Relationships are built from interactions, and interactions are built from communications that go back and forth like a volley in tennis. Depending on what the other person has launched across the net, when it’s your turn to hit the ball, you’ve got a range of options. Maybe they’ve done something really nasty or horrible, so your range is down here. On the other hand, maybe something better has occurred, so your range is up there. What’s within your power is whether you, again and again, volley after volley, go toward the high end of your authentically available range, or sink down to the lower end.
This is an aspect of unilateral virtue, the idea that it’s worth focusing on what’s on your side of the trade, what’s under your control, which is how you think and speak and act, and what you do to influence other people, but mainly focusing on how to be a better, more effective, more skillful person in relationships yourself. This is your best-odds strategy for getting good treatment from others. It’s not a guarantee, but it increases the likelihood of a good result. It also helps you feel better that you’ve done the best you could, that you’ve lived within your own code. And speaking this way reduces side issues, it takes away the possibility that other people will fixate on some tone you had, or words you used, and use that to deflect from what you really want to talk about.
This way of speaking could be called wise speech. For me it really boils down to two simple things:
are we well intended, and
are we skillful in what we do with other people?
We can be the best communicator in the world, and the other person, they just do whatever they do. If an interaction goes badly, it doesn’t necessarily mean you did anything wrong, that you spoke unwisely. They have a really big role to play too. But I can say this from personal experience, again and again: it has been so helpful to just realize this is getting a little strange, not going well, and come back to good form.
Six Guidelines for Wise Speech
There are six specific guidelines I use to know what good form actually looks like. Here’s the first.
Well-intended. Think about your underlying purposes, sometimes unconscious ones, or conflicts of purpose inside yourself, when an interaction isn’t going well. I’ve certainly talked with people at times where my real intent, deep down, was to pound my point home, or show them the error of their ways, prove that I was right, or get them to do something I wanted. I wasn’t being open about it, I was being covered about it. Those aren’t good purposes. They’re normal, they’re natural, but look at the results. Usually not very good. Speech that’s truly well-intended wants to lift up rather than tear down, wants to find the truth of your own experience and the other person’s experience, rather than throw dust in their eyes so they can’t see what’s true.
There are five more guidelines and a real distinction between two entirely different kinds of talking that most people blur together without realizing it.
