Hello, dear friends, and welcome back to our course, Basic Skills in Constructive Communication, week number 6. The final one. We have two videos, one is a theoretical and practical wrap up of what we've been going through during the previous five weeks. While the second one is about the outlook of what we recommend you to do after you've finished the course. Now let's start with the summary of our course. So we started from three levels that each communication goes on at. The subject related level, the relationship level, and the emotional level. Subject related means what is it you are talking about? What is it that you came together for? What is it that you want to achieve in your conversation or your discussion. About the relationship level, please let me remind you this is in constructive communication, we communicate on eye-level. So we accept and respect our partner in communication despite of his social status or his status in a cooperative hierarchy. About the emotions, we'll remind you of how to control them. Also please be reminded of the basic principle of social interaction, which starts from perception of information, goes on with accepting the information that you receive. Accept in terms of being clear that, of course, different people may have different opinions on the same subject than you. Then next step is to really understand. Understanding is decisive because only when you really understand the opinion of your interlocutor and vice versa, he would understand yours. You are able to say in which points you have similar views and on what aspects your views would differ, which then makes the subject for the work. After perceiving information, excepting the information and the opinions of others, respecting them, and understanding you would finally decide for yourself would evaluate what does it mean to you and you will make a decision. What would you keep on doing about the new views that you learned off during the conversation, what would you stop doing in your previous behavior, and what will you eventually stop doing. Now, in week number 2, we touched upon the point of perception of information and its interpretation. We talked about the two major traps you can get yourself into. Number 1 is interrupting and cutting yourself of the information flow. Number 2 is conjecturing. So making assumptions on what your partner is really talking about instead of just clarifying. Then we learned about the ambiguity of information. So you may perceive some information and it may be interpreted in really different ways. So that makes you to have to clarify. You have to clarify a, that you really understand the opinion of your interlocutor. B, are you free of any assumptions, whereas you might replace them by knowledge that you would gain from asking questions. You also prevent yourself from the ambiguity of information perception just by asking clarifying questions. Now, all that to ask clarifying questions, of course, obtains a especial necessity when we look at these statistics. So 25 percent can be recollected from what has been understood, whereas from what has been heard, only 60 percent is understood. From what has been said, only 70 percent has been heard. So that makes it specially important to ask clarifying question. You are somehow unsure, you realize that you stop making assumptions. Instead of asking clarifying question, stop making assumptions, start asking clarifying questions. Now in week number 3, we touched on the point of active listening for proper understanding with standpoint of the interlocutor, and precise formulation of your own thoughts. Let's say let me remind you of the major points of active listening. This is number 1 clarification as we already said. You ask clarifying questions. Number 2, verbalization, repeating in your own words what your interlocutor has told you. Actually when it comes to verbalization we even distinguish three levels. Just refer to week number 3 to remind yourself of the three levels. Last but not least we include into active listening also the reflections upon emotions, your own ones and the ones of your partner. Last but not least in long discussions it's always necessary to do some summarization in-between and especially at the end of any purposeful discussion. As I already mentioned about emotions, it's on week number 4. Now week number 5 we especially touched upon the point of regulation of emotions. I remind you that there are two decisive steps. Number 1 is to recognize in yourself and others when it comes to the point to your boiling point to recognize in order to be able to stop yourself from boiling and aggressively acting out your emotions, or swallowing them, and stop consciously applying regulation techniques that you learned of in week number 5. Those are the major steps on the subject of regulation of emotions. In week number 4 dear friends we touched upon major point in any communication, purposeful, constructive communication, which is feedback. Feedback, we learn about the basic rule, a sandwich rule, plus minus plus. Always start from something good that you have observed in the behavior of your interlocutor and just name it. I'm really impressed by how good you are in formulating your own thoughts. Very easy to understand even complex points. That will be part 1 of sandwich rule plus and minus at the same time I would like you to be a little bit shorter in your explanation, because sometimes they are very long and it makes it really difficult to keep the attention level high. That will be minus. Plus again you would say, I'm sure on your level of communication techniques it would be very easy for you to get rid of this point of talking too long. Now you remember this Russian sandwich rule where we would stop from three pluses and then one minus. Now dear friends there was another interesting and necessary most likely model about the three levels of the "I". Because all that stuff that we have touched upon throughout the first five weeks, especially from week number 2 on. All those techniques can be applied when you're on one of those three typical "I" levels, parent I, adult I, and child I. Let me remind you for a real constructive communication. Of course you are supposed to act being on the adult level. Last but not least we can learn a lot and can stop applying all those techniques, or models, or principals. We can. We can even have the impression that, we are changing. We are really keep doing the things that we were already good at and really stopped doing some stuff which is really destructive or minimum, not very constructive. We stopped developing something in ourselves which would increase our basic skills of conserved communication. Anyway, even if you have the feeling that you are changing to the better, just ask for feedback from time-to-time to understand does your environment really recognize those changes in your behavior, do the people that you usually deal with really see that you change to the better. Whenever you have the feeling you are changing please ask for feedback, that helps you to decrease your so-called blind spot and to make yourself more visible to the outside world, to the people that you deal with, and this is one of the major points of constructive communication, being transparent. Dear friends, so far about the wrap-up of our theoretical models, and the practical implications, and techniques that we touched upon during the course. Thank you for your attention and your patients. See you later.
