Part 2: Communicate

Before people know who you are, they experience what interacting with you feels like.

People cannot immediately know your character. They first learn what happens when they interact with you.

Instead of judging your whole personality, look at the conditions your behavior creates for someone while they are with you.

If you want trust, affection, autonomy, reliability, or safety in a relationship, look at whether your own behavior helps create those conditions too.

Caring about someone internally is not always enough. Give them something they can actually perceive.

Caring becomes easier to feel when it changes something about the load another person is carrying.

A mistake matters, but what happens after the mistake can become part of the relationship too.

Give the other person a better chance to understand what you are trying to do before they have to guess.

When your intent is good, make it visible instead of forcing the other person to infer it from imperfect behavior.

If something you say could reasonably mean several different things, tell the other person which meaning you intend.

Sometimes communication fails because the other person is solving a different problem than the one you brought them.

Make sure you are talking about the same thing before you decide whether you agree.

Two people can use the same word while pointing at different things. Find out what each person means before arguing about who is right.

Before you argue with someone’s position, try to state it in a way they recognize as their own.

You can understand exactly why someone believes something without accepting their conclusion.

Before concentrating on the disagreement, identify the pieces both people already accept so you know where the conflict actually begins.

Put agreements, disagreements, and unknowns in separate places so both people can see the same problem at once.

Once you know what you share, locate the smallest point where your reasoning actually splits.