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.
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.
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.
I'm going to give you the ultimate guide to reasoned action theory, which is the world's foremost theory of persuasion and behavior change.
If you're a student and you read this, I can guarantee you'll do well on any test or homework assignment that involves this theory.
If you're a practitioner of persuasion of behavior change, this will make you more effective at your job.
Have you ever been in an argument with someone you really care about, and in the middle of the argument, you could just feel things falling apart?
You're just thinking,
I wish I could stop this.
I wish I could reverse this.
I don't know what to do, but things are going in the wrong direction fast.
If I don't do something soon, this could damage or destroy the relationship.
Back in the 1980s when I was a graduate student teaching my first class, I asked a friend to come watch me teach.
She said I did a good job, but I said "um" and "ahh" too much.
Ouch!
Not sure why that criticism still stings 30-some years later, but it does.
One of the most annoying aspects of my own speaking style is my tendency to fill every pause and silence with some sound, normally "um" or "ahh".
I've done it for a long time, and it's been a hard habit to break.
Maybe you do it too.
One of our fondest hopes is to feel a sense of belonging, to feel that we are accepted by a larger social group, that we are normal just like everyone else, and that we are okay just the way we are.
In contrast, one of our greatest fears is that we would be a social outcast, unaccepted, cast out from the group, and stigmatized.
In today's post, I want to talk more about sociologist Erving Goffman's concept of stigma.
We all get rejected.
There was a time in my academic career when I was rejected for 10 grant proposals in a row.
Ouch.
Each rejection letter was hard to receive, but some were much better than others.
It is hard to write a good rejection letter.
Rejection is intrinsically threatening to the other person's self-esteem.
If you don't do it well, you risk hurting the other person, damaging the relationship, and making yourself and your organization look bad.
But if you do it well, you can write a letter that gets the job done and preserves the relationship.
Imagine this situation:
You get up in the morning. You take a shower.
If you're a man, you shave. If you're a woman, maybe you put on your makeup.
You spend all morning making your hair look good, dressing up, and spending a lot of time in front of the mirror putting yourself together so you look great.
You go out into the world, you get to the office and someone says to you, "Hey, you look great today. What a great outfit. You're looking great."
And what do you say? You say, "Oh no, no, no. This thing? No, no, I don't look so good at all. I just threw all this together."
So why do we do that? Why do we have such a hard time accepting compliments?
Communication can be hazardous, and one of the main hazards is that we will be misunderstood.
Sometimes the misunderstandings are bad, the kind that ruin our relationships or careers.
You say something to a friend. It seems perfectly clear that you were joking.
But maybe you wrote it in an email, and there were not enough context for them to realize you were not being serious.
Or you have to give written instructions to a colleague about an important task. You think the instructions are unambiguous, but they misunderstand and screw up a task for a big client.
Wouldn't it be nice if there were a way to avoid these situations?
Imagine you have a long-standing conflict with a friend, family-member or co-worker.
This person seems extremely angry at you, and you're pretty sure they have a long list of complaints and accusations to make against you.
Just the idea of having to face them keeps you up at night.
What if I told you there was a technique you could use that allowed you to take all of the stored-up negatives and use them to your advantage in a way that defused most of the explosive potential of the interaction?
There is.
Looking for a gift for that person in your life who's into self-improvement, who wants to be a better communicator?
I'm going to list the top five communication books that make excellent gifts this holiday season.
I've read each of these. Most of them multiple times.
I've talked about all of them on this channel, at least in part before.
I think they make excellent gifts for anyone in your life who's interested in improving their communication skills, or who's generally interested in self-improvement and wants to do a better job at communicating in work, home or their relationships.
You are staring at the label of a prescription drug bottle and are trying to understand what you’re reading.
You are reading the doctor’s note with instructions for what to do after surgery, and you’re scratching your head over his words.
These are examples of what is called health communication.
I am going to introduce you to the concept of health literacy.
I will tell you how it's measured, and then I will allow you to measure your own health literacy.
You find yourself in a difficult conversation.
It's very emotional and heated, and there is a lot at stake.
It is an argument about what's true and what's not true.
You've planned for this conversation, but then you get in the conversation and you say the wrong thing. It comes out all garbled and just doesn't turn out right.
How do we learn exactly what to say?
How do we know to say the right thing, not just have some general principles like listen or be empathic, but how do we know exactly what words to say?
I'm going to tell you a little bit about how communication really works, that will help you learn exactly what to say in these difficult conversations.
When we think about social interaction or communication, we normally think of the most typical case, which is a two people face-to-face talking to one another.
But in fact, Erving Goffman in his discussion of the idea of participation recognized that there were many, many different ways for people to participate in social encounters.
Directly participating in a face-to-face interaction where two people are talking is the most typical prototype of social interaction, but it is not the only way in which we can participate.
In fact, participation is a complex concept in communication.
It's useful to understand it in more detail.
There are some really difficult communication situations where we desperately want to use reflective listening or empathic listening to do a better job in the conversation and connect with the person we're talking to.
But we're afraid if we acknowledge their feelings they'll think that we're agreeing with them and we really don't want to agree with them.
So what do we do?
I'm going to talk about how you can use reflective listening and empathic listening to acknowledge the way someone else feels without actually agreeing with them or approving of the way they are acting or feeling.
Is the coronavirus going to kill us all and lead to the zombie apocalypse?
I don't know. It depends on who you ask, but people are pretty concerned about it.
Other people aren't concerned at all.
People are funny, they're scared of some things that present no risk or hazard to them at all and then they're not scared of things that really are a danger to them.
This disconnection between people's feelings of fear and the real objective threat is something poses is a real challenge for communication.
Today, I'm going to talk about how we communicate about risk.
One of the things that makes us afraid of communication is the prospect of embarrassing ourselves.
There's no way around it.
There's a lot of ways we can embarrass ourselves in ordinary interaction.
In fact, many of the structures in ordinary interaction are there precisely to give us a way to avoid embarrassment and to repair embarrassment, should it occur.
These are everyday actions you do that can embarrass yourself or the person you're speaking to.
I'm going to make this explanation using Erving Goffman's concept of face, and Brown and Levinson's concept of politeness.
I'm going to teach you how to run a phone conference that does not suck.
The techniques I describe are simple to implement and will teach you how to lead a conference call that people enjoying attending.
These tips make conference calls feel cordial, professional, and worthwhile.
Your colleagues will actually look forward to being on your calls and will be eager and enthusiastic to team up with you.
You will be more enthusiastic and get more done, and work will actually be more meaningful and rewarding.
I have a close friend who is going through a difficult time.
He called me up to talk about his troubles. I listened for a (short) while, and then I gave him some advice.
That didn't turn out so well. He got upset at me.
So it got me thinking – what are the keys to giving good advice? When should we give it? How should we give it?
I will teach you my 3 Golden Rules for giving advice and 4 reasons why you might want to think twice before the next time you're tempted to give advice.
One of the reasons people fail in communication is because they're stuck inside their own heads.
They can't understand the perspective of their audience.
This is especially true if you have complex information to communicate.
I’m going to give you four simple techniques to allow you to effectively communicate complex information.
