How many of you know couples that never argue? I know a few, and as much as I admire them, I really don’t think it is conducive for a healthy relationship. On the other hand, couples that argue too much are also in for a very rough ride, if their destination is a happy relationship. Moving out of the personal relationship and into the business relationship, and how many of those thrive without confrontation and conflict? I know in my previous work environment, confrontation and the presence of conflict was an every day occurrence.

In my last blog post Learn How to Listen I wrote about the importance of learning better listening skills, because it was such a crucial part of our lives. Well guess what? So is learning how to effectively manage conflict. [Read more...]

When we are awake, we spend more time listening than any other activity. You are probably thinking he’s wrong…my other half says I never listen, and you make a good point. Common sense should dictate that if you are going to spend so much time listening then you will become very good at it; or at least want to become very good at it. Unfortunately, as we touched upon in the blog post Start Learning How to Communicate human beings are inherently bad at doing the things that are most important to them.

Having a pair of ears means you can hear, it does not give you a qualification in the art of listening

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We sometimes forget that Homo sapiens are just one of the millions of different types of species that live on this planet. We are sat on the throne, positioned at the top of the evolutionary food chain, and we take the mantle a little bit for granted. The reason that we currently own that throne is because we somehow managed to turn everyday grunts, howls and screams into words – both verbal and written.

Just because we can communicate more effectively, does not mean that we are very good at it. Ironically, in a world that has developed technology allowing us to talk to people walking on the moon, most people cannot even handle a face-to-face conversation very well. We don’t share our emotions, we generate an illusory personality to hide the real us, we tell lies because we don’t want to hurt people’s feelings; and we don’t listen because, when people are talking, we are thinking about what we are going to eat for tea, or formulating our response. A conversation just becomes a heads-up confrontation with the winner being the first person to offload all of his or her problems first.

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