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Broadly speaking, the Auxano Communication Approach© benefits people because it helps them establish and maintain healthy relationships through honest truth-seeking about a situation or a relationship.

But this communication approach I suggest to all of my clients has more specific benefits too:

1. The Auxano Communication Approach© suspends defensive behavior.

When you’re challenged to share from a deeper place, the walls around your heart must necessarily come down. Protective, defensive behaviors like control, passive-aggressiveness, and criticism are suspended so that the health of the relationship might take precedence over one’s need for emotional safety.

2. The Auxano Communication Approach© creates an environment to really know another person.

As I said in my previous post—or as Suzanne Wallace said—we need to learn how to “listen to learn and speak to be known.” Once we can do this on a consistent basis, that creates a firm foundation for healthy relationships to form and endure.

3. The Auxano Communication Approach© creates an environment to be seen and known by another person.

The best relationships require that both people are invested in and working on the relationship. In the same way that open communication by another person helps reveal them to you, your open communication likewise reveals you to them. This is the place where true connection occurs.

4. The Auxano Communication Approach© assists you in “standing on your own two feet” by calming your anger and anxiety.

Seeking to honestly engage another person can sometimes lead to conflict, but learning to stand apart from that conflict—to avoid emotional reactivity or mirroring the other person’s emotions—is a key skill in being able to communicate effectively.

To learn more about these benefits, read Chapter 13: Toward More Connection and Fulfillment in The Stories We Tell Ourselves.

If you have yet to read the first three steps of the Auxano Communication Approach^©, please take a moment and read my previous three posts. It’s important that each step is taken before advancing to the next.

The last step toward better communication in your relationships is:

Step 4: Seek more information.

To most effectively accomplish this step, do what author and professor Brené Brown calls “passionate listening.” Attempt to tune out external distractions and internal mental meanderings as you seek to discover objective facts about the situation, the other person, and the other person’s take on the situation.

One of the most effective (and often most difficult) ways to do this is to refrain from thinking about your own response while the other person is still talking. Again, Brown has wise words on this:

When I really listen rather than thinking and formulating my response as people are talking, the entire conversation takes on a new cadence. It’s slower and there’s more white space between exchanges. It’s a little weird at first, but it’s also very powerful (“Passionate Listening”).

In The Stories We Tell Ourselves, I present one way for my clients to add more “white space” to their conversations:

Visualize placing [your] thoughts on a shelf for a few minutes. [You’ll] know where to find them later, but for the moment, they need to be somewhere just out of reach. [You] should listen with interest and seek to truly understand what the speaker is saying.

This takes practice, and I encourage you to try it the next time you’re speaking—and listening—to someone with whom you’re in conflict.

And if this final step of the Auxano Communication Approach© fails to result in a positive outcome for the relationship, go back to Step 1 in due time and repeat the process. Eventually, you ought to see, hear, and experience a breakthrough that will take that relationship to a new, deeper, and more authentic level.

This week, we’ll continue and conclude the four-step Auxano Communication Approach^©. As a reminder, the first two steps are:

Step 1: Observe and talk about what you just noticed.

Step 2: Invite the other person to hear the story you’re telling yourself.

Today, we’ll look at possibly the hardest step that may demand the most from you:

Step 3: Share with the other person the feelings you have as a result of the story you made up in your mind.

As I wrote in The Stories We Tell Ourselves, “If we only share the story we’ve been telling ourselves, we leave out half of the relevant information as to why we’re sharing that story.”

In other words, if you just relate the “facts” of the stories you’ve been making up and not how those stories are making you feel, you’re not exactly telling the other person the entire narrative.

To achieve relational connection, and even relational wholeness, you must be able to endure the awkwardness of telling someone else both the stories you may have been making up about them as well as how those stories have been affecting you internally.

To do this, fill in the blanks of this sentence when you’re conversing with the person about whom you’ve been fabricating stories: “Based on the story I’ve been telling myself about you, I’ve felt ____.”

This will demand vulnerability and honesty from you, but your truthfulness ought to help the relationship grow. In fact, the other person may even mimic you and relate how they’ve felt about the stories they’ve been telling themselves about you.

And once both of you have disavowed yourselves of the fabrications possibly surrounding your relationship, a foundation for a stronger, healthier relationship can be built.