Why I Fled In Terror From Good Communications Habits
Communications Covenants of the Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture
To ascribe good intentions to others regardless of their perspective;
To listen with respect and refrain from engaging in blaming language;
To speak for myself and from my own experience;
To hold to any meeting agreements that the group makes;
To use descriptive, not judgmental or inflammatory language;
To place principles before personalities;
To criticize issues but not people;
To refrain from using the Internet or e-mail to address interpersonal or inter-group conflicts and instead to address concerns in face-to-face communication;
To handle differences collaboratively and, if necessary, to seek mediation and/or counseling;
To respect confidentiality when it is requested and agreed upon.
When I first heard that the Brooklyn Society For Ethical Culture had a “communication agreement” my first reaction was something along the lines of “Snort. So they’re gonna tell me how to brush my teeth too?!?”
In my defense, I was hearing about this agreement after I’d already signed on the dotted line. Having the communications agreement communicated to me at that point gave it a certain ironic tang.
But I’m a game player from way back. Players don’t give each other the rules all at the same time. And not all rules are good. Sometimes there are too many or too few and sometimes they just don’t work. So its with real pleasure that I get to say that these rules work and that there seem to be as many as there need to be, no more, no less.
A lot of the games I like are mental so as soon as I got my copy of the communications agreement I set to it. Within a matter of weeks my entire inner verbal landscape was untenable. Unlivable. Without the diversion and added functionality of thinking petty vicious intolerant demeaning things about people including myself the whole machinery was in danger of grinding to a sparking smoky halt.
And. OK. I am going to have to concede that listening to the people I’m talking to is possibly the most effective way to understand what they are saying but frankly that’s time I need to spend admiring the next thing I’m going to say.
And then there was the abysmal horror of blundering into these unsuspected quagmires of tolerance and approval. Just bolting myself down to that “good intentions” provision was leading me towards a horizon over which gleamed the ghastly glow of whole sunny skies of of…amicability.
There is more, much more I could say about the functionality of these rules. At the point when it occurred to me that they could apply to how I communicated with myself I simply fled the field and left my bad habits in possession of the disputed territory.
