. We had to listen to it several times to make it sink in. Lesson four was even worse. We felt like we would never be able to master the lessons that followed.
But during lesson four, we realized something. We had mastered lessons one and two. They had become second nature. That gave us hope that when we got to five and six, we’d probably have three and four down pat.
Learning to communicate effectively in our most important relationships might seem like trying to empty a swimming pool with a coffee cup. But you’re taking the first step by reading this book. The process might seem like it will take forever. The key is to start the journey. Small steps, taken consistently, produce massive results. We’re made for relationships. They’re worth fighting for.
When tough conversations come, we can approach them with confidence. With the right tools in our toolbox and an understanding of how to apply the right skills, those tough times can be the catalyst to healthy relationships.