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