I want to talk to you about getting the full picture on stuff we’ve sort of talked a little bit about this before but there was just this really good example of it that cropped up in my own life today something that made me want to ask more questions and look behind the scenes. I think this is really important not just for our personal relationships but also because we are so bombarded with information like you’ve got stuff flashing up on your phone from Facebook, Twitter and Snapchat and maybe some news things that you might be subscribed to and sometimes even with really reliable information sources there is information that is missing that would maybe change your perspective on things in quite a wild and drastic way.

Here’s what happened to me today I was on Facebook scrolling through just kind of catching up with life and there was an article that one of my Facebook friends had posted that referred to an incident where an elderly gentleman had been shoved off of a bus by a fellow passenger and he was so badly injured, that unfortunately, he passed away. The Facebook friend who had republished this story had made a reference to the behaviour of the person who had done the shoving and had said some really harsh things about this woman. I’m not going to jump to conclusions and say she deserves punishment. 

This woman may have mental health issues or had an extreme reaction to seeing someone who looks familiar. If you put a back story to this women’s life and the possible reasons why she shove a passenger, it all gets a bit muddier and foggier and you may start to realise that other past events have led her to this decision and action on the bus. My advice is deep for the facts. Find out what’s going on behind it. People are presenting something to you, if you react based on their presentation you are only taking one dimension into consideration, and you need to ask more questions.

There’s a television show called ‘seconds from disaster’ and in this show, there will be some disastrous event that happens but there’s never one thing that causes the disaster, it’s a series of catastrophic events. Therefore, one person says one thing and it gets misinterpreted and then someone does something and then it gets forgotten about and it was really important and then someone you know puts something in place but it was the wrong thing and all of these things end up building up to the disaster and that’s very often how it works when we’re having disasters in our communication is not one thing that has caused it, it’s all of the stuff that’s gone historically before that it’s all of the emotions that are behind that which might be fueled by it. 

If we want to communicate with people better we’ve got to get better at understanding people and how they operate. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to ask more questions and that means that we can’t be lazy and it means that we will be annoying but it also means that we’re going to be operating from a more honest playing field because we’re going to be more able to establish what’s really going on for someone in their mind when they say and do the things that they say. My main point in this article for you is to ask more questions and that is it! 

By Gemma Bailey
https://www.childtherapisthertfordshire.nlp4kids.org