Welcome to our ADULT LIFE DECISIONS Series. These posts are about the adults in the lives of children because children deserve caring, healthy adults taking care of them. It is designed to help adults become more aware of their own potential as they strive to make the best lives possible for themselves and their children. Each posting will explore life decisions adults are faced with and how they can update those decisions to be sure they are helpful to them in their current life circumstances. 

To get the most from this post …

READ FIRST the earlier posts:  

• Recycling

• Eight Adult Life Decisions

• Your “Best Fit” Life Decision Area

• Successful Recycling

• Belief Systems = Helpful Life Decisions

• Understanding Communication

Giving, Receiving, Accepting Supportive Messages

Giving supportive message:

The following are important guidelines for giving supportive messages.

• Only give being, doing, or do better messages that you truly believe. If you say nice things just to be nice even
  if you don’t believe them, the receiver is likely to sense you are just being polite and not speaking truth. This makes it hard for the receiver to trust any of your messages and, in fact, invites him or her to not trust the messages of others as well. Instead, receivers can begin to doubt that people are honest with them which creates harm rather than helpfulness. 

• If you can’t find something positive to say to a person – something you truly believe – think about why that is. Look at yourself and what it is that prevents you from seeing any positives.

• Be alert to a receiver throwing away your message. If you sense this is happening, you can let the receiver know you are concerned. For example, you can say things like, “Don’t throw that away: I really mean it. How can I convince you I mean it?”

 Receiving supportive messages

 You receive messages three different ways.

1. You give yourself messages when you talk to yourself in your mind or out loud. That is often called “self-talk.”

2. Others give you messages directly, one-to-one.

3. You can overhear messages when you hear two people talking about you or when someone reports to you what another person said about you.

Usually a person prefers one of these ways for receiving messages. When receiving messages in their preferred way, a person will more likely accept, believe, and embrace that message.

Think about what your preference might be. Try out a couple. Use the message, “You do many things well.”

• Using mental self-talk, tell yourself, “You do many things well.”

• Ask a friend to tell you the same message, “You do many things well.”

• Imagine what it would be like to hear one friend tell another friend that you do many things well.

Which one of these ways is more powerful for you? Which do you think you would respond to best? Which type would lead you to believe the message more?

Accepting supportive messages

Despite your having a “preference” for how you like receiving supportive messages, you can learn to accept
messages all three different ways. The more ways you are willing to accept messages, the more support you will be receiving. You will be limiting how many supportive messages you will ever receive if you never give yourself supportive messages, or you only listen to certain people like a spouse or a boss, or you only believe messages about you that you overhear.  Accepting all the supportive messages possible will mean more upport for your building and maintaining a helpful belief system that can help you make helpful life decisions.

Next week’s post will discuss Internal Rules of Communication.

This posting is inspired by and adapted from Jean Illsley Clarke’s copyrighted books.

Do not distribute or duplicate without permission.