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This episode sets the context for what Communicate Like This is all about. Setting the context before any interaction with people is an important tool in ultimately achieving a mutual understanding among all those involved in a given discussion. 

A main goal of this podcast is to teach people communication tools that will help them drive miscommunication, misunderstandings, preventable arguments, and stress from their lives. What you'll learn over time is that all of this applies at both personal and professional levels.

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This episode provides more context for why I started Communicate Like This, as a follow on to Episode 1. In addition, it also explains how paraphrasing is a five-star-rated communication tool to use to get to a true mutual understanding more quickly.

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This episode is kind of the last of the foundational episodes that sets the context for all future episodes. In this one, we establish and define the key Core Values and Principles to which all of the upcoming communication tools are related.

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This episode talks about how unspoken assumptions can have big, unintended impacts on the ability to effectively communicate, including some real life examples. It also gets into whether the Core Values and Principles presented in Episode 3 are truly universal in nature and apply to everyone everywhere. (Spoiler alert: they are.)

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In this episode, we discuss doing our best to avoid extreme words like "never," "always," "all," and "none." They tend to set up a discussion as an argument right out of the gate as others try to come up with examples where that isn't true. We also discuss replacing the word "should" with the phrase "what if . . ." Last, we talk about how accommodation can help prevent arguments.

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Awareness is a communication tool that you can use to keep your mind engaged in the processes of communication even while you're in the middle of a conversation. Understand that effective communication takes much more than just the act of talking itself. It involves being aware of the need to consider the other person, their assumptions, your assumptions, and tools at your disposal to prevent miscommunication and misunderstandings. Awareness is one of your best foundational tools to produce a mutual understanding.

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Unspoken assumptions are the silent assassins of Effective Communication. This episode discusses how to recognize unspoken assumptions that may be invalid, even while you're in the middle of a conversation (or argument), so you can figure out where the true disagreement lies. Then you can more easily resolve the argument.

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This episode gets into the importance of the communication tool called awareness, as a follow up to Episode 6 - Awareness. This tool could be overlooked, but is foundational to being able to use the other tools. We also review the key learning points from the first seven episodes to help you remember the tools you've learned.

Ross sent this link to an article on how to unstick discussions/arguments when they just seem to be going nowhere with no resolution. The key is to find a larger principle that you can agree on that's related to the specific issue that can't get resolved and use that as a launching point to attack the specific issue from a different perspective. This is the link: https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/a-toolset-getting-stuck-conversations-back-track