Students often tell me they wish they could improve their communication skills. Before we talk about how to do this, let’s discuss how we learn to communicate with others. Are we born with the ability to communicate with others, or do we learn it as we grow? If you’ve ever been around babies, you know that even though they don’t have the ability to speak, they know how to communicate with their caregivers. When they are hungry, tired, or just want to be held, they cry. Crying communicates to their caregiver that they need something. As children acquire language, they learn more effective ways of communicating. Yet as we learn to communicate, a whole host of issues surface and interfere with our ability to talk to others. We worry about what others might think, we feel selfish for asking for things we want and need, and we don’t know how to talk about ourselves and our needs.
When we communicate with other people, we have three competing goals (Vanfossen, 1996). The first is to “get the job done”—we have a message for someone, and we want to communicate that message. Second, we also have a “relational goal”— we want to maintain the relationship and not hurt or offend someone with our message. Finally, we have an “identity management goal”—that is, we want our communication