Let's Chat with Will & Tony
Let's Chat with Will & Tony
LCWT - Effective Communication and Harmonious Parenting: A Deep Dive into Relationship Enhancement and the Influence of Tech Giants
Do you ever feel like your words are causing more harm than good in your relationships? Imagine a world where you could engage in open, respectful dialogue that strengthens your connections instead of straining them. This week, we're diving into the realm of communication and exploring techniques that can revolutionize your interactions. We'll walk you through how to sidestep the 'you' minefield and embrace 'caring candor,' where kindness and honesty meld together to foster genuine understanding.
Parenting is tricky business! Especially when two different styles have to merge, chaos can ensue. But, what if there was a way to create harmony in the household without compromising your individual approaches? Join us as we navigate this delicate balance, uncovering the power of physical connection and the art of prioritizing happiness over winning. Plus, we'll touch on the pervasive influence of tech giants like Apple, Google, and Spotify on our communication. End your week with a deeper understanding of relationships, parenting, and the digital world that shapes our lives.
Common Sense Advice for Life, helping with self-awareness, family and relationships in a complex world. Now here's Will Kesley and Tony Peck.
Speaker 2:Welcome back to this chat for Will and Tony.
Speaker 3:All right, bought him half the hour. We're excited. I'm known as the host and I'm the color commentary. That's all I do, you know.
Speaker 2:Will Kesley here. Tony Peck, my good friend Today, just got done talking about technology again. We're going to keep on that one. That one just really is.
Speaker 3:Yeah, we'll do more shows on that, because we all need it right.
Speaker 2:We're hearing you. We're hearing you. We're hearing how frustrated you are, and we get it. We understand as well.
Speaker 3:So another thing we're hearing, though, is we get tons of emails and texts and stuff that come in, and a lot of people are trying the things we suggest and they're finding a lot of value in it. Yeah, but then they get hung up.
Speaker 1:Where's the next?
Speaker 3:step. You know they get the next step, so Will got one just recently that we want to address here on the show that Go ahead.
Speaker 2:I thought the listener wrote this very well too, so I'm going to kind of skip through some of it. Just give you a feel of what she's feeling, because I'm guessing we all are kind of feeling this way a little bit. This is hey, just finished your podcast episode about content communicating. Oh, I love that one that was a good one Content, communicating.
Speaker 3:Go listen to it Out on any podcast, you can find it.
Speaker 2:She says I'm breaking a rule by texting you. At least she was listening right, because what we've said about content communicating is you don't tech, you can't communicate through texts.
Speaker 3:Yeah, you lose so much in the translation and texting Just don't do it, but we appreciate you.
Speaker 2:And to get her to she had to put a couple of emojis in there so you can try to get some communication through it. Right she goes. So I have this question. Here's the question. I've been working on getting rid of the you word when communicating. Yeah, the you word Remember, because when we say you, it attacks people and they get defensive.
Speaker 2:Defensive and it starts a fight instead of doing something to connect with them and work together on that conversation. So we'll go back a little bit on that, the you word communicating, especially with our children. I'm doing so, I've tried to get around it, but I've also realized my husband is having a really hard time with the kids using attack words.
Speaker 3:Oh, as she's practicing now, she's noticing it all around.
Speaker 2:My husband is like now that I know about it, I hear this is going on a lot more than I've found. Yeah, I understand she goes we're pushing kids into things like you know, why don't you do this? You never do this. Is that sound familiar? Sounds familiar. I think what she's saying is here's the alternative to that. Help me understand what you were going through. Help me understand what was on your mind when you thought about this project. Help me understand, or just what. Use the word what, if you can. What was it you felt when you were doing this? Said you don't listen to me. How about? Help me understand what it is? You didn't hear.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2:Now the word you isn't there to talk about them, but it's different than saying you as the lead word, because that's it's like sticking your finger out at the moment.
Speaker 3:Yeah even when we're sitting here your finger wants to come up and you, you, you hurt, you know, you drove me crazy. And then now it's blaming them instead of saying I, when you sit, when I felt this way when we were having that conversation, yes, so now that's a. Here's what I felt, here's how I experienced that, and it gives them a chance to say, oh, wait a second, that wasn't what I intended, I'm sorry. And it brings that connection, starts that conversation.
Speaker 2:And he follows on to say so. I've decided to take your next step of advice, will and Tony and I'd like to have a caring candor discussion with him. Ooh, I love caring candor. Caring candor, the phrase what caring candor just remind. Caring candor is that we can be honest and caring about it Without being mean, without being mean and destructive. We feel like when we have to be candid, we have to be mean. You don't?
Speaker 3:have to be the relationship doesn't deserve that. The term I always use. The opposite of caring candor is brutal honesty. If you have a here, somebody say I'm going to be brutally honest to you, here comes the zinger and and that's candor without kindness, candor without empathy, empathy Right. Caring candor is saying hey, I love you, I'm gonna say something that I think you need to hear, but I'm coming to it from a. I wanna help and you're trying to be kind to the person that you're giving the advice or the feedback or whatever to.
Speaker 2:Developing children or developing a spouse in that close relationship is not about winning and losing. It's about getting in the boat together and trusting each other that we're working on stuff. I have this one that's different than you. Do this Well, you do?
Speaker 3:I have this great picture in my office. It's a picture of a rowboat and one half of the rowboat's sinking and there's two people in the sinking's half and there's two people at their leisure sitting up on the other half and the little caption above it says glad I'm not on their side of the boat and the boat's sinking right, you're in the same boat. You're in the same boat people. So when you're working on these relationships, realize you're in the same boat, we're in the same boat. Care about the other person.
Speaker 2:It's not about Enough to put the energy in to communicate. That's right. You're not getting in by dictating. So she goes on to say I want to have a candid discussion with him, a caring, candid discussion with him about the you versus I phrasing. How do I do that? So this says something else too, though. This is they're having struggles with having in-depth conversations.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they're having struggles with the same thing.
Speaker 2:It's gonna be a debate. I'm right, you're wrong.
Speaker 3:Oh, I'm worried about the fight right Now. Let me throw out ideas.
Speaker 2:See what you think about this one and I got a little answer for that one. Go ahead.
Speaker 3:My idea would be sit down and say, hey, I learned something the other day that I think might help our family, and then describe what you learned about you words and about how it affects people, and then see what they think.
Speaker 2:And then invite him up to listen to the Will and Tony show.
Speaker 3:Well, there you go, Go out and find the bad cast and then listen to it together. Now he may or may not respond to that, but now you're not putting it as a. You're using too many you words, You're main mean to the kids and you're hurting them.
Speaker 2:Now you just put them in the same spot.
Speaker 3:Now you're gonna have your conversation, but if you put it into the intellectual space of, hey, I learned something that I think is valuable and is helping me. So for my wife and I.
Speaker 2:we actually became kind of funny. The conversation started with we wanna I'd like to visit you about an idea I learned, you know, listening to these guys and I think I'm trying to do it and I think it'd be interesting if we both tried to do it and learned from it. Here's what the implementation is, and starting with Caring Candor. One thing they talked about is we wanna engage our children in learning. In a communication, we ought to try losing the words like you and must and start using words like can you help or I invite you or hey, help me.
Speaker 2:Help me so the word help me and what. So now it's like I can see that you're upset with your brother. What is it about that that concerns you? Use the word what and help me.
Speaker 3:I love that Easy ones. I think of this conversation going hey, I am trying to use less you words and less attack words toward our children. Can you help me do that when you hear me say you need to do this, can you? Help me to make sure that I'm not doing that, Cause I'm really working on that because I think it'll connect our kids more. So now it's a hey, I'm coming to the rescue. I can be the knight on the knight, in shining armor and show up and help out, you know.
Speaker 2:So when my wife and I would do this, she'd give me a little bump, or I'd give her a little bump and go. Hey, you and she'd be like I did it didn't I Okay. And it made you think until you started getting words you could use that were more fluent off your tongue.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and you practice, you know and remember. Give yourselves a little grace, right. Life is a journey. Life is a time to learn. We're all in the learning process together, so give yourself a little grace. You hear something on her showing. You're like, oh no, I'm bad.
Speaker 1:No, just go try it.
Speaker 3:Just go try it. It's okay, practice You're gonna still slip into some of those old habits. It's okay to just practice.
Speaker 2:Any effort you're putting through the change that you wanna make will make a dramatic change in your life, even if it's only 10% of a change. Yeah, absolutely. It's amazing how it progresses in the relationship. She get better at it, Other people get better at it. The whole thing works. She then says and if you won't listen, do I just do it good myself and hope he picks up on the new thing?
Speaker 3:Yes, being a good example. That always helps you live in what you're living and sharing, but you can have a spouse that totally says, oh, I'm not doing any of that.
Speaker 2:Then you go live the best you can, Hope they pick up on it. However, it tells me something's missing between the two of you, which is probably this communication issue, which, right yeah maybe you text him Right, no, no. That was a joke.
Speaker 3:But one comment I do have to, that is, if you're the one living the example playing the example card you can always share your experience.
Speaker 3:I learned a ton in the breaks on this show because I'm sitting here and when we go on break we chat it up, we talk about all sorts of stuff and we're talking and I hear a lot of Will's experiences and he tells me stories and none of it's like Tony, you should do this, it's all. Hey, you know, this happened to me in my life and this helped me and I'll take it home and I talk to Camille like this. I say, hey, you know I was talking to Will, he was telling me about this experience. What do you think? And then we have this conversation about it and you know, we decide what we want to do and it's become. It's actually more fun, isn't it? Yeah, it's a lot of fun Because now you're together in it and you're trying things together, because who doesn't want a wonderful relationship?
Speaker 2:Content communicating Content communicating. And my marriage is really good at content communicating and one of us struggles and is developing it. I won't tell you who and so what?
Speaker 3:I know where my money is.
Speaker 2:So the cool part about this is is that over time we've had fun doing it. Even our kids now go hey, good content communicating on that. And you have to be able to go, not get ticked Shut up. You little rug rat, you have to go. Yeah, good call yeah it's okay. We're just trying to become better. Once you get the habit, it's good fun and everybody around you picks up on it. Everybody's edified by.
Speaker 3:I, we cannot choose a place to eat now Without somebody in my family saying alright, good content. Communicate that.
Speaker 2:What do you mean? You'll go anywhere because you're humming things out like I'm good for anything, now you're not. If you're good for everything, then we're going down to the dog pound or get some dog food. You're not good for everything. Say what you want. You've infected me will not good. I'm known as a fungus. We've got a few minutes left to show we got. Take a quick break. When we come back. I want to finish up on this. It's very nice text we got. In particular, her last comments are what do we? What do we do? When we were raised differently parents, we came from different families. Our mom and dad's do it this way. My mom and dad did it this way. How do we work with that?
Speaker 3:Yeah, how do you actually get through that? Yeah, yeah, it's a hard one we do.
Speaker 2:It's how you learned and you do the same thing your own family it's part of it got to deal with it back into. Let's chat with will and Tony on news talk 107 9.
Speaker 1:Common sense advice for life. Let's chat now. Here's will kesley and Tony pack.
Speaker 2:Righty, then welcome back to show. Let's chat with will and Tony. I'm will kesley. Wow, we don't have much time. I'm gonna fix the other guy. I'm here. You're here. We got only a few minutes left. We did want to. We're gonna talk about this again. You know that? Right? Yeah, I know that we're. So what? What our writer said was okay. So I come from different kinds of parents. Then my husband comes from parents they saw it this way, his dad was this way, my mom was this way, and I just see raising the kids differently than he does. So he thinks that we got to be hard on them and I think we need to be softer on them. What do you do, tone?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that issue in your life? Oh, absolutely. I mean, you look at the Walters and the packs and they're like oil and water. I mean not oil and water. I mean they're all nice people, but we have totally different cultures, right? Yeah, and I think everybody does, regardless of what your family may.
Speaker 2:Rarely will you get two people to get married that go. Oh, that's exactly how it was in my house.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly right, you always got a meld it. I think the key word in the entire conversation is we.
Speaker 2:Hmm.
Speaker 3:What do we want to have as our family?
Speaker 2:and rule number two in a good marriage is learning how to be adaptable and happy.
Speaker 3:That's right. It's pretty high on the list. It's not about winning, losing we talked about that earlier. It's not about who is right. And a funny example you know, my mom always put butter on the peanut butter and honey sandwiches butter on both sides. Yeah, camille's family.
Speaker 1:No butter.
Speaker 3:What are we gonna do? Divorce, it's over, right, you got nothing in common. And it's funny and it's, but, but in large scale. That's what people fight about, whether there's butter or not, right, and it's like no, the toilet paper roll pulls this way or that way. Put the sandwich on the table and talk about it. It's like what do we want.
Speaker 2:What do you do? Butter, we don't. What do you do when you disagree? We it, I'm all for it. Look, you're newly married. You guys do it as we. This is I take my experience, you take your experience. Let's put the two experiences together. And what can we do better? So the question comes what do you do if they disagree? I don't like your way. I want butter.
Speaker 3:The way I, the way I look at it, is if you're focused on the other person and their happiness more than you know, it probably doesn't matter.
Speaker 2:Good point, right for us, my wife and I we got to where we would say well, I'll tell you what, let's try your the way you think it works good and let's measure that somehow. If you think that's the way we'll do it. And then after a while we started seeing oh, this way you're working better, and that way, and then it was different. This child works better under the way she does it, and this child's working better, and this child's working better the way I do it. So how about we just blend these things and next, you know, we're kind of on the same page going. I get how we're doing this, and the key for us was we both agreed on accountability and responsibility as a key factor of whatever we did. One of the things.
Speaker 3:Once we agreed on that, it was easy. One of the things you told me a long time ago is like, whenever you and Robin had an argument, you'd hold hands.
Speaker 2:Yep, right, yep, and that's what the heart of which is only been once in my entire marriage. It's true story. Yeah, we don't argue. We learned early on not to. It didn't get us anywhere.
Speaker 3:How about we work together and find a solution and that's why I love about that suggestion, because that physical contact shows the caring. Yeah, I care about you more than winning this argument exactly. So I'm going to fight for us, not fight for butter. I gotta be winning sandwich good good point, tony.
Speaker 2:We're gonna leave it on that. Let's do it. That's inspiration.
Speaker 3:I can live by my brother All right, I hope we helped you check out our podcast better.
Speaker 2:Apple. It's up there. It's up on Google. It's a spotify.
Speaker 3:It's all over the place.
Speaker 2:Love to hear your input, love to share your thoughts with us and we'll see you again here next week. Same bat channel All right everyone a clock right here. News time. Wait one oh seven, nine. Have a great weekend.