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Wednesday, March 4, 2015

Try a Softer Tone, Just One Thing by Rick Hanson

How do you talk to people?
The Practice 
Try a softer tone.

Why?
When our kids were little, I'd come home from work wanting some peace after the daily roller-coaster and often walk into a living room full of stuff - toy trucks, tennis shoes, bags of chips, etc. Irritated, the first words out of my mouth to my wife would be: "How come there's all this mess?" Understandably, after a day chasing children plus juggling her own work, Jan would feel unfairly criticized and sputter back at me. Then there'd be a quarrel or a chilly silence. Not good.
And it all began with the tone I used. Linguists like Deborah Tannen have pointed out that most communications have three elements, which I'll illustrate with the example above:
* Explicit content - What led to these objects being on the floor?
* Emotional subtext - Irritation, blame; startling, the first thing I said; no establishing first of a positive context (like asking about her day before mentioning the clutter)
* Implicit statement about the nature of the relationship - I'm on top and get to judge how well she is doing her job as a mother.
Many studies have found that the second and third elements - which I define in general as
tone - usually have the greatest impact on how an interaction turns out. Since a relationship is built from interactions, the accumulating weight of the tone you use has big effects. In particular, because of the "negativity bias" of the brain - which is like Velcro for uncomfortable experiences but Teflon for pleasant ones - a repeatedly critical, snarky, disappointed, worried, or reproachful tone can really rock a relationship; for example, John Gottman's work has shown that it typically takes five positive interactions to make up for a single negative one.
As I gradually learned to use a softer tone, my wife got happier with me - and our living room became less cluttered.