Here’s part 4 of the transforming communication interview with Richard Bolstad.

In part 3, Richard described that, when they taught these communication skills to the teachers of one of the schools, a surprising thing happened. The big challenge the teachers had with the students that caused problems in the class room disappeared. The students had no longer any conflicts with each other anymore, and the students weren’t even taught the skills. It was how the teachers approached the students and responded to them that worked the changes.

And here’s the next part now:

Richard: Exactly that. So what we showed those teachers what to do was how to create the kind of relationships towards their students that they wanted their students to have with each other.

Now you can imagine then, as I said, we have research about these skills that comes from the fields of working with couples. So that’s another whole area. That’s a pretty exciting area to be working with as well.

Where people nowadays would like to think that they can create a longlasting couples relationship and they know that there’s around a 50 percent chance in the Western world that those relationships are not going to last. So, that’s the real situation that they’re in and they probably also know that if they go to a councellor about that, that in most cases that’s not going to help. So, most of the people who go to a marriage or relationship councellor are going to find that in the next two years that their marriage finishes, that their relationship finishes.

So, I want to be able to help people to do better than that as well in that area.

There are so many differently places where these skills can be taught. In New Zealand we have the Theological College which trains ministers from Christian churches around the Pacific. And they are all trained in Transforming Communication now. So that means that we have this group of people out there who are doing pastoral councelling, who are building a community of people together, and they have the skills to create cooperative relationships in that kind of community. That’s another whole area for this.

I work with some large corporations in New Zealand, and there I’m working basically with management. What I’m again focussing on is how they create a team that achieves things because people want to come to work. From the research on what keeps people in the same job, if we check, and that’s a big issue in the world today, will these people that you’re training and spending money on now be here even in your organisation in five years? Here’s what we find: it’s not the money that you pay them that’s going to keep them there. When they wake up in the morning and they think: do I want to go to work, one of the biggest thing on their mind is: is this the kind of group that I want to be in for the day.

Michael: Would another way of saying that be: it’s the kind of relationships that they have at work that affect the quality of their working life?

Richard: Absolutely! That’s what affects their motivation most of all. That’s what excites them. That’s what gets their juices running in the morning and makes them work productively. And the other thing is: when they are excited about cooperating together, they don’t get into that kind of longterm frustration that happens when they feel like: well, there’s someone in here who just doesn’t understand me, or there’s someone in here who, no matter what you say, they’re going to come down heavy on you, or something like that.

So, the range of places where we teach these skills is phenomenal; it covers pretty much every relationship that you could think of. I could give you examples from fairly much every sector of society.

We train high school students themselves to use these skills. So that’s another way of applying it, it’s actually to teach children these skills from the age of around 10 or 12 onwards. And what a great thing because, as you listen to the things that I’m describing, I hope you would think: well, that must be pretty remedial, why don’t we get that when we are kids, why don’t we learn how to do this when we’re young enough so that we don’t have to sort of rebuild relationships after we’ve lost our first marriage, after we’ve lost our first team together, that kind of thing.

****** to be continued

How would your life look like, how would you feel if you had learned these communication skills when you were a child? How much less conflict would you have now? And how much more easily could you deal with conflict in a constructive way, rather than getting stressed, angry and frustrated?

Think about that! What would your world be like?

Next week I’ll put the next part of the interview up.

And here ’tis. Part 5 of the Transforming Communication interview

They call them “soft skills”, these communication skills.

Well, I can’t see anything soft about them. They are hard-hitting, as you can read in this third part of the interview with Richard.

By the way, here’s the link to the second part of the interview, in case you haven’t seen it yet.

Ok, in the second part, Richard was talking about when he ran the transforming communication seminar in a school and the changes that were then experienced. And there was a surprise…

Now the interesting thing about this was that we didn’t just get results with the teachers; we expected that, we were training the teachers. At the end of six months one of the things they said was that there was a group of students that those teachers all identified at the beginning were their biggest problem. They said:

“the most we want to get out of this course is to deal with those students who don’t do what we ask them, who are not interested in education, who don’t want to be in the room.”

At the end of six months, when we asked them:

“So what things are happening in your classroom, what things would you want to change?”

that group of students had simply disappeared. There were no students in the class anymore who fitted that description. We expected that.

But here’s the next thing: what we then found was in the questionaires with the students, the students reported after six months that they no longer had the conflicts with each other that they had before that time. And they had not even been through the training. They had simply experienced consistent teaching from that group.

So we compared them to students who were going through with teachers who had not done our training. And the difference was dramatic. The school that we were doing this study in already had a programme in place to deal with bullying, one of the big problems in schools that I find around the world when I’m teaching. But that programme that the school had in place wasn’t dealing effectively with bullying in the other areas. And here’s the reasons:

The teachers’ only method for dealing with students was essentially to bully. And then they would tell the students: don’t bully. That doens’t work…

Michael: …the pot calling the kettle black…

Richard: Exactly that. So what we showed those teachers what to do was how to create the kind of relationships towards their students that they wanted their students to have with each other…

***

So, these so-called “soft skills”, these communication skills can be applied in virtually every area of your life. In what area of YOUR life would you want to see better relationships? Where would more harmony make your life more enjoyable? And where would more balance bring you more happiness?

Next week, I’ll put another part of the interview up. Until then, think about what it would be like if you had the relationships that you really deserve.

And here’s the link to part 4 of the Transforming Communication interview.