Overcoming Relationship Communications Breakdowns

If You Want to be Understood, First Show how Understanding You Can Be. 

Communication issues are frequently highlighted as a root cause of marital and relationship breakdowns. Often one partner accuses the other of not communicating. 

In fact, there is no such thing as not communicating. Even silence is a form of communicating. As is walking away.

All interpersonal communication has two components ── verbal and non-verbal. 

The words spoken are verbal. Everything else, including tone of voice, level of voice, gestures, body movements, facial expressions, and inflections comprise the non-verbal component. When the two are not in sync, the listener usually pays greater attention to (and assigns a higher value to) the non-verbal signals being received.

Partners in strong relationships accept that the other person's feelings are just as valid as their own. In troubled relationships at least one of the partners either does not hold this view or expresses it poorly. In destructive relationships neither partner holds the feelings of the other to be valid.

It is important to remember that there is no cause and effect relationship between what another person does or say and our feelings about such. Other people do not cause our feelings (though we often incorrectly assign blame for our feelings to others). 

Our feelings are not controlled or manipulated by anyone other than ourselves.

That's right. We have control over our feelings, even at times when this does not appear to be true. However we, and only we, can choose how to feel in response to any event, situation or utterance by another. These are our feelings, so we must take ownership and responsibility for them.

It is never correct to say "his action made me feel ­­­­________" or "her words caused me to feel ________." Rather, the correct phrases should be, "I chose to feel _______ because of what he did" and "I elected to feel _______ as my reaction to her words."

In any relationship (including workplace ones), but particularly in a married or de facto spousal relationship, we have a responsibility to communicate and respond to others in a non-violent and abusive-free manner. This is a joint responsibility of couples, and does not work as effectively if practiced by only one of the partners.

Far too much of the communication between partners and spouses is spent trying to get the other party to understand and accept what we want them to understand and accept. 

If you want to get through to your partner, you must first show that your partner can get through to you. 

In other words, if you want to be understood, first show how understanding you are. 

This article is partially excerpted from our top-ranked personal development book Project You: Living A Determined Life, which is available in Kindle and paperback formats at Amazon. 

Forgiveness is Lacking in Families | Results from Global Survey on Forgiveness

Absence of Forgiving Prevalent in Family Relationships and Society 

We were stunned by one result in the 2016 Project You Global Survey on Forgiveness — 39% of the respondents said their own families were not forgiving at all, while another 16% said that their family members were not forgiving "very often." 

Admittedly, we had suspected that the lack of forgiveness is a major cause of family dysfunction. But we had not anticipated the severity of these results. 

With 55% of respondents indicating there is little or no forgiveness within their own families, it is little wonder that people do not feel there is sufficient forgiveness in the world today (88% of the respondents to our survey, who come from 18 different nationalities, agreed that there is not enough forgiveness in today's world). 

Contrast these results with the responses to our questions on forgiveness in the workplace and within the countries in which respondents lived.

While both country level and workplace level forgiveness were deemed to be highly situational, the level of forgiveness in each was remarkably higher than indicated for families. 

For instance, only 19% said forgiveness happens "not very often" and just 3% said forgiveness does not happen at all in the countries in which they live. So that's a 22% lack of forgiveness at the country level compared to the 55% within families.

As for the workplace, just over 14% said that forgiveness in the organizations in which they work happens "not very often" or "not at all." That's about one-fourth the level of the absence of forgiveness in families. 

You can download the full results of the survey here:  2016 Project You Global Survey on Forgiveness. 

Personal Year of Forgiveness 

The lack of forgiveness within families is one of the biggest ills of society. We had suspected that this may only be a problem in the materialized western world. But the responses were fairly consistent across all 18 different nationalities that responded to our global survey on forgiveness. 

We also see the lack of forgiveness occurring frequently in other aspects of today's world. We all witnessed the anger, fury, and antagonism that surrounded last year's Brexit vote and the lengthy U.S. election process. Numerous studies are also showing increased incivility in the workplace across the globe. 

Hence, Project You is calling for 2017 to be a Personal Year of Forgiveness. 

We want to start a dialogue on forgiveness. We want to encourage acts of forgiveness at the family, workplace, and national levels. 

We ask that you help start this dialogue by sharing this blog post and our two previous blog posts (Research Confirms Forgiving Is Difficult and Why Are We So Hesitant To Forgive?) with your family, friends, and colleagues. And please share these in Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and elsewhere. 

And most important, please share with us and your fellow readers in the comments section below your own ideas on how we can stimulate a Personal Year of Forgiveness with everyone. 

Thank you. 

Building Committed Marital Relationships

Making Intimate Relationships Work Through Commitment

One of the key factors in the creation of troubled families is a relationship breakdown between the parents.

People define "committed relationships" as those in which one's love and sexual desires are committed to only their partner. 

But there's another aspect of commitment that is often lacking in these relationships. And that is the commitment to commitment  ──  the commitment to try, to act, to overcome hurdles and blips encountered on the way, to remain in a true partnership no matter what.

Famous basketball player and coach Pat Riley is certainly on the mark with his observation that, "There are only two options regarding commitment. You're either IN or you're OUT. There's no such thing as life in between."

What Riley says about life and basketball is certainly true about committed intimate relationships and marital situations.

There are two components to commitment ── preparation and persistence.

Persistence is what frequently separates successful relationships from those that are not. 

According to Dale Carnegie, "Most of the important things in the world have been accomplished by people who have kept on trying when there seemed to be no hope at all." The same rings true for successful intimate relationships that last the long haul.

Too many people are ready and willing to discard their aims, desires, dreams, and even their purposes in life by casting everything overboard as the first signs of difficulty or misfortune manifest. They see obstacles and failures as defeats, or even worse as misinterpreted "signs" that things are not meant to be the way they had planned, hoped or dreamed. 

As the Japanese proverb goes: "Beginning is easy, continuing is hard." 

What steps are you making this week to commitment to being committed to your intimate or marital relationship?

This article is partially excerpted from our top-ranked personal development book Project You: Living A Determined Life, which is available in Kindle and paperback formats at Amazon. 

Your Family Life

Families Build Each Other 

Vic Conant, the President and CEO of Nightingale-Conant, the premier publisher of audio personal development programs in the world, wrote: “If you’ve had wonderful family relationships, you will be able to call yourself a true success in life no matter what else you’ve achieved.” 

Edith Schaeffer, a Christian author and co-founder of L’Abri (an evangelical community that welcomes people who are seeking answers to questions about God and the meaning of life) wrote:

A family is a formation center for human relationships. The family is the place where the deep understanding that people are significant, important, worthwhile, with a purpose in life, should be learned at an early age.

The following concept from the author Gail MacDonald is one that would go a long way in fixing some of the dysfunctionalities found in many families:

Once, when our children were about five and eight, they were caught arguing. I can remember my husband stopping them and saying, “This is home. Now, outside of these four walls people are going to hurt you, they’re going to call you names. But inside these four walls we build each other. Do you understand? We build each other.”

Many people seem to operate their families as some sort of organizational enterprise, where all they do is rush from one sporting event or commitment to another, or try to get by day-to-day without some sort of emotional confrontation.

It is little wonder that, if asked to play the word association game, the first word many people would apply to “family” would be dysfunctional. Not laughter. Not love. Not joyousness. Not even happiness. Simply dysfunctional.

When it comes to our own families, perhaps these words from Jim Rohn can provide guidance: “Your family and your love must be cultivated like a garden. Time, effort, and imagination must be summoned constantly to keep any relationship flourishing and growing.” 

For the following week, make your family life your#1 priority. See what a difference this makes in how you think and feel about your family.  

This article is partially excerpted from our top-ranked personal development book Project You: Living A Determined Life, which is available in Kindle and paperback formats at Amazon.