When Conversations Go Bad

November 1, 2012

Interview with Dr. Ben Benjamin, author of the book Conversation Transformation: Recognize and Overcome the 6 Most Destructive Communication Patterns

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Mike Carruthers:
Who taught you how to communicate?

Dr. Ben Benjamin:
The most important skill a person needs to have a good marriage, to have a good job is how to communicate. And nobody ever gets classes in communication because we always assume we can do it – and most people really can’t.
 

Ben Benjamin, author of the book Conversation Transformation...

Have you ever been in a conversation and all of sudden it turned really bad and you didn’t know exactly why? For instance I had somebody say to me, “I just asked somebody a question and they started attacking me”. And I said, “Well what question did you ask?” And they said, “How could you do that?” But that’s not a question that’s an attack in a question form that got the person all riled up.

It’s helpful to know that people often use conversation to manipulate others. For example…

If you said, “Don’t you want to go to dinner?” That’s not really a question that’s a command almost, that’s telling you that you should answer the question the way that I want you to answer the question. So what I might do is dissect your question. “It sounds like you want to go to dinner and you want to know if I would like to go too? Is that right?” And then we start a real conversation.

Verbal communication very often has an underlying agenda.

People don’t realize that when someone attacks you it’s actually a call for help. When somebody says, “Why’d you do that???” It means they’re upset and they don’t quite know how to express how upset they are. So they jump at you and you jump back at them and yeah it’s human nature if we learned how to communicate our human nature would be a lot better.