When you have something difficult to say, something that might hurt or embarrass the person you're talking to, how should you say it?
Should you come right out and say it, bluntly and honestly?
Or should you be tactful and indirect?
What values should guide us in these situations?
Is honesty the highest value? Or is kindness?
I want to tell you a story.
In addition to being a college professor, I'm a consultant. The most common kind of training I do, as a consultant, is communication skills training.
I specialize in training health professionals how to talk to patients and families who have been harmed by healthcare.
These are very difficult conversations. We focus a lot on empathic communication skills, which is a topic I've taught a lot about.
I'm going to teach you the single most important step you can take to begin to improve your communication skill.
Our own behavior is killing us.
If you look at the top 10 causes of death, you'll see at the top diseases like heart disease, cancer, and stroke, but it's actually our own behavior, smoking, drinking, not exercising, having a poor diet, which lead to the problems.
If you want to change people's behavior, you have to stop giving them information.
Information alone simply isn't persuasive. Most of the time, people already have a lot of the basic information like smoking causes lung cancer, but it doesn't change their behavior.
If you want to actually change people's behavior, you have to put this information into a story.
Living in 2021 with all of its illness, despair, and violence makes us long for a way of communicating with one another that could produce better outcomes for all of us.
We want a way to communicate that could allow all of us to have our needs be understood and met while meeting other people's needs as well.
I'm going to talk about a technique for communicating called nonviolent communication.
It was developed by an author named Marshall Rosenberg back in the late sixties, early seventies.
It helps us communicate in a way that expresses our feelings, expresses our needs, and respects the needs and feelings of other people.
Empathy is one of the most important communication skills.
In many ways, all other communication skills depend on empathy.
But what is it?
What is the difference between empathy and compassion? Is empathy only about feeling other people's emotions?
Empathy and sympathy?
How much of empathy is about feelings and how much about thoughts? What does emotional regulation have to do with empathy?
What is empathic accuracy?
As the sun sets on another week, I've just finished doing two days of in-person communication skills training.
We were working with 60 doctors, nurses, and other hospital staff to teach them how to talk with patients and families after the patient has been seriously harmed by medical care.
These are extraordinarily difficult conversations, about life or death topics, often with millions of dollars at stake.
