As I’m sure you’ve noticed, there is a lot of resistance to this idea and very useful belief. A significant part of it

* Distinctions need to be made between our idea not being communicated well and our idea not being agreed with. They are not the same thing but believing “if they don’t agree with me, then that must mean I am not communicating it well” is not communicating well to ourselves. While in many cases it’s certainly true that if we calibrated to the individual and communicated better (let alone learning their native language)they would agree with us, it’s also very true that they may fully “get” what we are saying but simply disagree (not to mention the humbling fact that we have more to learn then they do about the topic).

* It is easy to see how the 100% belief that “it’s their problem, not my communication” is a form of arrogance. However, the other extreme of believing that it’s 100% always your communication that needs to be fixed can hide another kind of arrogance. When we assume that the problem someone doesn’t understand is ALWAYS mainly due to the way we are communicating it, we “benefit” by eliminating the possibility that we could be wrong or very ignorant about the very core idea that we are trying to communicate. For example, in a sales context, we might truly believe that if we persuade someone to buy a new car, we are doing them a favor and it’s a sound and wise decision for them (despite being aware of their financial problems) – when the reality is that it would be the tipping point that drives them into bankruptcy and leading to divorce etc. We could improve our persuasion and communication skills all day long but it doesn’t change the fact that the reason why they don’t seem to truly “understand” our reasoning well enough to be persuaded, has little to do with our ability to communicate the idea. Assuming we have sincere good intentions (sometimes a big assumption to make), we are not allowing for the fact that the other person might just be smarter and/or more experienced than us. So in this case, it would be a form of arrogance because we are not allowing for the possibility that we could either be wrong about the facts, or wrong about what those facts mean.

* I overstand that this belief is within the context of “it’s less important how true a belief is than how useful a belief is.” With that in mind, it’s rarely useful to believe something like this 100% of the time. I doubt that anyone involved in NLP truly believes this 100% of the time anyway. After all, if someone is intentionally withholding information from their physician and intentionally responding to the physician in a way that makes the physician believe that the patient is hiding nothing, it’s simply not credible for an observer to argue that the main reason for the patient’s lack of accurate understanding about thee condition the doctor is telling them about is primarily the doctor’s fault. In this case, the doctor is not provided the necessary facts to communicate something well and they are in no position to even be aware this is happening. There are people who will hide things or not WANT to understand regardless of how much rapport there is. So in this case with the doctor, he is lying to himself, a bit arrogant, and not serving his patients well if he does not leave open the possibility that the PATIENT is not communicating well.

* If you are a teacher and there is a student who secretly listens to music on their headphones in every class etc., and they repeatedly fail exams and refuse to talk with the teacher about it, is it more about the teacher’s lack of flexibility in communication or more about the student’s not paying attention to the results they are getting? This relates to the other party refusing, not wanting, or not interested in understanding – let alone being convinced.

* Often there are other factors out of our control – we could look and sound just like their ex-wife and not even know it…they will unconsciously or consciously go out of their way to never by a car from us. Another salesperson however could just walk up and say “want to buy this car?” and their response will be “yes”.

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I realize that such examples could easily be misused as excuses to not even try to improve our flexibility in communication in our own language, let alone learning another language. It’s just important to recognize the facts first and THEN as the second step, adopt the most useful belief. So for instance since I am not near as flexible in my communication as I want to be, believing that “My communication is equal to the response I get – it is not about my intention” 100% of the time, that belief might be what is needed to take responsibility often enough to get the best possible results from my communication.

On some level though, it’s important not to be brainwashed into truly thinking it is ALWAYS the case – that will have diminishing returns and results we are not wanting.

Just my 5 cents of rambling…thanks for tolerating and thanks again for the great post. If I talked about all the things I agree with about your post, my reply would be 10x longer.

These are some of the reasons that trying to convince someone that it will help them in life to ignore all feedback adopt this belief 100% of the time will be a hard sell – because they KNOW from real world results that belief simply is not always true. So for me, this is a belief that has been VERY useful to continually adopt more often than I did yesterday. So really the only issue I have with the article is the “100%” aspect. I am SO on board with the idea of teaching others (and having to remind myself daily) to take MUCH more responsibility for our own communication than we do. Because as you’ve indicated, the default behavior is to assume the opposite – Why? Because it’s less painful than realizing that we could get better results in most cases

This is the variation of the belief that I am able to adopt of the time – “If what I am communicating is sound, I will always be able to communicate a concept to someone if I’m flexible enough and there is enough time.” After all, it’s not unreasonable to believe that if we had 5,000 years to help someone understand what we’re trying to say, we could do it.

Just as their is an advantageous to increasing the flexibility in our communication, there is also an advantage to increasing the flexibility of our beliefs about communication. If we don’t believe on some level that such truisms are not actually useful 100% of the time, that’s a sign of inflexibility.

I like your comment Sam, it’s very informative. In NLP we paraphrase your point through presupposing that the map is not the territory, no matter how much we think we get what someone else is saying, it’s always going to be just a best guess.

Anyone who’s ever been in a relationship will know

I like the way you suggested to seek clarification. Instead of asking for a direct ‘did you get it’, going about it in a subtle way instead.

Interesting article that should peak some introspective thought on an important topic.