We make many dumb relationship mistakes, which I have noticed after years of study and observing communication and human behavior, that all cannot be listed here. I use the term “dumb” not to put people down, but only because a lot of people repeat the same blunders. Put an end to these 15 relationship mistakes, in no particular order:

1. Withhold Feelings

Men are more guilty than women in withholding feelings from their partner. If something ticks men off, they may hide their irritation instead of revealing what it is that annoyed them. Women are indirectly guilty of this relationship mistake. While women are more emotional than men, they withhold feelings in the sense that they blame or criticize others to indirectly express their emotions. “I hate you for…!” is not an example of expressing your feelings. An expression of emotion is, “I feel sad about…” “I’m feeling happy you…” “I am angry!”

2. Reject Emotions

We may withhold feelings from someone because we reject our emotions. It is uncomfortable for most people to feel guilt, shame, anger, sadness, and even love so they reject these emotions by thinking positively or generally suppressing them. You feel whatever you do for a reason – accept it. Your relationships deteriorate if you suppress anger, for example, because you will resent and behave bitterly with people.

3. Blame

The failure to healthily express emotion can show itself through blame, a common relationship mistake. Look at an argumentative couple to see each person blaming the other for relationship problems. Neither acknowledges imperfection, preferring to be right. Each person thinks people ought to change instead of taking the responsibility for self-change. Victimization is a relationship mistake unhealthy for either person.

4. Gossip

People gossip about their relationships mainly for self-pity. They seek validation that the other person is to blame for relationship problems. If you have a relationship problem, talk with the person you share the problem with and stop complaining about it to your friends or coworkers. The other person is not the cause of your suffering; you are because of your ignorance to the problem through gossip. If a gossiper just turns the mirror on himself, he would realize the rumors hurt his relationships. A gossiper is no better than the originator of the problem. Neither roles create resolution – both compound it.

5. Interpret Behaviors Negatively

A gossiper is one example of a person that blames others and interprets their behaviors in a negative light. Each little behavior signals a conspiracy against the cynic. If you think your husband is having an affair, anything he does will be filtered through that perspective.

Give people a margin-for-error because you don’t know every detail. Each of us hold a piece of truth discoverable through communication. The best way to resolve your worries is to ask the person by showing interest in their life.

6. Show A Lack of Interest

Do you know what happened to your partner today? When was the last time you watched a friend play their weekly sport? When did you last ask what someone did at work? Get curious about people’s lives by asking a lot of questions and displaying attentive body language. Communication often lacks in relationships because neither person takes the initiative to learn about the other person. Interest in people’s lives makes them feel important, builds the relationship, and teaches you a lot of great stuff in the process. Think of something a person important to you enjoys then go do it with them. You may even want to take up a new hobby together like dancing or yoga.

7. Exert Excessive Control

We hate being controlled and told what to do. The worst managers micro-manage, dictating employee behavior. Many angry employees echo similar remarks.

The greatest leaders give team members freedom. The same is true in families and interpersonal relationships. If you order your teenage daughter to not smoke, research shows she is more likely to smoke. One study that looked at how values transmit through families found that children with authoritative parents have different values to them. When the parents are supportive rather than restrictive, the children agree and accept similar values.

8. Try to Change People

Whenever we try to change people, whether it be through manipulation, criticism, orders, threats, or rewards, they take on strange behavior. Do a test in a safe environment. Intentionally tell someone what they are doing is wrong and the person could not change, become suddenly quiet, resent you, gossip about you, or purposefully do what you said not to do. We always try to change people, but rarely succeed.

9. Remain Unchanged

We expect people to change while we remain unchanged. Rigid perspectives on money, family, work, emotion, and the relationship creates severe friction that can destroy a relationship. “If my coworker stopped…then I’d be able to…” “If my son stopped…then I could…” “My partner should…then I’d feel…” I’ll give you an if-statement to remember: if you don’t change, you have no right to expect people to change.

10. Keep One’s Point of View

What is your honest estimate of the percentage you think you are right in an argument? 80? 90? 100%? I estimate most people say 95%. That means a fighting couple’s righteousness totals 190%, a formula for conflict. It is logically and mathematically irrational to conclude one can be right 95% of the time. We are not divine beings knowing of truth.

Each of us possess the truth that we must be flexible enough to explore. The cure to any couple’s problem is held by each person because their point of view is 50% of the relationship.

11. Deny Flaws to Show Perfection

Because we don’t change and like to keep our original point of view, we deny flaws and show perfection. When a mistake arises, we freeze about being found out. A simple sit-down discussion where the two of you each admit three flaws about yourselves helps keep destructive perfection at bay while encouraging growth. You do not fear imperfection when mistakes are encouraged to surface.

12. Absence of Admiration

Relationships are easy to take for granted. We devalue what we have while desiring what is out of our reach. Put some effort into the relationship. You can show people you value the relationship with them through admiration. Give a compliment. Send a gift. Thank someone for a task they did. Phone one person now and thank them for something specific.

13. Be Judgmental

We love to judge people. As described in my Communication Secrets of Powerful People book, there are four judgments: criticism, labeling, diagnosing, and praising. We criticize (“You are no good at helping me”), label (“You are a jerk”), diagnose (“Stop being rude because you don’t get what you want”), and praise (“You are the sweetest person for doing that”). Each judgment has its own problems too deep to described in this article.

14. Send Solutions

It is counterintuitive that solutions kill relationships. After all, don’t solutions cure problems? More often than not in relationships, solutions create problems. We feel inferior being controlled and the problem-solver often overlooks the real issue. Solutions are usually manifestations of other dumb relationship mistakes like blame, gossip, trying to change people, and sticking to one’s point of view.

15. Avoid Concerns

The most frequent dumb mistake people make in a relationship is avoiding their partner’s concerns. Look at any bad relationship and each person will tell you their needs are not being met. They are not being listened to, understood, cared for, loved, whatever. Good communication is the key to overcoming these problems and meeting each other’s needs.

There you have 15 mistakes people frequently make in their relationships. Follow this advice then hopefully the next time you ask someone what one mistake you do in the relationship, no walls break because walls are nonexistent.

(If you are reading this and want to eliminate the communication mistakes that hurt your relationships, and to learn more about judgments, sending solutions, and avoiding concerns, read my Communication Secrets of Powerful People book to discover the 12 barriers of communication. Nearly all of the dumb relationship mistakes can be avoided when you understand the 12 barriers.)

Other Articles That Might Help You

1. 4 Reasons Advice and Other Solutions Kill Relationships
2. Barriers and Mistakes in Apologizing
3. 40 Ways to Make a Good First Impression
4. Controlling People – Signs of a Controlling Person and How to Deal with Them
5. Principles and Tips to Deal with Difficult People

See if you can find a link between the following short scenarios: Your partner leaves the room in anger after another argument; A friend lashes out at you despite you having done nothing wrong; Your children’s constant disobedience makes you extremely frustrated and causes you to yell and do things you regret.

Why do the above scenarios, or similar situations, constantly play out in your life? There are thousands of situations like the ones listed above that all have a common thread. We know there is a better way to handle the situation, but we cannot figure it out. Our emotions often get the better of us as we poorly handle the situation. We know something is wrong and that we can fix it, but how? The answers to these questions and the secret human need I will show you how to fulfill is through a method of communication called “nonviolent communication”, also known as NVC.

An Overview of Nonviolent Communication: Your Key to Compassionate Communication for Shared Understanding

The process I am about to discuss in this article is one created by the Center for Nonviolent Communication. The organization is a nonprofit organization founded by Marshall Rosenberg, author of Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. Rosenberg and a couple hundred other NVC trainers, conduct workshops throughout the world where they teach people their nonviolent communication model. The NVC process has changed millions of people who learned the techniques directly from trainers or Rosenberg’s book, and people who have been fortunate enough to have those trained in the NVC process use the model on them.

If you are after a process that changes a person’s behavior, NVC is not the best one to use. NVC builds a deep intimate relationship and connection with effective communication by satisfying people’s needs. It achieves a level of connection most people never experience. It can be used to change a person’s behavior, but the primary purpose of the process is to help people face what matters with compassion to connect at a very intimate level.

Once you have sufficiently gone through certain steps in the process, then you can use your negotiation skills to persuade the person. If you try to persuade the person upfront before you use NVC, you will often find the person resists you and ignores what you have to say.

When a person disagrees with you, refuses to comply with a request, or is angry at you, a poor communicator tries to firstly express oneself. The person seeks to be understood before seeking to understand. An NVC user, on the contrary, seeks to understand the person, which in turn leads to their own need of being understood. Once you understand others, they will want to understand you.

The commonality amongst the situations I mentioned earlier, and hundreds of situations you experience throughout the week, is people’s desperation to be understood. Your angry partner wants to be understood. Your friend wants to be understood and will have almost zero frustration once you understand. Your children want to be understood, which will naturally compel them to talk with you about intimate issues. Nonviolent communication helps you understand people and have them understand you.

The need to be understood is possibly the greatest unmet human need. Fulfill this need and you will trigger new experiences, intimate sharing, and connect with people at the heart. Thanks to Dan Kennedy, a great marketer that I intently learn from, I came across a quote by Cavett Robert, founder of the National Speakers Association, who said, “Most people are walking around, umbilical cord in hand, looking for a new place to plug it in.” If you can be that “socket” by understanding the person and empathically receiving their needs, you automatically share an electrifying connection with the person. Something about the person will change before your eyes. They will know something deep is going on without knowing what you are doing.

Unfortunately, the majority of people never arrive at this stage of electrifying intimacy. Answer this question truthfully: How many people truly understand you on a frequent basis? Think about the question for some time because it is important to understand understanding.

I ask this not to make you blame others for their failure to understand you, but to show you the scarcity of people who seek to understand. If you are like most people, you will not have one person that frequently and truly understands you in conversations. Few people care about understanding others, which causes themselves to be misunderstood. People who complain that “no one understands me” are constantly misunderstood because they live on a one-way street seeking to receive before they consider giving.

Violence is widespread because one person or group desperately wants to be understood while another party they are in conflict with also wants to be understood. The failure to see each other’s needs means neither gets one’s needs fulfilled. The result is an outbreak of emotional or physical destruction. So much pain in the world is caused by misunderstandings.

The anger and frustration present in everyday situations appears to be irrelevant to deeper issues, yet it is our inability to effectively face conflict that contributes to a global scale of war and hatred. Our everyday wallowing in resentment, frustration, and misunderstandings has as much – but probably greater – impact on peace and love than kind actions. If you cannot resolve your minor nuances in relationships that are suppose to be intimate and love-filled, you cannot expect nations who have hated each other for centuries to resolve major conflicts. To understand another person is a secret of world peace. “Peace cannot be achieved through violence,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson, “it can only be attained through understanding.”

The nonviolent communication process is a simple once you know the process; though it’s not always a fun slide to ride on because emotional pollution clogs your use of it. With practice, you will become better at NVC and be more successful in your communication and relationships. Over time, provided you continually practice the techniques and polish your skills, you will become excellent at the process.

The Four Step Process

The process has four steps: observing, feeling, needing, and requesting. There are really eight steps, however, because you firstly apply the four steps to the other person, then you apply them to yourself. Remember what I said before about seeking to understand before being understood? The first four stages make you understand people so you can be understood when you apply the four steps on yourself. This is the most critical part of the concept to grasp.

Unless the person is a compassionate communicator, go through the four steps first on the other person otherwise he or she will not listen to you. Use the visualization of a vacuum empathically “sucking up” the person’s communication. Until the person feels “cleaned”, you will be unable to clean yourself. Once you have sucked up the person, and hence understood them, you are then ready to use NVC on yourself.

Most people identify a few problems in firstly focusing on the other person. If you have not identified one of these now, you will as you continue to read about the process. The biggest concern I had with NVC is that you forgo your own needs, concerns, and emotions like anger. NVC prevents destructive expressions of anger and frustration via harmful attitudes and behaviors (think of the sarcastic teenager or the employee who does poor quality work). The process encourages you to express intense emotions – especially anger – in a healthy way that fulfills the underlying need.

At first glance, I understand the model may overwhelm you, but keep at it and reread the pages in this article to refine your ability to understand people and be understood. The NVC process as described in this full article will give you a good idea of what to expect in my Communication Secrets of Powerful People Program should you want to invest in it. It could be one of the greatest investments you make. Once you know how to understand people and help them understand you, you can mold your relationships however you want. It is time to kick into the first stage: observing.

Other Articles That Might Help You

1. Review of Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg
2. The Heart of Effective Communication: How to Love People
3. How to Manage Stress in Relationship Communication: Keep Calm with Scientific Stress Management
4. The Benefits of Communication Skills
5. The Greatest 15 Myths of Communication