Difficult Communication

Improved communication technique is of vital importance in many aspects of personal life, business, and even the future of the whole world. Based on personal experience and knowledge of social sciences (esp. psychology), the authors introduce a series of methods and techniques to help readers understand the mechanisms of communication and learn how to improve its efficiency.

The book starts by sorting out three conversations: The “What Happened”, Feelings, and Identity ones. In the following chapters, the authors explain in more details, triggering the final chapter for how to create a “Learning Conversation”. The whole book is written in an easy but analytic style, and the readers at different educational levels can understand the unfolded theories that the reader borrowed from other disciplines including social psychology, game theory, learning theory and so on. The aims of this book are mostly achieved in this strategy and ideas of the authors are cleverly delivered.

The authors’ sorting out the three conversations is deliberate. The chapter for “What Happened” conversations is focused on objective factors, and the one for “Feelings” is rather focused on subjective issues, and the “Identity” one is from another interesting point view: how to identify self social position. Although such sorting activity is somehow effective for readers to understand the mechanism of communication, it can be confusing due to the entangled nature of these three “types” of conversations. And unfortunately, the authors didn’t point out that fact in this book, even though they by themselves well understand that cataloging in this way is not scientific approach but a technical trick. However, I actually stand up for the authors’ using that technique, for it will be very difficult to make the readers understand the natures of conversations using other methods, due to the complications involved.

The highlighted part of this book is to raise a novel theory of how to create the so-called “Learning Conversation”. Obviously, the authors are familiar with learning theories regarding