No matter how hard you work to keep your tongue in check, trouble is never more than a word away. Your tongue can turn into a ballistic missile in seconds. Adhere to six guidelines to prevent your tongue from transforming into a weapon and blowing up your important relationships:
- Contain conversations that are negative and are escalating at every turn, and don’t grow complacent once you feel like you have a conversation under control. Damaging communication is only a hasty phrase away, and conversations that have escalated can flare up again quickly.
- Don’t let negative emotions override your restraint. Anger, fear, frustration, and other negative emotions can wreck havoc on your important relationships.
- Don’t jump into the meaning behind the words until you have actually understood the literal meaning of the words first. Listen to what your conversational partner is actually saying. Peering behind the meaning of words often leads to false conclusions which can prevent you from understanding what the other person is saying. Jumping prematurely into the other person’s intentions may cause hasty and ill-advised words to slip from your tongue. Understand words at face value before seeking ulterior motives.
- Curb your bad communication habits. You will be pleasantly surprised how much trouble you will avoid by eliminating simple errors. So, don’t talk to someone when you are distracted, angry, or upset; think and review before hitting send; and don’t multitask during a face-to-face conversation. Although you won’t drive all of the errors and mistakes from your communication, curtailing bad communication habits can dramatically reduce your error rate.
- Whenever your tongue detonates and causes damage, conduct a self-critique to identify what went wrong and why, and form a plan to prevent recurrences. Although not all wayward conversations reveal learning points, it is important, whenever possible, to extract the learning from failed conversations and eliminate problems that have the potential to repeat.
- When in doubt, stop talking. The person in front of you is more important than the feeling inside you.
Originally posted on mouthpeaceconsulting.com.