00:00

Well, hey there, welcome to Intentional Living with Tanya Hale. This is episode number 286, "How Miscommunication Destroys Relationships." Welcome to your place for finding greater happiness through intentional growth, because we don't just fall into the life of our dreams...we choose to create it. This is Tanya Hale and I'm your host for Intentional Living.

00:22

Alright, hello there, my friends. Welcome to the podcast today. So glad to have you here. It is one week until Christmas when this comes out. Can you believe it? And if you play this card like I play, like everybody says, "what do you want for Christmas?" And I'm always like, "I just want us all to be together." And I do, and I love that. And I don't have a lot of things that I really want, but at the same time, good heavens, girl, tell them that you want coaching because that will make your relationships better with all of them. And if they all go in and combine, you can afford it and it's going to be worth it. And it's so, it is so, so worth the effort to put the work into coaching. Coaching has completely changed my life. And yes, you can listen to the podcast. This is great stuff and it's all free content and I get it and I love that I put it out there for you and I put it out so you can work on it, but you will make more progress in 12 weeks of working with me than you will in two years of doing this work on your own. And not that the content is not the same. I will do the same things, but having one-on-one feedback on what's going on in your life, what's happening, it is such a spectacular, incredible experience. So if you've been on the fence thinking, "maybe I want it, maybe I want it," talk to your family, tell them that this is what you want for Christmas and let's get moving. Like, the new year is always such a great time for our brains because we have this reset time where we think I just want to do it better. I want to move into my life with more intention, with more decision, and this is a great, great time to get started on coaching. So if this is what you thought about, put this on your Christmas list and get something that's really, really going to make a difference for you this year. You would not regret it. I promise you that.

02:19

Also a couple of things. If you are interested in joining a discussion group about physical and emotional intimacy, I'm still just kind of gathering some basic information to see if that's something that is of interest to any of you. Also if you are, go to tanyahale.com. There's a "contact me" button. You can just put in there, give me your name and information, and tell me that you're interested in that. I'm thinking about a Saturday morning group. It may require the you to get up a little bit early on a Saturday for the next three or four months once we decide to do this. But I promise you again, so so worth the time investment to do it, the energy investment, and the monetary investment to clean things up. I mean, so many of us women struggle with wanting more emotional intimacy, not knowing how to get it, and also struggling so much with physical intimacy. And yet those two things are so tightly interwoven, we can't separate them out, and yet we want to in our brains. And so cleaning up a lot of this, getting some clear thoughts about that, having discussions about how it works and what goes on, I think would be pretty amazing. I would love to get that going if I have enough of y'all that are interested. So check that out.

03:34

And also I am getting transcripts made of the podcast. So if you have some that you like, you just think "I really love that one, I wanna go back and I wanna to read it," we're starting at the current ones. The current ones will usually be up a day or two after they come out on Mondays and then we're just working our way back. And so check those out if that's something that interests you. And share this, gosh darn it. This is the best way to help other people to find information, to share ideas that are impacting you and changing your life, share this information, have discussion with friends about this information. Those are some of the best ways that you're going to move forward in what you wanna do.

04:20

Okay, let's jump into today's topic, how miscommunication destroys relationships and then we're gonna tag on how to stop miscommunicating because we have to stop miscommunicating if we're gonna have better relationships. So a miscommunication is when I say something, or don't say something, because I think it's implied or generally understood and you interpret what was said, or not said in a different way, than I meant it, chaos ensues and then we either fight about it or you get upset about how the other person person could be so stupid or how could they never listen to us or about how they never ever talk to us and I'm pretty sure you know what I'm talking about if you're a human. Okay? In my previous marriage there was so much miscommunication and that it sometimes makes my head spin. But here's the really tricky part. I don't think either one of us realized that it was miscommunication. Isn't that fascinating? I think we both just went so quickly to thinking that the other person was in the wrong because they didn't listen or they didn't think clearly. It was all about blame and there was little-to-no curiosity about how the misalignment of ideas happened. We assumed worst intent rather than assuming best intent, meaning we assumed the other person was just trying to be difficult or trying to hurt us or to make us mad rather than assuming that they weren't trying to be difficult...best intent, right? Or that they weren't trying to hurt us or make us mad. They were just coming at things from their own point of view.

05:59

So with zero data to back up this number, but a lot of personal experience and working with clients, I would guess that 95% of the fights we have in marriages come from basic miscommunication. And if we can clean up our miscommunication, we can eliminate a lot of angst in our marriages and relationships. But miscommunication is a fact of life in relationships because of our varied backgrounds, our encyclopedias of experience that we've talked about before. So let's revisit that idea really quickly. Every one of us has a completely different schema than every other person who has ever lived. Meaning that all of our background knowledge is completely different and that causes us to interpret the world differently. For example, I was raised by a fairly feminist mother who often worked during the 70s and 80s. And she even owned her own real estate business for a while. And my dad was always really supportive of her drive to be valued as a smart woman. I remember him designing the logo for her business and helping her get things set up for it and always being supportive of her time commitments. Also, my parents, because of my mom, I believe, didn't have a fully traditional marriage for the time, meaning they didn't adhere strongly to a lot of stereotypical marriage roles. Now, some they did for sure. But my dad was also the one to get us up for school, to make us breakfast before he left for work. He was also involved in cleaning up after dinner and doing a lot of the cleaning of the house. He was very involved. My previous husband came into the marriage from a background of a much more traditional marriage roles. Meaning, um, the the traditional woman takes care of everything in the house and the man does the work. So the work that makes the money, is what I meant to say. There we go. So you can imagine that when he and I got married, there was some miscommunication or lack of communication about all of this. I had unspoken expectations that he would perform as my father had and he had unspoken expectations of performing as his father had. I had unspoken expectations of performing as my mother had and he had unspoken expectations of me performing as his mother had. And it took about three months of marriage for my resentment to finally overflow and blow up about me cooking dinner and also doing all of the cleanup. Now it just made sense to me from my experience that he would want to partner up and help with the cleanup especially since I had also done the cleaning, the cooking. And it just made sense to him from his experience that he would go do something else while I took care of all the cleanup.

08:52

So it's not just big things like gender roles that we have different experiences around. Everything we have experienced in life has shaped us and informed us and given our unique perspectives in life. Every person we have interacted with, every movie or TV show we have watched, every magazine or book we read, every teacher in school and church, every other person that we have watched doing things, everything has shaped us and informed us. There may be some things that we view similarly because of where or how or when we grew up, but all of us interpreted things very differently as well. And it always amazes me when talking to one of my seven siblings how different our recollections of things are from growing up. I can talk about an experience, one that shaped my views of the world and the siblings who experienced it with me have zero recollection of it. And vice versa, for whatever reason, our brains highlighted certain things and those shaped our overall view of the world. And for whatever reason, their brains did not highlight the same things that mine did. Of my seven siblings, I am the only one who exercises regularly. It's just something that I value and none of them really do. And generally, most of them have zero interest in this coaching work that I do. I think only a couple of them have ever listened to this podcast and I think only one of them has listened to maybe more than 10. And life coaching stuff doesn't come up as a topic when we're together. And it's just fascinating to me that things that are so important and prioritized in my life, like the life coaching work that I do, that I don't have to do, just our life to me aren't even on the radar of people that I spent years growing up with in the same house. And they probably have things that they are passionate about and highly value that I'm pretty oblivious to as well. We value different things, we see the world differently, and that means we interpret our current world differently as well.

11:06

Now if that's how it is with siblings, imagine how it is with other people in the world who even grew up in different families. So of course when we get married or work on relationships with other people there will be miscommunications. Things that I think are normal and necessary, other people in my life aren't even aware of. So there's where miscommunication starts with our basic schema of life. Our encyclopedia of experience creates our own unique meaning to everything we currently encounter. Tied in with our encyclopedia of experience is that a 4D type of concept in my brain has to be turned into a 2- dimensional concept to speak with words. And then this goes into the other person's ears as a 2D concept and then it gets turned into a 4-dimensional concept in their brain. And because of our different schemas, from my 4D to a 2D to a 2D to them and a 4D in their brain, everything gets interpreted so differently. It's that classic telephone game, right? Everybody hears and sees things differently and so by the time it goes from one person to ten people, that sometimes is not even recognizable. Okay? So remember that this is what's going on with communication.

12:36

And another piece of this is that we unknowingly omit information when we are communicating because our brain sees it as so understood that we don't register that it might be important to clarify it. For example, in my brain, when something starts at 7 o 'clock p.m., I factor in a generously how much time it will take to drive there, how much time I will need to get myself ready, dressed and all of that, and to get out to the car, and then an extra 10 minutes for good measure. I really enjoy being on time. It's super important to me, right? Someone else in their brain will see 7 p.m. as a really great suggestion, but not set in stone. So they could leave at 7 p.m., leave the house at 7 p.m., and feel really great about life, which would be the time that I am about stressed up to my eyeballs. Is it really vital that we be obnoxiously on time? But for most things, probably not. And are either of us right or wrong? Probably not. But because my brain sees it that way, I can say that it starts at 7 p.m. and assume that the other person takes into account the travel time, the getting ready time, and the 10 minutes to boot. So I would say it starts at 7pm and think we're good. The other person may think, okay, we can leave around 7 p.m. and think that we're good. Meanwhile, around 6:55 p.m., I'm getting frantic. I start thinking the other person is irresponsible and rude, not just to me but to whoever or whatever or wherever we are going. And if it's a persistent behavior, then I will start to think that they are doing it on purpose just to make me angry and to be in control of me. And past me would have backburnered all of these times, letting the resentment build and build and build until I finally blew with all sorts of accusations and blaming and attacking for how selfish they were and how rude and irresponsible they were being. And by blue, my version was a lot of passive aggressive comments and harbored resentment and then to just kind of keep putting things on that backburner so it was constantly simmering, just waiting for the next time they were late.

14:59

But consider how destructive this is in a relationship. I'm holding on to all of that stuff I just talked about and the other person would be defensive thinking I'm irrational and too uptight and overreacting and when those thoughts and my thoughts get said out loud, ooo, then we have just doubled or tripled the mess. It's just so easy for miscommunication to occur. Again, from my experience, both personal and working with clients, I will go out on a limb and say that I believe about 95% of the fights we have in our marriages and relationships are over miscommunications. And seriously, think about your current relationship or your previous relationship and identify how many of your fights started with miscommunications. We probably agree on 95% of stuff going on in life and yet we spend all this time fighting over 5%, right? Like, there's just such a mess here and when we can learn to communicate better, we can eliminate so many of these squabbles. Okay?

16:08

So for example, when Sione and I first started dating, if I recall correctly, we had a discussion about what it means to be on time because we had some different ideas. No, not huge different ideas, but a little bit different. He was a lot more fluid, right? Not only did we talk about the logistics of what it meant to be on time, me insisting that we be 10 minutes early, but we also talked about why we had the views that we had. And this was a super important part of our conversation because when we understand the "why" behind someone's ideals or ideas, it makes so much more sense to us. Sione is a lot more fluid with time than me, but is still mostly on time. But when he understood my reasons for wanting to be super on time, he also understood the underlying meaning that I attach to being on time. So for me, someone being late, someone in my life being late was them trying to control me with forcing me into their time schedule. Okay, I'll let you figure out like where all that came from, you can probably figure it out. But if you've listened to me for very long, you know that I will push against someone trying to control me every single time. So when Sione understood that about me, understood that it was me pushing against being controlled, he much more willingly made small adjustments so that we could be on time most of the time. And here's the thing I've noticed in the last two years since we first met and discussed this and we're almost always on time, and I don't feel he's trying to control me with it. I don't feel the same fire in me to be on time and I'm a little bit more fluid. By the way, Sione, I know you're listening. When you listen to this, it's still an issue for me. This isn't about me agreeing to making being on time a free for all. However, it's no longer something that seems about control to me. So I don't feel I have to be crazy hyper vigilant about it. I've become being been able to be a little bit more fluid, but I still really like to be on time, just FYI. And to be honest, I didn't have to be crazy hyper vigilant about it before, but without the awareness of what was going on, I instinctively pushed in that direction. We had fights about the time when we could have been having discussions about my wants and needs and his wants and needs and all of that kind of stuff.

18:45

So where are miscommunications happening in your relationships and how do you learn to communicate better so that they happen less often? So let me give you another example from Sione and me from Thanksgiving just a few weeks ago. All four of my children and my daughter-in-law were there, so there were seven of us total. And Sione's not generally a huge American football fan, which I'm grateful for since I have a lot of football trauma from my previous marriage. But he does love to watch BYU Football on Saturdays, which I enjoy doing with him. And he watches an occasional Dallas Cowboys game, but he just, for whatever reason, he really loves watching the Cowboys play on Thanksgiving, because I guess they always do. And I know he wants to watch the game and he knows that I love having a really good dinner and that I don't want to do all the work myself, that I think that this is something that we should join in and he believes that as well.

19:44

So that morning we had a conversation about all of our expectations and wants and desires for the day. We decided on a general time to eat. I acknowledged that he wanted to watch the game and we discussed what time it started. He also said that there was another game that he was interested in following but didn't really need to sit down and watch it. And that game was during the time that we would be eating and during the last hour of the frantic prep to get things done. And I expressed some concern that I didn't want Thanksgiving to be the women-folk doing all the prep and cooking while the menfolk sat and watched football. And at this point he clarified something for me. He said something like, "oh, so you're thinking that by following the game that means I'll be sitting on the sofa watching," and to which I responded, "yeah, that's kind of where my brain goes." So see our different perspectives. And then he clarified that for him following it just meant having it on the TV that we could see from the kitchen and kind of half watching it to just see the big plays, but that he would still be in the kitchen helping to get dinner ready and what were my thoughts on that, right? So we clarified what would have been a miscommunication there. My thinking that he was going to be sitting on the sofa and I was going to have to constantly be coming up and interrupting his watching of the game and saying, "hey, will you come help with this? Will you, will you do this?" And he was like, "no, actually to me that means that I'm in the kitchen, just kind of the game's on and when the announcers go berserk, then I can stop and watch the big play." So right? So a big clarification. Then I was like, "oh yeah, okay, so I'm totally okay with that." We would have dinner finished by the time the Cowboys game came on and at that point I was totally good with him going to the basement with my sons to watch the game. So since my daughters and I love to cook together and would be doing most of the prep work just because we enjoy it, he volunteered to clean up afterwards. And I also expressed a desire for my children to see us working together in a healthy and happy way because they did not see that in my previous, in the home that they were raised in and he was on board with that.

21:56

So here's what we did in this conversation that was amazing. We both put everything we wanted on the table. He put all of his game desires on the table. Also his desires to help participate and be part of what was going on. I put my desires on the table of how much... involvement I wanted from both of us. And this is where I've gotten so much better at being honest about what I want and not feeling that having wants and needs makes me high maintenance or irrational.-It actually just makes me an equal partner. Notice that when I don't share my wants and needs, I am one-upping or one-downing myself. Generally, I would be one-downing myself because my wants and needs don't matter. But then I would go into a one-up position while I'm cooking dinner and fuming thinking, "oh, I'm just so much better than him. Like he's not putting stuff in." So notice that me putting my wants and needs on the table is me showing up as an equal partner. So in this experience, we worked together as a team. We scooched our butts around the table. We sat cheek to cheek to decide how to get everything or most everything we wanted accomplished. This is a space of collaboration rather than a space of compromise. And I'll tell you that neither one of us compromised anything in this. And we both got everything that we wanted. We didn't make it a space of him against me, us sitting across the table fighting each other. We scooched our butts around the table, we sat cheek to cheek, and we worked it out to be collaborative. By both of us putting everything we wanted out on the table, we were clear on the whys as well. 23:45 So a piece of this that I was a little bit nervous to say for whatever reason, and wasn't sure whether to put on, but I put it on anyway, because I'm like, this is a piece of what I want, was letting Sione know that having my children see us working together was really important to me. And that could have been left unsaid because it really didn't have a lot to do with stuff, but it was also a piece of my why. Okay, and so me being willing to say, "I want my kids to see that, I want them to see a healthy version of a relationship." That was an important piece of the puzzle for me, and it helped him to understand part of my "why" as well. All of our expectations and wants were expressly discussed, and we didn't have any miscommunication about how we wanted our Thanksgiving Day to play out, and it was amazing.

24:39

In the past, very little, if any, of that communication conversation would have happened, I would have gotten angry about unmet expectations and feeling like a maid who was just there to do the cooking and the cleaning. I would have thrown out a bunch of passive aggressive comments before, during, and after dinner, and we would have both gone to bed angry and blaming the other person for ruining Thanksgiving. So learning how to communicate beforehand about what our expectations are, about the why behind our expectations, getting curious about things we may not fully understand, clarifying timelines, and I guess, ideas and who is doing what may seem like a bit of overkill at times. But it really, really works. Doing this with most things we engage in has been amazingly helpful for us. By being preemptive and having discussions, we have very few miscommunications and therefore we have very few fights. And in fact, if I have to be honest, we don't fight at all. Cleaning up the miscommunication and being willing to set aside our ego to own our own, to circle back around, to get curious, to seek to understand...it has all created a super honest place where we both feel emotionally safe. So if something happens and one of us is uncomfortable, it's very easy for us at this point to say, "hey, can we talk about this?" And we do so with the owning your own. So there's not this blaming, accusing, attacking space that this can be so painful.

26:14

Okay, now I know that so many of you are saying "yes, but that's because you started your relationship with these skills and also because you're married to someone who wants to communicate and talk about all the things," and guess what, you're entirely right. That does make it a lot easier. But let's take a look at how we can often become complicit in the miscommunication that causes so many problems. Okay, where are you not being specific about what you want and why? If your spouse or other person doesn't ask, put it out there. That is what an equal partner does, we step in to take care of what needs to be taken care of, and that includes you putting all of your stuff on the table and inviting them to put all of their stuff on the table and in this sort of situation you can ask them what they would like. You can head up the conversation if they respond with "I don't care, whatever you want." Take them at their word. Discuss what you want and then ask them how they feel about it then you would say, "okay, this is what I'm thinking," put yourself out there and then say, "what are your thoughts on that? How do you feel about about working this plan?" and if they still defer by saying "I don't care", right? You cannot force them to participate.

27:41

Now be be aware, though, that if they say well, "it doesn't really matter what I want anyway," okay? There's a backburner issue. There are things to be talked about and we can start cleaning that up. But in this case sometimes we just really don't care about things, right? Like there are times that Sione wants to do something and I'm just like, "okay, that's fine," like that's not something that matters to me. And I will defer and he can take me at my word that okay, that doesn't matter. Because it's my responsibility to speak up and show up as that equal partner, right? So, you can't force your spouse to participate in this, but you can be really clear about what you want and why. And if they are not happy with what you have planned, that is on them to talk about it and to be honest with you. It's your job to stay out of their lane, not to anticipate their unexpressed wants and desires. But also listen because if they do say something that indicates there's a back burner issue, you'll be willing to step into that with a lot of curiosity. And as you step into learning to be more honest with your own wants and needs, and as you do it with kindness, offering a safe space for them to offer up their wants and needs, you are being that equal partner we've been talking about. And you are just responsible for you showing up equally. Them being in their lane means they are learning for themselves how to speak up and how to have their own voice. They are responsible for expressing themselves. You're just responsible for creating as safe of a place as possible for them to do that. Which means if they express something different than you had in mind, you step back and step into curiosity. Ask them what that looks like, why it's important for them. The more you can understand about the what's and the why's, the more you can work as equal partners.

29:42

Now, if your spouse is resistant, that's okay. He can be resistant. And you can keep showing up discussing all of the expectations, the wants, the needs, the desires and offer him a safe space to share his. We do not move into mocking or ridiculing what they want. What they want is just as valid and important as what you want. And yes, very often it will be different. It is supposed to be different because you are different people. You will want different things. Our goal in relationships is to figure out how to honor the other person's differences and continue to love them even though they're different, to accept them in all of their differences. When we really learn how to communicate about all the things, we can cut our miscommunication down significantly and then our disagreements get cut significantly as well. This is an important component for creating a more equal partnership. Once you feel that you have stepped into this space of understanding, clarify that at the end of the conversation. Clarify it and say, "okay, I just want to make sure that we're totally on the same page here. So this is what I understand that we have decided." Give them one last chance to clarify anything that that has been misunderstood. Right? Let's really make sure that things are clean and and that we both are on the same page with our understanding.

31:22

So one last thought. Maybe for now you're the only one doing this work. There is nothing wrong with that. The work has to start with someone and since you're here learning the tools, it may as well be you and it kind of has to be you. The alternative to you doing the work is continuing to live in resentful misery and frustrated anger that you are married to such a jerk and that is never a great place to be. And here's the thing. This work does not just benefit them. You're doing amazing work and ultimately it is benefiting you because it is helping the relationship and It is helping you feel like a rock star about how you're showing up. So when you think, "well, I'm having to do all the work." Well, thank goodness! You're doing all the work because it's going to benefit you, not just them. They're not getting a free pass. You're the one that's doing amazing work for you.

32:24

Okay, so we don't want to live in this place that we just think that we're married to a jerk, right? Because I guess what I bet that most of you are not really married to jerks. Now, some of you are, right? Okay, that's just the reality, but most of us are not married to jerks. But miscommunication can make the other person seem like one sometimes, so let's clean up the communication. Let's get really clear and concise. Let's create space for the other person to safely share their experiences and wants and needs and let's see what happens So rather than having unspoken and unmet expectations, put it all out there on the table with an openness and a willingness to work together and find solutions that you will both be happy with. Collaboration rather than compromise. You are a team. You both want a good relationship here. Right? Assume best intent.

33:24

You've got this. I promise it will make a difference in how you feel in your relationship. You continually show up as an equal partner regardless of how they show up and things have to shift. This being able to step in as this equal partner is the space of growing up into middle-aged. And I love growing up and I hope you do too. I hope that's why you're here. Okay, my friends. So much goodness, so much stuff to work on. Ask for coaching for a Christmas present and let's get to work. This will change your life. I promise you that. This is amazing, amazing work. Okay, that's going to do it for me. Have an awesome, awesome week and next Monday is Christmas. And podcasts will be coming out on Christmas. Yeah, I think that's the first thing you should do Christmas morning is listen to my podcast. Just saying. Okay, have an awesome last week before Christmas. Enjoy your preparations and I will talk to you next week. Bye.

34:33

Thank you so much for joining me today. If you would love to receive some weekend motivation, be sure to sign up for my free "weekend win" Friday email, a short and quick message to help you have a better weekend and position yourself for a more productive week. Go to tanyahale.com to sign up and learn more about life coaching and how it can help you get to your best self ever. See ya.