Communication is something many of us struggle with. We are born with no real ability to communicate. Over time we learn the skills. Unfortunately, while we learn how to communicate we then rapidly learn to keep things inside, to keep things bottled up. We learn this for many reasons.  None of us really want to embarrass someone by what we say, we may hold back to position ourselves to gain from information we have, or we may not want to lose someone close to us which may be the result if we say what we really want to.  While having a filter on our conversation is good, it can lead to unintended challenges. Can you hear me now?

We really over complicate things for ourselves by not being more of a student of our own behaviour. I probably went at least the first 10 years in my marriage before I realized that my wife, when we had an issue that was elevated to a serious (read heated) discussion was not looking for what I was giving back verbally.  To expand on this, I came to realize that listening to the issue, then outlining my solutions to make the situation better or prevent it from happening again in the future, was actually not what she was really looking for, at least not at that moment in time. Sure, this information will be useful at some later point in the conversation, but the typical “type A personality – leader – guy – husband – dad” five point outline of how to fix the situation was actually, and quite counterintuitively for a guy, not what she wanted or needed right at that moment. She wanted to be heard. She wanted to be listened to and understood. She wanted to know that I really ‘got it‘.