I was on the school drop off this morning when I noticed two boys, aged about 10/11 having a discussion around a book. I will make up their names and will call them Jack and Mark. Jack appeared quite frustrated and was saying; “I haven't got the book, you can come round to my house, I don't have it”. His body language was tense and his tone high pitched, not aggressive and he appeared to be struggling to get his point across. Mark appeared quite relaxed and said; “ I know you have it, it cost me actual money.” I noticed he didn't look Jack in the eye and carried on his conversation with another boy immediately after. Jack replied; “stop being so childish, I don’t have it”, and walked quickly

Today I was at a seminar - it was a retirement, change of career seminar covering topics such as managing your emotions and using the change/ grief cycle - I smiled to myself having written about this yesterday. The rest was around looking at what to do with your life in the future, your skills preparing for a new role. It was interesting and I learnt some new bits and confirmed some other knowledge. I love going to anything which helps me develop and am always looking for new opportunities to watch communication in action. At one point we all had to go round the room and talk about ourselves in 30 seconds. There were 2 things I noticed; 1. I was in a room with some very interesting people.

I am going to use the below grief cycle as an example of how emotions can play such a powerful part in communication. A friend of mine pointed this out to me a while ago and since she did I have been looking at how people deal with loss, disappointment and change and have found their pattern of behaviour and communication follows the stages in this theory. Those of you who have children will be able to relate to this. I have a 10 year old in my life and the other day she went through this cycle in a matter of seconds. It was the school holidays and we had agreed she could watch a film. Because we had friends round for dinner the evening disappeared and by the time we were at the stage whereb

I was having my hair cut this morning and chatting to the hairdresser about communication and how, when emotions are involved, the conversations we have aren't necessarily the ones we want to have. We were talking about communicating with children and partners and I was explaining the following, which I believe, are the 2 main reasons we struggle to communicate with people close to us. Emotions: When we talk and we are being driven by our emotions, we will often say words we don't mean, cause hurt and pain, find it frustrating and difficult to say what we mean and end up in a row rather than a conversation. Let's look at an everyday example. You have a child, perhaps a teenager, somewhere al

I was watching a programme last night focusing on people who had lost lots of weight and featured in magazines some years ago. The programme was a catch up on where they were now and had the weight stayed off. The main reason for watching is because I find people fascinating, how we work, what motivates us and I also have an interest in nutrition and fitness. I didn't watch all of the programme so am not sure if anyone had kept the weight off; the three people I saw had all put the weight back on and some extra on top of what they originally lost. This isn't a post about how and why this happens, it's about the self talk of one of the gentlemen involved. This man is 45, he has 3 kids, a wife

Recently I have read lots of tweets and articles on large organisations across the world, experiencing change. There are many great threads out there  giving ideas on how to manage change and I repeatedly see the words "we need to listen." This is generally referring to listening to communities, customers, clients, the public. This is then followed by sentences like,"we are hoping to build better relationships", or "we are trying to give people a better service", or "we must do more for less"". When we insert the words "hope to" and "try", we immediately caveat the process by inserting a negative and give ourselves an excuse not to actually get something done. When we use the word "must" we

Today we're going to look at how using two small words can make such a difference to how you can make people feel. Those words are "but" and "and". Perhaps you can relate to this when someone has given you feedback, maybe in your appraisal at work, a teacher, a parent. They generally start off with "Thanks for the report but ........", "You played well today but .........", "Dinner was lovely but ........" Most of the time after the "but" comes some feedback about how you can improve. So what happens when we hear the word "but" in the sentence? Generally we don't hear the first part, so if you are giving someone praise and then a "but", they won't hear the praise as all they will hear is the

Many of you will know someone who has suffered from stress, become ill through some loss or perhaps you even know someone who has ended up taking their own life. Today's post is a suggestion of how we can all make a difference through communication skills and a little of our time. It seems to me everyone's life is now so busy, we are either on our phones, laptops or dashing from one place to another, we sometimes forget to talk. Yes we all know how to have learnt conversations, you know the ones which go a little like this; " Hey how are you?", "ok thanks what about you?". "Yeah, same old same old, you know how it is". "Yeah I know, great to see you". Or perhaps; "Hey how are you?", "good th

Have you ever been thanked or received an apology or praise and it just didn't feel right? The words were there but no meaning behind them. Or perhaps you have done this, apologised to maintain the status quo or praised someone without truly meaning what you were saying. Remember how you felt? The brain recognises the words but without any honesty backing up the words it's just meaningless "blah". Most of what we say we don't even think about, we open our mouths and out they come, tumbling into the open, leaving the other person translating what they think we mean and making the rest up. The way you say something is incredibly powerful. Sometimes you might use the wrong words, if you are pas