50 Psychology Classics (8 page)

Games People Play
can seem to offer an unnecessarily dark view of human nature. However, this was not Berne's intention. He remarked that we can all leave game playing behind if we know there is an alternative. As a result of childhood experiences we leave behind the natural confidence, spontaneity, and curiosity we had as a child and instead adopt the Parent's ideas of what we can or cannot do. Through greater awareness of the three selves, we can get back to a state of being more comfortable within our own skin. No longer do we feel that we need someone's permission to succeed, and we become unwilling to substitute games for real intimacy.

Eric Bernstein grew up in Montreal, Canada; his father was a doctor and his mother a writer. He graduated from McGill University in 1935 with a medical degree, and trained to be a psychoanalyst at Yale University. He became a US citizen, worked at Mt Zion Hospital in New York, and in 1943 changed his name to Eric Berne
.

During the Second World War Berne worked as a US army psychiatrist, and afterwards resumed his studies under Erik Erikson (see p. 84) at the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute. Settling in California in the late 1940s, he became disenchanted with psychoanalysis, and his work on ego states evolved over the next decade into transactional analysis. He formed the International Transactional Analysis Association, and combined private practice with consulting and hospital posts
.

Berne wrote on a range of subjects. In addition to his other bestseller,
What Do You Say After You Say Hello?
(1975), which examined the idea of “life scripts,” he also published the
Layman's Guide to Psychiatry and Psychoanalysis
(1957),
Structure and Dynamics of Organizations and Groups
(1963),
Sex in Human Loving
(1970), and, posthumously,
Beyond Games and Scripts
(1976). See also the biography by Elizabeth Watkins Jorgensen,
Eric Berne: Master Gamesman
(1984)
.

Berne admitted that he had a well-developed Child, once describing himself as “a 56-year-old teenager.” He was a keen poker player, was married three times, and died in 1970
.

“Although interpersonal communication is humanity's greatest accomplishment, the average person does not communicate well. Low-level communication leads to loneliness and distance from friends, lovers, spouses, and children—as well as ineffectiveness at work.”

“Communication skills, no matter how finely structured, cannot be a substitute for authenticity, caring, and understanding. But they can help us express these qualities more effectively than many of us have been able to do in the past.”

In a nutshell

Good people skills not only get you what you want, they bring out the best in your relationships.

In a similar vein
Daniel Goleman
Working with Emotional Intelligence
(p 130)
Carl Rogers
On Becoming a Person
(p 238)
Douglas Stone, Bruce Patton, & Sheila Heen
Difficult Conversations
(p 272)

Often the best books are those that authors needed to write for their own use. In the preface to
People Skills: How to Assert Yourself, Listen to Others, and Resolve Conflicts
, Robert Bolton notes that he would never have got into the communications field were it not for the fact that his own people skills were so bad.

The book was written over a six-year period while he was running a consulting firm, and the material was tested on thousands of people doing the company's communication skills workshops. Participants involved everyone from top executives to hospital workers to small business owners to priests and nuns.

There are virtually no jobs where communicating well does not make a big difference to our success. As many people have found, particularly those in a more technical field, the actual “work” is only part of the job; the rest is managing or dealing with people. Therefore, if we can communicate well, this can account for at least half our achievements.

People yearn for a closer connection with one another, Bolton notes. They may be lonely not because they don't have others around them, but because they cannot communicate well. Yet if we can put a man on the moon and cure virulent diseases, why aren't we all great communicators? It is partly because we learn a good deal of our communication skills from our family; chances are our parents were not perfect communicators, and neither were their parents.

Nearly everyone wants better communication skills, yet often without knowing it our communication is full of roadblocks that prevent real communication with others. Two of the main ones are judging and sending solutions.

When talking with someone, it is difficult to listen to what they are saying without putting in our “two bits' worth.” This is the nicer side of judging. The other is criticism and labeling. With people close to us we feel we should be critical, otherwise we don't see how they will ever change. With others, we feel the need to give them a label such as “intellectual,” “brat,” “jerk,” or “nag,” but by doing so we cease to see the person before us, only a type. Our “good advice” is in fact rarely constructive, because it usually represents an affront to the other person's intelligence.

We may be so used to having roadblocks that we wonder what will be left if we remove them from our style of conversation. What remains is the
ability to understand and empathize with other people, and to make our concerns clearly known.

Are your conversations a competition in which “the first person to draw breath is declared the listener”? Not many people are good listeners. Research has found that “75 percent of oral communication is ignored, misunderstood, or quickly forgotten.”

There is a huge difference between merely hearing and listening, Bolton notes. The word “listening” is derived from two Anglo Saxon words,
hlystan
(“hearing”) and
hlosnian
(“waiting in suspense”). The act of listening therefore means more than just something physical, it is a
psychological
engagement with another person.

Listening is not a single skill, but if genuinely practiced involves a number of skill areas, which are described below.

The common estimate given in research papers is that 85 percent of our communication is nonverbal. Therefore attending skills, which are about the extent to which we are “there” for someone when they are speaking, are vital to good communication. You are not looking somewhere else in the room, but through your posture, eye contact, and movement show the other person that they are your focus; you are “listening with your body.”

Bolton describes when painter Norman Rockwell was creating a portrait of President Eisenhower. Even though the President was amid the worries of office and about to enter an election campaign, for the hour and a half he sat for Rockwell, Eisenhower gave the painter his full attention. Think of anyone you know who is a great communicator and they will be the same: They fully attend to you with their whole mind and body.

Following skills relate to how we follow up what someone says to us. Though commonly we advise or reassure, a better way is to provide a “door opener” phrase. This may involve:

Noting the other person's body language: “Your face is beaming today.”

Inviting the other person to speak: “Tell me more.” “Care to talk about this?” “What's on your mind?”

Silence: giving the other person space to say something if they want to.

Our body language: offering the message that we are ready to listen.

Doing any of those things shows respect; the other person can talk or not talk as they wish. There is no pressure. Bolton comments that a lot of people are
initially uncomfortable with silence, but with a little practice it is not hard for us to extend our comfort zone.

In developing our skill at following, we become adept at discovering exactly how the speaker sees their situation, unlocking or bringing out whatever is waiting to be said. This is valuable to both parties.

Bolton defines paraphrasing as “a
concise response
to the speaker which states the
essence
of the other's content in the listener's own words.” For example, when someone is telling us their problems, we report back to them in our own words, and in one sentence, what they are saying. This lets them know we are really listening, and indicates understanding and acceptance. We may feel strange doing this at first and think the other person will wonder what the hell we are doing, but in fact most of the time they will be glad that their feelings are being recognized.

This type of listening provides a mirror to the speaker so that the state or emotion they are in is recognized. Bolton gets us to picture a young mother on a morning when everything is going wrong. The baby cries, the phone rings, the toast gets burnt. If her husband notices this and says something like “God, can't you learn to cook toast?” the woman's reaction is likely to be explosive.

But picture an alternative. The same events happen and the husband says, “Honey, it's a rough morning for you—first the baby, then the phone, now the toast.” This is a reflective response, acknowledging what his wife is experiencing without any judgment or criticism. Imagine how much better she will feel!

Reflective responses work because people don't always wish to spell out what they are really feeling. They beat around the bush. Only by being reflective, not reactive, are we able to discern their real message. Psychologists talk of the “presenting problem” and the “basic problem.” What presents is what a person
says
is the matter, and behind it is the real problem. This is why we have to listen for the
feeling
in a conversation. That points us in the right direction, whereas a common mistake is to try to make sense of the words only.