Communication

It helps to have good communication skills boiled down to the basics, but knowing what we should being doing and actually doing it are two different stories. Do you have any tips on putting these skills into practice? This may sound strange, but we have discovered that talking about good communication is often easier than practicing it. Too often, we understand what to do but for a variety of reasons — we’re distracted, feeling stressed out, or simply forgetting what to do — we don’t do it. Even the experts sometimes have difficulty following their own advice. After years of…

Many are the plans in a man’s heart, but it is the Lord’s purpose that prevails. Proverbs 19:21 “The traffic on Westlake is crazy,” Leslie told me. “They’re doing some construction as you near Mercer Avenue. So beware.” I was driving to meet Leslie across town, and she’d just passed through the same streets where I was starting to travel. “Thanks for the heads up.” Did this little bit of info matter? Surprisingly, yes! I didn’t get uptight wondering what was happening. Instead, I took a round about way and felt like I’d performed a magic trick. It’s amazing what…

Say nothing evil or hurtful;
 Snub evil and cultivate good;
 run after peace for all you’re worth. I Peter 3:9 Did you know that communication is the very lifeblood of your relationship? And yet it is the number one complaint most couples have about their relationship. “We just don’t communicate,” is a common refrain in many counselors’ offices. Or “We never have time just to talk” is one we hear a lot. But the one that makes us cringe the most is “When we finally find the time to talk, we don’t have anything to say.” Whether a relationship sinks…

Though you lie down among the sheepfolds, you will be like the wings of a dove covered with silver, and her feathers with yellow gold. Psalm 68:13 At one time Andrew Carnegie was the wealthiest man in America. He came to America from his native Scotland when he was a small boy, did a variety of odd jobs, and eventually ended up as the largest steel manufacturer in the United States. At one time he had forty-three millionaires working for him. In those days a millionaire was a rare person. Conservatively speaking, a million dollars in his day would be…

My partner accuses me of keeping him in the dark, of not telling him everything. I, on the other hand, believe we should respect one another’s privacy on some matters. What do you think? Should we never keep a secret from each other? Most of us were raised to believe that in good marriages, there are no secrets — that couples should tell each other everything. We believe that in a good marriage spouses are totally transparent with each other, revealing all of what they think, feel and do so that absolutely nothing is hidden. But while this ideal may…

Sometimes it feels like we are speaking different languages. What I think I said isn’t what he heard and vice-versa. Maybe if I knew just how men and woman communicate differently, I could do something about it. What are the differences in communication between men and women? Only recently have researchers begun to understand how drastically different men and women communicate. Deborah Tannen and other sociolinguists have come to believe that the genders speak so differently, in fact, that they can be considered different languages — or at least different “genderlects.” In her ground-breaking book, You Just Don’t Understand, Tannen…

Nearly every couple we talk to says that communication is the key to a successful marriage. But when we ask these same couples what “good communication” is, we get a lot of foggy answers. Can you pin-point the most essential parts of good communication for us? With so many thick books on communication, it is sometimes difficult to cut through the clutter and sum it all up. The following is our attempt: Send clear and accurate messages. Precise and unambiguous statements facilitate good communication, while imprecise and ambiguous statements hinder it. Consider the difference between these two statements: “You hurt…