I closed last time by touching on how important it can be for us to help the friend or family member we’re interacting with understand the positive impact they can have on the people they care about; helping them have clarity for how what they’re doing matters and helping them develop a clear picture of how that connects with a purpose that’s meaningful to them. Before going into that in any more detail, I need to stress one thing: this is absolutely not about manipulating someone for our own benefit. Close to a decade ago, while Cindy and I were teaching a group some critical practices for effective communication that we had learned from John Maxwell, one of the participants repeatedly asked what would keep someone from using those techniques to manipulate others. After trying to address the question tactfully several times without making any headway whatsoever, I finally replied that the only way I knew to be sure we weren’t manipulating someone was to not be manipulative. I’m sure my tone left a bit to be desired and I may or may not have used a swear word or two in that final response, but the question never came up again.
With that behind us, let’s consider how we can make a lasting difference for the folks we care most about by helping them develop a clear picture of the purpose that matters most to them and understand how even the most monotonous tasks they need to grind through contribute to fulfilling that purpose. When our son was young, he was notorious for his bedroom looking like a bomb had gone off. I suppose that’s not very different from most teenagers, but I wasn’t responsible for any of the others at the time. He and I went round and round about things as simple as dropping dirty clothes in his hamper rather than on the floor or taking dirty dishes to the kitchen (and maybe even putting them in the dishwasher) rather than stuffing them in his closet or dresser drawers. There were times where Cindy asked that I “choose my battles,” which I’ve never been all that good at doing. That said, I wasn’t nearly as bothered about a shirt or pair of pants on the floor as I was about the habit he was creating by not putting them where they belong. (A half-eaten bowl of oatmeal in a dresser drawer is a completely different story…) While I didn’t want to deal with the disaster area those behaviors led to, I really wanted to help him build discipline that would carry over into other aspects of his life. My approach didn’t always work then but the bit that did sink in serves him today in his career and as a parent; if he still left all that crap laying around, his wife would likely kill him and who knows what it would do to his son…
What I did not do well then though was tie it back to anything that mattered to him at the time or share my message in a way that he would best receive. To do either of those things, I would have needed an understanding of “The Platinum Rule” I’ve referenced from time to time in this column: Communicate with others like they want to be communicated with, not how I want to be communicated with! Had I tailored my message to be what he needed to hear, and in line with what was meaningful to him, I would have been much more effective in tying even something as dumb as keeping a clean bedroom to a clear purpose – and we would have had far less, let’s call them, intense conversations…
