emotional availability, relationships
Bruce Lambert
How to Be More Emotionally Available in a ...

Relationships thrive on genuine connection—on feeling heard, understood, and supported at a deeper level. Yet all too often, we hold back, afraid of vulnerability, or simply unsure how to open up. This pattern of emotional distance is sometimes called “emotional unavailability.” While it can protect us from hurt, it also holds us back from the warmth and intimacy we crave.

How to Be More Emotionally Available in a Relationship
Persuasion
Bruce Lambert
The Theory of Reasoned Action Explained: A ...

Why do we intend to do things but often don’t follow through? Learn how the Theory of Reasoned Action explains this puzzle—and how attitudes, social norms, and perceived obstacles shape your intentions and actions.

The Theory of Reasoned Action Explained: A Simple Guide
relationships
Bruce Lambert
Honesty vs. Politeness: How to Balance Truth ...

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?

Honesty vs. Politeness: How to Balance Truth with Tact in Communication
relationships
Bruce Lambert
Improve Your Communication Skills: One ...

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.

Improve Your Communication Skills: One Essential Step to Success
persuasion
Bruce Lambert
How to Persuade People Effectively Using the ...

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.

How to Persuade People Effectively Using the Power of Stories

How Good a Communicator Are You?

How Good a Communicator Are You?

Some of us are great communicators. Some of us are, how should I say, somewhat less than great. All of us can improve. Communication skill can continue to improve throughout our lives. 

I assume that anyone reading a blog called "How Communication Works" is interested in improving their communication skills. In upcoming blogs and videos, I want to talk to you more about how we measure communication skill, how communication skill develops, and what you might do to advance your own skills to the highest level.

But before I do that, I want to give you a chance to assess your own skills.

Easy and Hard Communication Tasks

Easy and Hard Communication Tasks

Some communication tasks are easy, and some are hard.

An example of an easy communication task is to describe your home or apartment. Faced with this task, most people complete it easily. Interestingly, most people approach it in the same way—they provide a verbal “tour” of their house:

As you come in the door, there is an entry way. To the right is the dining room and to the left is the living room. Straight ahead is a short hallway with the stairs to the right and the entrance to my office straight ahead...

Easy communication tasks involve few goals. There is only one dominant goal in the apartment description task—describe it accurately. Maybe there are sub-goals, e.g., be amusing, be brief, make your home sound nice.

How to Tell People What They Don't Want to Hear

How to Tell People What They Don't Want to Hear

When I ask people what they want to learn about, the most common answer is ‘how to handle difficult conversations,’ or as one friend put it, ‘how to tell people things they don’t want to hear.’

Let’s use an example given to me by an old friend (and blog subscriber!). This person runs a company and often has to refuse plum assignments to valued employees or has to let long-time employees go when they are no longer a good fit for the company.

Imagine a valued employee comes to you asking for a plum assignment outside their normal area of expertise, e.g., your best salesperson wants to lead a big new marketing campaign. As good as she is at sales, you know she does not have the skills to do this important marketing task, and you cannot afford to risk the company’s reputation by letting her perform in an area where she is out of her depth. What do you say?

Everything is a Performance: The World's a Stage

Everything is a Performance: The World's a Stage

The best way to understand the social world is to view it as a stage.

We are the performers and the audience.

The roles we play are based on our many identities.

In every performance, we seek validation and social support for our identity.

Performances can succeed or fail.

Success means increased self-esteem, confidence, and the ability to claim that identity for another day.

Failure means embarrassment, loss of face, humiliation, and difficulty sustaining the identity that was most closely associated with the failed performance.

Politeness in Relationships: How Formality Reflects Connection Depth

Politeness in Relationships: How Formality Reflects Connection Depth

In the recent posts, I’ve talked about face and politeness.

In this post, I want to talk more about the factors we consider when we decide how polite to be when doing a face-threatening act (FTA).

I’ll discuss how the amount of politeness we use reflects back on us and allows others to make inferences about us, about the act we're performing, and about the nature of the relationship between us.

This is important because it introduces a major theme: the relationship between communication and identity, between what we say, how others perceive us, and how we understand ourselves.

Advanced Politeness Strategies: Navigating Face-Threatening Acts

Advanced Politeness Strategies: Navigating Face-Threatening Acts

Face-Threatening Acts

Now that you have a basic grasp of positive and negative face, you can begin to understand what politeness is really about. Politeness is a set of strategies for managing threats to face, for doing face-threatening acts (FTAs).

Face-threatening acts are those routine, everyday communicative actions (e.g., requesting, apologizing, advising, criticizing, inviting, complimenting, etc.) that, by their very nature, pose a threat to the speaker's or hearer's positive or negative face wants.

Consider requests. When we make a request, we tend to use some form of politeness, often the simplest and most conventional form, the word "please." Why do we do this?

A request asks another person to do something they would not ordinarily have done. In doing so, it threatens negative face, the desire to be left alone. The speaker knows this, and being a person with tact and social skill, acknowledges the threat to face by saying please. Please is a shortened form of "if you please." So "pass the salt, please," is really "pass the salt, if you please." 

Understanding Politeness: Strategies for Respectful Communication

Understanding Politeness: Strategies for Respectful Communication

Politeness Is a Window into the Inner Workings of the Social World

Politeness is a core communication skill. As soon as we begin to learn language, our parents teach us to say 'please' and 'thank you' and 'excuse me' and 'I'm sorry.' It's no mistake that we learn politeness so early. Our parent intuitively sense that politeness skills are central to our being seen as decent people.

Being polite allows us to show basic human decency to others, even strangers. Receiving politeness acknowledges and reaffirms our humanity. Politeness makes a risky and sometimes frightening social world just a little bit safer.

Politeness is more than etiquette. Understanding politeness provides insight into fundamental truths about the social world and what it means to be a person—someone with a self and an identity. Because it is in part governed by rules, politeness also illustrates how the social world is at times rule-governed.

The Key to Comforting: Name Their Feelings

The Key to Comforting: Name Their Feelings

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.

The Key to Understanding Others is to Be a Good Detective, Not a Code-Breaker

The Key to Understanding Others is to Be a Good Detective, Not a Code-Breaker

The Big Picture

The purpose of this site is to help you achieve your own goals by improving your communication skills. Better personal relationships. More success at work. Deeper connections with your parents, kids, spouses, friends, and lovers.

As in the previous post, I will give you tips, techniques, and strategies for handling all sorts of common communication tasks. But more than that I want to give you the big picture, to teach you how communication works in general. In the long run, you will rely less on tips and techniques. Instead, you will use your in depth understanding of communication and the social world to analyze and solve even the trickiest communication problems.

How to Make Sure People Understand You

How to Make Sure People Understand You

“I never said that!”

“That’s not what I meant!”

“You’re taking me the wrong way.”

A man shows up at the emergency room: nauseous, vomiting, heart racing.

When the nurse asks what's wrong, he says it might be a bad reaction to the nicotine patch he is using to quit smoking.

He takes off his shirt, and the nurse sees ten or more nicotine patches all over his torso.

Asked why he had so many patches on, he said that the doctor told him to put the patch on a different spot every day.

So he just kept applying patches to a different part of his body every day.

Nobody said anything about taking off the patch from the day before.

How was he supposed to know?