By Sue Woodward
An Engage Aloud For Parents & Kids
Every time you see the ∞ sign, be sure to give your child all the time s/he needs to think about the question and discover his/her own, unique answers.
Introduction to the Special Edition
Healthy communication is the most important aspect of empowered relationships between humans, especially within families. Yet much of our communication results in misunderstandings, anger, hurt, tears, sadness, and frustration. In spite of our best intentions to communicate clear and precise messages about how we feel and why we feel that way, we often end up making the situation worse than when we started! In many relationships people resort to stopping communication in order avoid the conflict, but that’s really no better than poor communication. Both leave us feeling closed down, disconnected, and emotionally distanced.
Our current style of communication encourages us to think in terms of absolutes and judgements. We think we understand how to relate to our kids, we think we listen to others, we think we can convince others that what we believe is “right,” we think we know how to educate our kids, we even think we know what’s right for others! And then, when they don’t say or do what we think they should, we blame them for our reactions. We are a culture that operates from a platform of right versus wrong, left versus right, black versus white, etc. Our communication is a self-defeating attempt at understanding each other, since it results in separation, stress, confusion and pain! Our attempts to get our needs met by the use of verbal, emotional, or physical coercion is violent. Nonviolence is a commitment to trusting that everyone has unmet needs that account for their behaviors and actions,and that everyone wants to be accepted and understood. It is our nature as HUMAN BEINGS.
C2: Connective Communication™ is a dynamic tool for families to creatively explore new ways to discover, share, and address the emotions that arise each and every day of our lives. This is a new language for communication, a language that is based on empathy, compassion, and connection. It starts with understanding ourselves, and moves us to understand others as we take responsibility for our own needs and feelings. Families, schools, and the world will transform their interactions as they learn to incorporate another language that is based on understanding and compassion, with the goal of discovering and addressing the unmet needs behind our words and actions.
Our exclusive, new Enagage-Aloud™ activities give families a hands-on way to connect with each other in new ways, moving healthy, compassionate communication into our daily lives, no matter how others respond. Kids and adults experience the process of untangling reactive emotions and discovering the needs of someone we care about and love. Instead of getting blamed and accused, we are understood and embraced. Commit the time and energy to create a new practice of Connective Communication in your life and transform your family and relationships. But above all, explore and have fun making sense out of this new mode of communicating.
What is Communication?
For our purpose, we will define communication as:
The sharing of information through interactions for the purpose of understanding one another.
Let’s take a closer look at this definition. “Sharing” tells us that communication happens between two or more entities, a sender and one or more receivers, which can be people, kids, dogs, countries, or whatever else you can imagine.
“Information” is the message that is being relayed or sent. It might be true or false, a thought or an emotion, a dream or a fear—anything at all.
“Interactions” are the social circumstances in which communication occurs. For example, a casual phone conversation, a formal discussion, a letter, or the sniff of a dog meeting someone new.
“For the purpose of understanding one another” explains why communication takes place—in order to express our perspective and to have the other person acknowledge and understand it.
So the goal of all our communication is to understand one another. It sounds like such a simple goal and yet it turns out to be so complicated.
Enagage-Aloud™ Activity
Answer the following questions on a scale of one to ten.
How good do you think you are at making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? ∞
How well do you think you can communicate your thoughts and ideas? ∞
How easy do you think it would be to tell someone how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich? ∞
Materials:
We suggest you do this outside since it’s fun and easy to make a mess of this. For the first time around, the parent is blindfolded and now becomes a visitor from the planet Ackwa, and makes it clear that s/he knows nothing about planet Earth except the language. Each other person in the family takes a turn giving one of the steps in making a peanut butter sandwich.
The visitor from Ackwa will only do exactly and literally what is requested. When someone says, “Pick up the knife,” the blindfolded visitor might pick it up with the wrong end. If they say “Take a piece of bread out of the bag,” the visitor might take a small chunk of bread out of the bag instead a whole slice. Then, it’s time for the kids to be blindfolded and try it all again.
How successfully did you communicate how to make the sandwich? ∞ Was it easier or harder than you expected? ∞ Isn’t it funny that such a simple thing seems to leave so much room for error? When else have you had trouble communicating something that seemed so simple? ∞
There is so much we take for granted when we engage in communication in even the most simple interactions. When someone isn’t understanding our communication it’s because they haven’t understood, or “received” the information we are trying to send.
Now that you’ve experienced how communication can be trickier than we think, we invite you to explore the rest of the articles in this special edition to create more fruitful and fulfilling communication in your life. C2: Connective Communication™ is a dynamic tool for families to creatively discover, share, and address the emotions that arise each and every day of our lives.
August 2008