Communication Is Critical
MomThought.com Episode #138
Welcome. I’m Joan Romero at Momthought.com. Thanks for joining me today.
Today’s Momthought is Communication is Critical. Communication is something that we work on quite a bit around here at my house. My husband and I were learning about meta communicating. Which is talking about the way we talk. What do we mean when we say certain things? Why do we say the things we do? And how do we hear what other people are saying?
We discovered that these conversations are very valuable. And when we’d get back into our normal routines and are runnings from here to there and as we would just say things to each other, we had a better understanding of what was actually being said.
Then we decided to take our communication to the next. And we started talking about how we can better phrase things. How we could use words to build each other up to be more effective in our speech. And at first this was a very hard. We knew what we wanted to say but it just took a long time to get the right words, in the right order, to come out in the right way.
We always knew when we didn’t do it correctly because we didn’t receive the kind of response back that we expected. Such as, if he said something and I felt offended and I became defensive he could say, “Oh, wait a minute. That didn’t come out the way that I had planned or the way that I wanted it to. Let me try again.” And then I would literally have to erase what he just said from my mind, take a step back, give him the minute to refocus, regather his thoughts and try again.
And it was amazing. It was so nice to have that liberty to pause rewind and try again. It saved us a lot of head ache. And as we could practice that: as we would go through it several times in different situations, we found that we were getting better and we were communicating more clearly. And we are having more fun, more peace, more happiness in our home just because we better understood each other.
So some things that helped us get from there to here where sometimes we had to use the phrase, “Can I talk to you as a friend?” as opposed to talking to you as a spouse. Because sometimes, you just need a friend to listen to you. Or you need advice from a friend who really understands the situation. But at the same time, we didn’t want to offend or accuse our spouse of anything. Those kind of conversations helped.
We also listened to a lot of audios and we read a couple book on the topic which we found to be very helpful. And these are things that we did together. So it wasn’t like one of us trying to teach the other one. Or one person trying to change the other person. But that we were reading these things and hearing these things at exactly the same time. And that we knew that we could try them out together. And so we found it to be very helpful.
In fact we find that good communication is really quite critical a happy family.
To share your Momthoughts go to Momthought.com or call 206-350-3037
Thank You,
Joan Romero
Communication Is Critical [2:59m]: Play Now | Play in Popup