Seven Inside Tips for Mastering New Skills

1. Be patient with yourself. This is the most important one. People often have unrealistic expectations for how quickly they are going to master a new behavior. This unrealistic expectation sets up for early discouragement.
2. Pick one or two new skills to focus on. Don't try to change everything at once. Just as it makes sense to help your kids to work on only one or two new skills at a time, you should do the same with yourself. As number 3 below will explain, you need to give your brain time to change. It is not an instantaneous process. Accepting that fact and working with it vastly increases the odds of your success.
3. Don't confuse understanding with mastery. Lots of times when parents hear about a new skill, like enforceable statements for instance, and have an exciting moment of insight into how it would help and why, and some become disappointed when they go home and end up doing the same thing they did before they learned about the new skill. The insight was important, very important, but the way the brain works dictates that it take some time and repetition for a new habit to form. Your brain is actually altering physical neural connections and is forming new ones. It doesn't happen all at once, as nice as that would be.
4. Understand how your brain works. In the heat of the moment our brains very automatically shift into what psychologists call over-learned skills, that is skills that we've practiced over and over and over. So if we usually get upset and yell at our kids, in a moment of stress, our brain will tend to powerfully veer toward that old way of doing things. This is not your fault. It is just how the brain works.
5. Use visual cues. The veering to overlearned skills is the reason why when you have a new skill you want to master you need to get it to the forefront of your mind, over and over. Post its are your best friend for acquiring new skills. Slap them on the bathroom mirror, on the door jamb of your closet. If you have young kids, stick them on the fridge (they can't read yet). These not only might remind you in the heat of the moment of the skill you could use, they also function to create repetition. Every time you see the post it reminding you of the skill, it reinforces those newly forming connections, which neurology textbooks explain, will make them stronger.
6. Create a learning loop. Make a habit of reviewing regularly, maybe before bed or at breakfast, how you did on the one or two new skills you're working on. Without judgment review how things went. How did you handle the situation? If you yelled or phrased what you said to your child in an unhelpful way, picture how you would say it according to the new skill. Picture the scenario and visualize your calmly doing what you hope to be able to do in the future. The key is to do with with number 1 in mind.
7. Count awareness as progress. Parents who give themselves credit for at least realizing after the fact that they could have done something differently are the same ones who go on to make changes in their relationships with their kids that make life more enjoyable for everyone involved. Those who don't usually get discouraged and give up on the new skill before it has a chance to take root. This is one of many reasons why awareness is half of the name of this blog.

Now you're ready to select one or, at most, two skills and make them yours. With patience and realistic expectations about how your brain makes changes, you can make them happen. I see who are equipped with this knowledge do it all the time.

Also this article I did over at GTDtimes looks a bit more in-depth at the dance we do with the unconscious, automatic parts of our mind every time we try to take on a complex new skill, which includes any interpersonal skills, and especially parenting. The idea is essential for understanding why we often commit to ourselves to do something and then are puzzled when we just don't follow through. I think you'll enjoy it.

If you enjoyed this article please vote for it on Digg, above, or Netscape or one of the other options below. You also bookmark the site to the right. I appreciate your support.

Couples, Part 2, Inside Look at the Way a Top Couples Therapist Works

In Part I of this post, I looked last time briefly at the work of couples counselor Dan Wile, whom John Gottman has said he believes is the most effective marital therapist on the planet. What I want to do in Part II of this post here is to get across the essence of the statements that Wile uses in his work..

Wiles statements on behalf of his clients tend to communicate two pieces. The first is describing something with positive intent. It could be what you would like to do, or what you hope for that would support your partner or that would show that your connection with them is important to you.

I really wish we did more things together like we did before the kids were born. We used to go for walks, get coffee together, go to movies. I miss that...

The second part is about why it is that you feel stuck, what your worry is about how things will go if you make yourself vulnerable and go for what you identified in the first part of the statement.

...and I'm reluctant to bring up that I want to, because when I do it seems that you experience it like I'm nagging you or blaming you that we don't do it more often.

Again, the first part (positive intent):

I have something that is bothering me, and I want to talk about it, because I want us to enjoy the time we spend together, and instead I'm tense and probably not much fun to be around...

And the second part (the worry):

... but I feel like if I do bring it up, we're just going to get into a fight, which feels even worse than feeling annoyed at what I want to talk with you about.

In describing his method, Wile says that he tries to say something on behalf of one member of the couple (at a time) that gets everyone in the room empathizing.

From looking at the examples above it is probably easy to see how just altering them a little can throw change their character altogether. The second part of the statement (the worry) can easily shift into blaming the other. "But I feel like if I do bring it up, we're just going to get into a fight," can easily shift into, "But I know you're not going to listen. You always just get defensive," which is unlikely to get anyone empathizing and more likely to backfire.

Wile's strategy is to get your partner to see your positive intention, and put into words how despite your intention for things to go well for you as a couple, you're in an uncomfortable position. He tries to do this in such a way that your partner can picture what it is like for you, to get them empathizing. And then, of course, he moves to the other side and tries to do the same on behalf of your partner.

It is worth pointing out that Wile is the first to say and understand that most of the time, as a member of a couple, we're not going to come up with this sort of statement in the heat of the moment, and he's right. We're not, which is why he does this in therapy sessions. On the other hand, there are times when we've got something on our mind that we'd like to get across and we give it thought before we raise it. It is at these times that I'm proposing that thinking about how you could form your concern in the manner described in this article that might make the difference between just another evening of mutual irritation (or worse) and getting your partner to see what it is that you are getting at that is important to you.

Also note that Wile's work is not the common version of "teaching communication skills". It involves communication skills, but is more subtle than simply teaching "I messages" for instance. So next time you find that you've got something that is bothering you about your spouse, boyfriend, etc., instead of swallowing it, which usually ends up coming out in some other manner anyway, give one of Wile's statements a try. You might be pleasantly surprised by how your partner responds differently.

Couples, Part 1: Inside Look at the Way a Top Couples Therapist Works

It goes without saying that being part of a couple is hard work at times. Even when things are going smoothly, studies show that each member of the couple will estimate that their success as a pair is due to their doing relatively more for the relationship than their partner. How about when things are going less smoothly? John Gottman, the kingpin of research on couple interactions and author of Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work has found that of the problems that are a source of continuing disagreement for couples, 69% of them fall into the category of irresolvable problems. That is a sobering statistic. While Gottman is the premiere researcher on couples, one of only two couples therapists whose work Gottman gives a nod of approval to, is Dan Wile, the author of After the Fight: Using Your Disagreements to Build a Stronger Relationship. Wile's take on these perpetual problems is that it is not having the problem that is the problem, but rather each member of the couples inability, when things aren't going well, to recruit the other as a resource for dealing with that problem. Gottman is in complete agreement with Wile on this. One factor that makes a big difference between couples whose relationship is headed for the rocks, and ones that end up together years down the road is their ability to talk about those problems that aren't ever going to be completely resolved.

Dan Wile believes that the key to dealing with these problems is very elusive for us in those times when things aren't going smoothly. His entire approach to couples therapy is about helping each person to express what it is that is eating at them in a way that enables their partner to experience empathy for them. Wile's approach is similar to other couples therapists in taking turns trying to understand each person. Where his approach becomes unusual is that he then tries to speak to the other partner on their behalf, putting their concern, and their dilemma into words that might help the other see the difficult position their partner is in.

His version of speaking for them varies greatly but it might sound something like this. Picture Wile kneeling beside one partner speaking to the other on their behalf, saying, "There is a big part of me right now that wants to reach out to you and comfort you, but I'm afraid if I do, you're going to push me away again, and I just don't think that I can risk that right now." He then checks in with the person he's speaking for and asks how close he was, and what they might add or delete from what he said. When Wile does this with his clients, on those occasions that he gets it right, clients experience this as being very powerful, really capturing how it is that they are feeling stuck and misunderstood. When they have something to clarify, to add or something that they'd would take out altogether, they end up bringing the discussion closer to what the issues really are. One way to put this together is to say that Wile sees the goal as connecting around the difficulty rather than focusing therapy on solving the problem. Given Gottman's finding that 69% of ongoing couple problems are irresolvable, this makes a lot of sense.

Now hiring Dan Wile as a therapist would be a nice luxury that hopefully some Awareness * Connection readers will experience. But what about those of us who won't be able to, or who might not even have the opportunity to see a therapist trained in his approach? In the next installment of this post, I'll break down how and why Wile's statements work, and I'll show how in our better moments we can tap into them to connect with our partner when a perpetual problem comes up and those familiar feelings of tension creep back into our lives.

Thought: Our Most Important Job

One of the most crucial jobs that we have as parents, as I see it anyway, is to help our children learn to tolerate and manage their emotions. Do you know any adults who don't understand their own feelings? Any that have difficulty managing their temper or their sarcasm? How well do they do in their relationships? You get the idea.

Guess what our biggest obstacle to helping our children to learn to tolerate and manage their emotions is?

Correct!

Tolerating and managing our own emotions. Maybe it should give us a bit of empathy for our kids. Even having at least a couple of decades on them, it is still difficult, when we're honest with ourselves, to manage all the feelings that parenting and simply living in today's society brings, not to mention that simply being a human being brings.

Whether we're talking about a four year old, a twelve year old or a college sophomore, we have a lot more experience in life than our kids do. Try to imagine what it is like having the powerful sorts of emotions that we have at our worst moments, with a good deal fewer skills for managing them.

Book: The Sociopath Next Door

Ever wonder what it would be like to live without a conscience? We often think of sociopaths or psychopaths in terms of serial killers, but they have much more of a range than that. They can be successful business people, politicians, deadbeat dads and petty criminals. The one trait that ties them all together is that they function without a conscience. This can be surprisingly hard to detect because they can be impressive emotion decoders even though they lack any felt empathy that you and I experience like fish experiences water. This means that they can read others well and that they can often portray exactly the emotion that will push your buttons, which will serve their selfish ends.

If I recall correctly it was Robert Hare in his book Without Conscience, who compares the sociopath with the color blind person. Watching a color blind person at a traffic light, if we didn't know ahead of time about their color blindness, their deficit would be invisible to us. They apparently saw the light turn green when they drove off. The sociopath has learned tricks similar to the color blind person watching the relative position of the traffic light rather than the color. They similarly learn to deal in emotions that convey empathy without ever experiencing empathy themselves. Because of all this they can and do frequently wreck havoc in the lives of others.

Martha Stout's Sociopath Next Door sold well for good reason. It acquaints us with what it is like to live in their world and explores the tragic effect that they have on the lives of others with straight forward analysis and stories that will draw you in. Have you ever wanted to do something that your conscience would not permit you to...but you still wished you could if only your conscience would let you alone? She also entertains this intriguing question, would it be worth it to be able to pursue your own ends without a conscience to pester you if you had the choice?

I think this question gets at why we find ourselves drawn in by the Sopranos, Showtime's Dexter, Dirty Harry films, American Psycho and so on. It is intriguing to put ourselves in the shoes of someone who can live without a shred of genuine concern for others. But most of us only entertain that fantasy for the duration of the movie or book and then go back to genuinely connecting with others, loving our spouses, kids and families, feeling for others to one degree or another when they hurt. For the true sociopath when the lights come on, the movie doesn't end.

Gottman: Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child

One school of thought in parenting is that there are often times where we need to be wary of engaging a child's emotions. If we do, this approach says we'll end up making the situation worse, much like trying to put out a fire with spray bottle full of gasoline. Another camp focuses on the fact that children genuinely need help navigating their emotional experiences. These two camps often point fingers at one another saying that the other side doesn't "get it" about what is most important about working with or parenting children.

Of course with a very young child, things start off with no real setting of limits of any sort. The second camp I think is certainly on the right track in this regard. The relationship at that point is primarily about connection and the meeting of needs. But as a child grows older, becomes mobile, starts hitting, pinching and insisting on having things their way, the first way of looking a things begins to look a bit more appealing to many of us. I think both of these ways of looking at parent-child relationships have some wisdom to offer.

That's why I try to stay in the habit of thinking about relationships in terms of continuums. Thinking in terms of either/or gets us in trouble. Just placing the issue on a continuum and pretending you have a slider (like a volume adjustment) can help us to see lots of alternatives that would have been invisible when viewed through an either/or lens. The discussion of this book takes both camps into account, and tries to use the "slider" or continuum approach.

The last book I featured was Daniel Siegel's Parenting From the Inside Out, which also delves into the emotions involved in being a parent. Siegel's book homes in on discovering what the parent brings to the relationship from his/her own past and their inner experience. John Gottman's Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child gets a bit more practical as it looks at the "how to" of ways parents can interact with their children to support their emotional development during difficult interactions. In doing this, Gottman builds on Daniel Goleman's work on Emotional Intelligence which shows that ability in knowing and handling one's emotions has much more to do with how far we get in life and with how happy we are than IQ does.

John Gottman is today's premiere researcher on couple interactions. He's the researcher/therapist that can identify with just a brief, minutes long sample of behavior whether a couple will still be married in 15 years. His accuracy in doing this is impressive. In Raising an Emotionally Intelligent Child he applies some of the concepts of his research to how parents can support their youngsters emotionally and help them become emotionally intelligent. Here is the general approach which he calls Emotion Coaching in a nutshell:

1. become aware of the child's emotions.
2. recognize the emotion as an opportunity for intimacy and teaching.
3. listen empathetically, validating the child's feelings.
4. help the child find words to label the emotion he is having; and
5. set limits while exploring strategies to solve the problem at hand.

Love and Logic, which I draw on in my parent coaching work, is very practical in its focus. It is strong on the "how to" of step five above of Gottman's Emotion Coaching approach, "setting limits and exploring strategies to solve the problem at hand," whereas it relatively glosses over the first four of these steps, calling what they are getting at simply "offering empathy". Cline and Fay's identifying empathy as being important and as something that is very helpful even when setting reasonable limits with children is an original and important contribution. Where their expertise lies is in how to carry out the limit setting and maintaining of boundaries.

One place Gottman's book can be nicely integrated with some of the boundaries and limits of Love and Logic's focus is in the details of just how that empathy might look in different circumstances. It goes further than that, of course, and helps children to become more emotionally literate, teaching them something about how both they and others respond to different events in life.

All approaches to therapy and to raising children have implicit assumptions. These assumptions both give them their strength and determine where the limits of their effectiveness lie. If you are aware of what those assumptions are, it becomes easier to know when to draw on which approach, and that awareness will help you decide what might fit best with each specific situation. Gottman's Emotion Coaching approach definitely deserves to be in the range of skills that you can draw on as a parent. It probably also describes things that you are already doing. Isn't it nice to hear a bit about why certain things that you are doing are working once in a while?

Book on Attachment

Parenting from the Inside Out
by Daniel Siegel and Mary Hartzell is a wonderful book. The work I do with parents when they first come in is often focused on the very practical, how to cope or improve specific interactions and try out some potential solutionns to common workaday parenting challenges from dealing with sibling rivalry to problem solving how to chisel out some time and pull off family meals more regularly. Parenting From the Inside Out gets at the deeper level in parenting that in my work with clients often begins a few sessions into our work. Rather than covering ways to handle the daily parenting challenges or even connection strategies, this book gets to the core of our relationships as parents to the bond that we have with our child, attachment.

For those who are less inclined to want to hear a lot about research behind Siegel's work, like he covers in The Developing Mind, Parenting From the Inside Out is a gem of a book to learn about how the attachment between parent and child works and how our attachment with our child is deeply affected by how we've made sense of our own attachment to our parents.

Here is one fascinating fact from the book. We can tell a lot just by hearing what a parent has to say about what their childhood was like with their own parents. Before a child is born, or even conceived, based on how the mother tells the story of her attachment with her parents we can predict with a good deal of accuracy what sort of attachment she will have with her child to be! Here is the clencher. Even if you've had a difficult childhood, a poor attachment with your own parent, that is not what in the end determines how well you'll be able to attach with your child. Instead it is how well you've been able to make sense of the experiences you had as a child that is associated with how well you'll bond with your child.

A couple examples are helpful with this. Parents who form insecure attachments with their children will often dismiss the importance of parent-child relationships, and they tend to have very inaccurate understandings of what their own relationship with their parent was like. One way that this can show up is that when asked about his relationship with his mother, a father might make a sweeping positive statement, "She was a great parent." But when asked for examples of this, he can only make vague statements, or he might even make statements that actually would better support a statement that the relationship was not very close.

Another way of saying all this is that parents who will have secure attachments with their own children are able to tell a coherent story of what their attachment was like with their parent. Parents who do this even if they had a rocky upbringing have worked through and understood what happened. They also value attachment, rather than dismissing its importance in order to cope with the emotional pain of their past. Parents who have done this are prepared to provide secure base emotionally for their own children.

The wonderful thing about Parenting From the Inside Out is that it actually takes you through exercises to help you take stock of your experience as a child. This is work that often takes place in the context of therapy, or even in other close, supportive relationships, but it can also be helped by self-reflection. This book is a tool to help you do some of that on your own, piece by piece.

The Enforceable Statement

I wanted to get a practical skill in here early on. One of my favorites is the Enforceable Statement. Parents let me know that they often wish they had more credibility with their children so that when they really need their kids to take them seriously, they would. One way to increase credibility right away is to stop talking about what the child needs to do and focus instead on what you will do, provide or allow. A familiar example is if you tell a child, "Don't talk to me in that tone of voice," the statement is completely unenforceable. It will probably make the child want to continue to talk to you in the same exact tone you are trying to address. Now what happens to your credibility when the child does respond in the same tone? Down it ratchets.

Notice what happens when you change that unenforceable command into an enforceable statement. "I'll be happy to listen as soon as your voice is calm like mine". Now if the child continues with the same tone, you can let them know that it looks like you'll need to try again later. With some repetition they get the hang of things pretty quickly and realize that staying tuned in to what you say you're willing to do, provide or allow is a valuable source of information for them.

On days when things aren't going so well we might try to set the exact same limit, by saying with exasperation, "You use a civil tone or don't bother talking to me, because I won't be listening." Even though the limit is the same, because it is framed negatively (and usually has a petulant tone to it as well) it pulls the kid into a power struggle with you, if you weren't already in one to begin with. Love and Logic uses the mnemonic Thinking Words vs Fighting Words, which I think captures pretty nicely what we're shooting for.

On Love and Logic.com they have a nice Enforceable Statements PDF handout. Be patient with yourself as you try these. Awareness is the first step. If you're trying out enforceable statements and you end up saying something much less helpful, remind yourself that this is the normal process.

Just being aware that there is an alternative, and seeing in retrospect where it might fit is progress that will start you on your way, even if your behavior has not yet changed. Give enforceable statements a try. They can be one important piece of a better relationship with your kids.

When in Doubt...Empathy

One thing that is clear in doing a lot of parent coaching and counseling with parents is that it is hard to figure out when to respond in what way with your child. Should I empathize? Should I set a limit? Should I offer a choice? Certainly we can find books that would advice any of the three, and dozens more. As parents we can’t be blamed for feeling baffled, especially at the end of a long day (whether at work or at home) when it feels like we'd be lucky to have two brain cells to rub together.

Rather than several approaches to sort through, it can be nice to have a single fall back option. One that can almost always draw on, and one that would very rarely cause more of a problem. Lots of parents find it helpful in these situations to go back to having/showing empathy for the child. Keep in mind that empathy is not an all or nothing proposal. If something has happened that is big, our child flunking a test, hearing that a friend is really peeved at them (and for good reason), it is important in those circumstances to dig deep and come up with some actual heart-felt empathy. But we don’t need to do this for smaller everyday sorts of occurrences. For these run of the mill issues, a simple, “Bummer,” seasoned with bit of empathy can suffice. In other words, the empathy is most helpful when it is commensurate with the context.

Sometimes our gut tells us that it isn't a good time to say anything. Empathy can even come in handy during these times. We can do this just by doing nothing more than noting that we need to come back to the situation. And before we do that'll give us a bit of time to give it some consideration from the child’s point of view. I’ve yet to see a situation where the parent took the time to consider how the situation might look from the child’s viewpoint (through their temperament, preferences, developmental abilities, and areas of challenge) that this hasn’t proven helpful to the parent or to the relationship in the longrun.

The author of Verbal Judo: The Gentle Art of Persuasion, George Thompson, made the statement that empathy is the most important word in the English language. And this is a guy whose gig is helping to train police officers around the country how to handle the aftermath of burglaries, and the guy who is refusing to step out of the car for the breathalyser. Situations where people aren't known to be their most flexible. I thought when I first read Thompson's book back when I was teaching that he was onto something important. Knowing how whomever we are working with sees the situation, whether an angry driver who is being verbally combative with a police officer or with our 11-year-old whose attitude we’re finding hard to tolerate. After a bit of practice, on our better days, getting there can come relatively easily. On other days…not so easy. I'll have plenty of posts coming up to address how to deal with ourselves on these more difficult days.