the art of communication…

I woke up this morning with a desire to share these 5 brilliant techniques I use to communicate all the time. I’m certain that I alone can help you with any communication challenges you’re facing in your life.

🛒 📞 ☎️ 🗓 📲 💻  💵 📬 🕰 💔 ✍🏽

My ideas are basically always the best anyway…or so I’m told. I know loads of brilliant people who know a lot of things and they always adore most, all of my ideas.

I’m intelligent, kind, creative, and generous. Always. Anything that challenges that belief based on my behavior, I will just have to flat out disagree with every damn time.

I don’t like having things pointed out that are in conflict with how I view myself. It feels yucky. I want that feeling to go away quickly.

🤒 🤕 🤢 🤮

Below I’ve condensed my five most effective communication tips:

#1 When someone brings attention to something I’ve done that doesn’t fit my personal view of me, I simply say that it’s a false narrative. 🤦🏼‍♀️

They’re clearly mistaken about what they think they witnessed me say or do.

For added effectiveness, I throw out some questions to help people understand why they are confused. 😳 🤪

Are you sleeping well? Still taking that medication? Do you have your eating/drinking/legal challenges under control these days? Is your brother/uncle/dealer out of jail yet? How’s that rash? Did your haircut turn out as you intended? 👍

Repetition creates familiarity, use it to your advantage.

Folks just love this technique because they don’t have to waste any time being discerning. The wordage becomes ingrained, second nature.

NOTE: Because people felt brave in even starting a difficult conversation with me, they burned a lot of their emotional energy. 😫 😴 

Capitalize on their fatigue. 🛏

#2 When someone writes me an email and I respond in a way that was confusing, somewhat cruel or insensitive to them and they take me to task about it, I have a brilliant idea for that too. 👎🏼

Well, of course I do.

I just say that someone on the internet, some bad actor must’ve edited my email to persecute me.

Then I add…you know I’ve been hacked a bunch of times, right?

See what I did there? I “primed” them by repeating that I’ve been hacked a bunch of times before.

See, you just have to plant a little, tiny seed for honest communication. 🌱

#3 When someone doesn’t want to do or say what I want them to do—here’s another fun technique I’ve come up with. I create a harmless, little nickname for them.

All in good fun, of course. 😁 😂 🤣

Here’s an example: I write a blog post about something that I think is clear and spot on. Someone decides to speak their truth about what they see or tell me how it could be improved or better understood. I don’t want their stupid feedback so I have to find a way to knock it back…so I make a joke of it.

Here’s how this technique works. After their feedback, I give them a mean, fun nickname.

Say, Clueless Miss Know-It-All, are you here from the Office of Bullshit Observations? 🕵🏼‍♀️

Who died and made you the editor of everything, Little Lord Fauntleroy? 🤴🏻

So much fun…basically a brilliant team-building exercise. 👊🏻

#4 Whenever something is said that just doesn’t really jive with how hard I work and how efficiently I get things done all the time, I have this communication skill at my disposal.

Do you know about the brilliance of “whataboutism”? You don’t? Well, that’s sort of stupid of you, anyway… 💁‍♀️ 💁‍♂️

Whataboutism is so disarming that it makes people just walk away, confused and forgetting what you were even talking about in the first place. This technique is such a blast!

Merriam Webster: Whataboutism gives a clue to its meaning in its name. It is not merely the changing of a subject (“What about the economy?”) to deflect away from an earlier subject as a political strategy; it’s essentially a reversal of accusation, arguing that an opponent is guilty of an offense just as egregious or worse than what the original party was accused of doing, however unconnected the offenses may be.

The tactic behind whataboutism has been around for a long time. Rhetoricians generally consider it to be a form of tu quoque, which means “you too” in Latin and involves charging your accuser with whatever it is you’ve just been accused of rather than refuting the truth of the accusation made against you.

Here are some whataboutism examples:

If my husband says or texts

I wished you had called to say you were going to be late? ME: Well, you were late last Tuesday and the dinner I slaved over was ruined. That really hurt my feelings.

Why didn’t you mention X, Y or Z? ME: You never tell me anything that I need to know and it’s really taking a toll on our marriage.

Did you deposit the check in the bank? ME: Remember when you forgot to send that payment in and we paid that huge penalty? So…

What time will you be home? ME: Why are you so obsessed with knowing where I am all of the time? It’s really creepy.

I just love whataboutism. 💁‍♀️ 💁‍♂️ You will too.

“He that is good for making excuses is seldom good for anything else.” —Benjamin Franklin

#5 Everyone really seems to enjoy this final and really cool technique. It’s so simple, even you can understand. It’s chaos…dizzyingly, exhausting, constant chaos.

From morning till night, make sure no one actually knows what you’re doing or talking about. This creates a clever, hard to pinpoint mystery about you. You’ll look so busy, important and then you’re off the hook for any of your words or behaviors.

🚖💃🏌️‍♂️🏇🏽🎳🤹🏻‍♀️🎭 🎨🛩🚦🔍🎱 📊 📈

This technique really works best if you can be on-the-go a lot—in and out of cars (or better helicopters), shuffling stacks of papers, off to meetings, taking phone calls (they don’t have to be real) or doing whatever busy looks like in your little life.

The chaos technique is really effective if you have lots of people around you who also enjoy playing the chaos game. But, it works just fine as a solo act. Trust me. 👼

In conclusion, if anyone asks questions anything you’ve said or done that doesn’t fit how you see yourself, just breathe and use any of these five techniques I’ve so generously offered today. 🧘🏼‍♀️

Here they are in a nutshell:

1. You don’t like what someone said about you, call it a false narrative.

2. There’s evidence that you wrote or said something crappy, say you were hacked.

3. Not in the mood for honesty or criticism, play the fun nickname game.

4. If someone asks about your behavior, use whataboutism and walk away.

5. To dodge questions about your words or actions, try constant, dizzying chaos.

Good ☘️ Luck!