Maximizing Performance Through Applied Common Sense*

Do you ever notice that you use the words always and never and you get all kinds of incendiary results?  People will do that to you.  Your kids will say “You are never home.” “You are always gone.”  Your first thought is, “Wait a second, I’m home often.  What are you talking about, always gone?”  The reality is that when you speak with always or never, those absolutes create all kinds of drag and resistance.  So to get people to be more interested in listening and less defensive, you want to change the word always to frequently, often, or much of the time.  Change the word never to once in a while, infrequently, or rarely.  When you change always and never to these other kinds of words you are going to get by far better results and as a result, people will listen with a lot less defensiveness.