Don’t fall down the stairs. Don’t get hurt. Don’t hit your head. Don’t drop that!
Are you already feeling queasy? No wonder. Our brain isn’t able to handle No’s and Dont’s and is just visualizing all these unpleasant situations. We also happen to use dont’s pretty often in our working life – though there is a far more effective way. In the following week, avoid negations and say exactly what you want instead of what you do not want.
Effective communication needs no Dont’s
Go through your last conversations in the office: How often have you pointed out what you do not want? What should not happen this or that way? Often enough, we guess. We all use the dont’s.
The consequence of telling what you do not want is that your conversational partner immediately visualizes just the unwanted scenarios and focusses on them. Even though this happens subconsciously he might tend to work in favour of the unwanted instead of avoiding it.
That’s no effective communication!
So act differently and choose a positive wording for the next five days. Tell your conversational partners, employees and team members exactly what you want and skip the don’t. Sounds easy? Look at yourself in your following conversations – in fact, talking without negations is one of the biggest challenges of every day conversation.
And here is the nice side effect: positive language encourages positive thinking. And that’s something you can’t have enough of.
Share your experience with us and have a successful week.
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