Book Notes: The Art of Communicating, by Thich Nhat Hanh

Most books on communication are aimed at salespeople. They want you to be more persuasive, more charismatic, better at "framing the conversation". They are not, on the whole, about love.

Thich Nhat Hanh wrote a book about communication that is entirely about love. It is short, almost embarrassingly simple, and it has changed several conversations in my life that would otherwise have gone badly.

The central instruction

He calls it deep listening and loving speech. The shape is two-sided.

Deep listening means listening with the intent to relieve the other person's suffering. Not to defend yourself. Not to gather material for your reply. To hear them, and to understand the pain underneath whatever they are saying — even if what they are saying is, on the surface, an attack on you.

Loving speech means saying things in a way that does not produce more suffering. He gives concrete examples. Instead of you always do this, you can say when this happened, I felt afraid. Instead of you don't care about me, you can say I am alone here and I would like to feel less alone. Same content, different consequences.

The mantra he offers

In the middle of the book, he offers four sentences. He calls them mantras. I have used them, with mixed grace, for years:

Darling, I am here for you. Darling, I know you are there, and I am happy. Darling, I know you are suffering. That is why I am here. Darling, I am suffering. Please help.

You can substitute any term of endearment for darling. The sentences are deliberately childlike. They are also, in a difficult moment, the only sentences you need.

The first one says I am present. The second says I see you, and your existence makes me happy. The third says I see your pain, and I am not going away. The fourth — the hardest — says I am hurting, and I am willing to ask for help.

In any conversation that has gone wrong, you will find that one of these four sentences is the one that was missing.

What surprised me

The book is not, despite its theme, mostly about other people. It is mostly about your own listening. He returns again and again to the point that you cannot listen well to another person if you have not first listened to yourself.

If your own anger is unprocessed, you will hear theirs as an attack. If your own fear is not faced, you will hear theirs as a threat. If you have been ignoring your own grief, you will not have room for theirs.

Most of the work he describes is not interpersonal. It is internal. Sit with your own difficult feeling first; then you can sit with another person's.

A line worth keeping

Near the end of the book:

The greatest gift we can offer anyone is our true presence.

I have copied this onto more than one wedding card.

The book is short. You can read it in a Sunday afternoon. It will do its work for years.