5 Secrets

  This is one of my all time favorite topics!! I have a huge addiction, if you will, to having good communication. In this entry I will be talking about communication in interpersonal and personal relationships. So, I would like you guys to think about how you communicate with anyone that you’re acquainted with, and what you could do to communicate better. 

I had the unique opportunity to be a missionary for my church for 2 years in Detroit, Michigan. If you don’t know much about missionary life for missionaries in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, you are living on your own in a place you’ve never been with one or two other missionaries of the same gender, who also have never been there. You spend every minute of every day together. The only time that you get away from them is when you’re in the bathroom… Needless to say, tensions can build real quick. It becomes absolutely necessary, if we want to be unified and make healthy, positive decisions together, to work through our problems by holding something called companionship counsels. Side note: if it isn’t clear by now, these roommates of mine are called companions for the short times that we are assigned to live with each other. So, these companionship counsels formed the basis of my ability to communicate well, and work through real problems in a healthy way. 

My mission president had an incredible way of making these companionship counsels particularly effective. In our mission, we had an addition to the missionary purpose that we would repeat every meeting, because of how important it was to him. That statement is: “motivated by love, we find joy in our own conversion, and in the conversion of others.” The biggest emphasis is on “motivated by love”. So, in order to make these companionship counsels effective, we really needed to be motivated by love. He used an analogy to help us called a “love sandwich”. We begin to address issues by first saying what we love about them, truly and genuinely. Then, we say what has been bothering us, only assuming the best intentions, and listening as to why they chose to make those decisions to try and understand them. Finally, finishing with how much we love them and why; again, truly and genuinely. Because I was forced to have these interactions with sensitive communication, aka: lots of practice, I have grown a lot in my ability to communicate well in all of my interpersonal and personal relationships. 

As I studied good communication in relationships this week, I was referred to a document called “The Five Secrets of Effective Communication”. As I read this short and valuable document, I realized that I had been practicing this without even knowing it. To have good, effective communication takes serious effort and practice. One of the greatest principles I learned recently is that if one of you loses in this effort to communicate, you both lose. That’s exceptionally important to know, because you both are trying to work through individual circumstances, and if one of you gives up, then it’s just “succumbing to the argument”, instead of coming to a creative compromise for you both. I personally need that, because I want to work with my relationships, instead of owning them, or being owned by them. I want freedom of speech, freedom in a relationship (for both or all involved), and freedom from any form of bondage. To communicate well in any capacity is an invaluable skill that I hope everyone will strive to develop. Call me a dreamer, but I can’t even imagine the monumentally epic difference it would make if everyone communicated exceptionally. I’ll leave you with that thought to ponder as my conclusion. Thanks for sticking with me through this one.