The Power of Connection

How to Become a Master Communicator in Your Workplace, Your Head Space and at Your Place

Rik Rushton

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780730349495
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business Skills
• Index: Business

A simple communication framework to begin practising today

We all carry around the technology to stay connected 24/7, yet many of us are disengaged and challenged with our lack of communication skills. The Power of Connection provides you with practical, real-world solutions for improving your professional performance, your personal relationships and your outlook — one conversation at a time.

Becoming a confident and compelling communicator might be the most important skill for leaders in the modern business landscape, parents in the modern home and individuals who use 'self-talk' to help shape their world. By adopting the simple strategies revealed in every chapter, you can become an unshakeable success at what you set out to do. This book is designed to help you start communicating better today, so start reading and start practicing with your very next conversation!

• Understand your communication strengths and weaknesses
• Become a better listener to build a deeper connection
• Learn how communication sits at the heart of all relationships
• Develop the skills to connect, inspire, engage and empower

We are surrounded by noise, yet no one is actually saying anything we can connect with — or are we just not listening? Communication is a two-way street, and involves so much more than just speaking. The Power of Connection offers a quick and easy road map for your personal journey of growth and development that will make you a better parent, friend, spouse and employee. It's the right message for this time considering there's never a wrong time to level up your skills and become more effective at work, at home and in life.

CHAPTER 1
RULES OF ENGAGEMENT

Where are you going? I haven’t finished yet. Get back here — we need to talk this through!’

I can’t remember the catalyst for our first argument, but I can remember clearly the way my fiancée calmly left the room. It was the first ‘spirited debate’ we had experienced in our five-year relationship. It was a mystery to me why Gai would walk away and leave the matter unresolved. I’m not sure whether I was more angry about our disagreement or her calm exit. Shouldn’t the situation stir up a more emotional response on her part?

In the doorway her gentle voice spoke volumes: ‘I’ll speak with you when you’re ready to stop yelling and start talking.’

‘I’m ready now!’ I yelled back.

‘Clearly you’re not,’ she whispered as she quietly left the room.

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The solution is often found away from the experience, not knee-deep in it!

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Not that I knew it then, but the time alone helped me to achieve a major breakthrough that would affect not only my communication with the person I loved more than life itself, but my wider communication from that day forward.

On communication failure

How could two people who had so much in common be so far apart in their thinking? Thinking about everything we were about to embark on in the coming year, including exchanging vows in front of our respective families and close friends, I wondered whether it might be hard to make a lifetime commitment to each other if the first sign of trouble saw one of us retreating from the room. We had only recently got engaged and already I could not imagine my life without her, but I was perplexed by how to resolve what seemed like a serious communication problem.

Even then, in that uneasy moment, I did not question our relationship, just the manner in which we communicated with each other, especially in times of stress and challenge. In the many years ahead of us circumstances would surely conspire to put us in a place of conflict, and we would need a better way of resolving these differences than evidenced in our first poor attempt.

How could we hold such opposing views on the same situation? We shared so much — including, as I will de­scribe, surprisingly comparable upbringings — that the idea of total disagreement on any subject at this stage in our relationship was hard for me to accept. Until that point we had seemed to agree on everything important. In fact, what we had experienced was not so much a disagreement as a communication failure.

Gai and I are both the second youngest of five children. I have a brother and three sisters. She has a sister and three brothers. Both our mothers were adopted. Both were nurses in country towns. Both our fathers were blue-collar workers, men who possessed a higher intellect than their menial jobs required. Both our fathers put their life ambitions on hold to provide secure homes for their families, to feed and clothe and provide for their children as best they could. In both households the weekly pay cheque did not stretch to the end of the week.

We know that both of our fathers went to work under sufferance. At the end of the working day they would each repair to their local drinking establishment (as chance would have it, less than five kilometres apart) and the company of like-minded mates. They didn’t go to the pub to ‘talk through’ their problems; they went to escape them. It was the Australian way. After a few hours of drowning their sorrows they would return home and take out their personal frustrations on the person they saw as the source of their problems — our respective mothers. After all, as they saw it, their wives were the ones who had fallen pregnant and started a family they then had to support, thereby denying them the chance to pursue their own dreams in life. The volatile mix of alcohol and personal frustration more often than not saw ordinary arguments lead to physical violence.

I had assumed, wrongly, that, as long as I did not follow my father’s example of resorting to physical violence during an argument, I could justify my fit of temper. Clearly I was mistaken. I thought as a student of my environment, as opposed to a product of it, I understood the right approach to successful communication with my future wife. Mistake number two!

Growing up with different communication rules

What became obvious once we had reunited an hour later was that despite all the similarities with respect to our parents, siblings and life experiences, we had actually grown up with very different rules when it came to handling disputes. It was imperative that we talk through these differences and produce a plan that we could use in any future conflicts. Part of that plan had to be to build a ‘reality bridge’ between our two upbringings.

In our household, if I had a dispute with my brother or sisters we had to stay in the room for as long as it took to resolve the matter. No matter how loud we yelled or how physical our body language got (so long as no blows were exchanged), our parents allowed us to resolve the dispute without their passing judgement. (It was a classic case of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ on my father’s part.) Once the argument was sorted and we had left the room, the dispute was never raised again. This was one of our house rules, and I came to assume that this was how all families settled their differences. But I was about to share a home with someone who played by different rules.

In Gai’s family, once a dispute with a sibling reached a point of ‘raised voices’, the rule was that one party leave the room and that they revisit the dispute later when calmer heads prevailed. This was a foreign concept to me.

When she had explained this to me, as she did so clearly and calmly an hour after my outburst, I realised that while we had a common goal of resolving the argument, we had very different ideas of how to get there. I quickly shifted my thinking away from ‘judging’ her approach to understanding her point of view that nothing positive can be gained from anger. Gai believed that once you remove yourself from a conflict, you give yourself the space and time to think through the situation and arrive at a better solution. It was obvious that our approaches conflicted and were mutually exclusive. When tensions arose between us, I followed a rule that I had observed and followed all my life. Put simply, I chose to stay in the room and plead my case passionately, and insist on a resolution before leaving it. Again, in my thinking, so long as I did not get physically violent I was not doing anything wrong.

Gai, in turn, was following the conflict resolution handbook that she had used all of her life. I didn’t know that my yelling broke one of her rules. In fact, in her thinking, shouting at someone was just as abhorrent as physical violence, which I had incorrectly assumed was the real ‘line in the sand’. She was also unaware that leaving the room before the matter was resolved broke one of my rules. By walking out she was telling me she did not value my opinion or respect my feelings, whereas in her thinking she left the room because she did care about my feelings. Clearly, by following our own personal rules of engagement we were each unknowingly communicating in a manner that suggested we did not care about the other.

If not for this new insight into the differences in our upbringing, I am fairly certain that our relationship would have gone the way of so many marriages in the Western world, where divorce is all too common. We determined to set our own house rules to avoid that outcome. Growing up in a hostile home had caused us both immense pain as children, and we were committed to sparing our own children such a fate at all costs. (I was always a forward thinker.) An hour before, we had been following opposing communication rules. Now, thinking calmly, we were able to set new rules of engagement for our relationship from that day on.

Recognise rules challenges

Later that experience got me thinking. Why did so many marriages end in divorce? My best guess at the time was that, as in our own relationship, most couples were drawn together by attraction alone. Whether a physical attraction, personality attraction, status attraction or simply Cupid’s arrow, these relationships are initially based on the attractiveness of the other. And in the early stages of the relationship we tend to pass over any perceived faults our new chosen partners may reveal. We have the expectation that in time, if they truly love us, they will fall more in line with our thinking and make the necessary adjustments.

Once romance gives way to familiarity, however, we tend to notice more how our partner’s behaviour breaches rules we hold dear. The challenge is that our partner will be oblivious to these breaches. Indeed, they won’t even know these rules exist. I came to believe that most relationship challenges were ‘rules challenges’. The problem, as I saw it, was that most couples were using ‘the force’ to communicate these rules and expecting their partner to possess ‘Jedi thinking’ to sense the shifts in the force and behave accordingly.

I saw this firsthand with my parents.

‘What’s the matter?’

This, from my father, was part question but typically more statement or challenge.

‘Nothing.’

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Table of contents

• cover
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Rules of Engagement
• Chapter 2 Tune in Before you Broadcast
• Chapter 3 Adjust Your Personal Programming
• Chapter 4 Become an Active Listener
• Chapter 5 Energy in Motion
• Chapter 6 Building the Reality Bridge
• Chapter 7 Connect Through Courtesy and Gratitude
• Conclusion
• Index
• EULA