Rules for Communication (or Rules for Life)

I’m an accountant. Accountants are notoriously bad at communication, and there’s usually a reason: numbers are straightforward, clear, concise, easy to line up and sort. I love doing taxes. You put the numbers in their place, finalize the return, send it off, and you’re done.

Except you’re not, not always. Sometimes the Canada Revenue Agency wants to talk about that dinner meeting, or those moving costs, or that dependent credit. That’s when you realize numbers were never as clear as you thought.

I saw this everywhere in my work, but nowhere more than in my years as a Financial Neutral in the Collaborative Divorce Process. I discovered I was working more with communication than numbers, and that the real work happened in communication, which is hard, especially for an accountant. The numbers are so clear. Why can’t my client decide?

Wanting a concrete answer, the way accountants do, I ended up with five rules. I call them rules for life.

Rule 1: Know Yourself and Know Your Financial Situation

After my divorce, I enrolled in a career program to learn how to write a resume, having been out of the workforce for five years as a stay-at-home mom. Six weeks later, I sent out resumes and heard nothing, zip, zero, nada.

The problem wasn’t the resume. The problem was I didn’t want any of those jobs, and it showed in every cover letter I wrote. I was following someone else’s template because I didn’t know what I actually wanted.

I spent six months waking up in a panic about money, writing cover letters I didn’t believe in, finding ways to scrape by in between. Slowly, with the help of a coach, I got to know myself well enough to realize I needed to start my own business, despite a vow I’d made to myself at fifteen that I never would. As soon as I said it out loud, people started calling to ask for my help. I had to look honestly at my finances first, panic filters and all, and once I did, I saw I could manage the short-term dip it would take to get there.

Rule 2: Know the Person You’re Communicating With

The flip side of knowing yourself is knowing the person across from you. This is where it gets tricky and emotional, which accountants tend not to love.

I had to tell my co-parent I was starting a business, since his child support depended on my income. I told him by email. He responded almost instantly, which was unusual. I got defensive. We went back and forth until we hit a six-month deadlock, and eventually ended up in court.

Which means I broke Rule 2 before I’d really learned it, and had to detour through Rule 3 to get back to it.

Rule 3: Set Up Neutral Time and Space to Communicate

Court is not neutral. It’s public, it’s stressful, and a judge who has heard it all before will look at you like you’re both being unreasonable, then send you off to try again before he’ll even set a hearing.

That’s what happened to us. Instead of a hearing, we were assigned time with a mediator to try to resolve things privately, at a time we chose together, without an audience. She listened to both of us and made us listen to each other, then sent us to counselling. Back to Rule 2.

Rule 2, Again

We sat in a counsellor’s office for three hours doing one thing: taking turns speaking and repeating back what the other person said, before either of us was allowed to respond. I wanted to interrupt constantly. I was rolling my eyes, squirming, nearly at a breaking point.

Rule 4: Shut Up and Listen

If you actually want to resolve a conflict, you have to understand what it’s about. I could have argued my case all day and never once understood what was driving my co-parent. The counsellor made me sit still and paraphrase what he’d said, feeding me the words when I couldn’t find them myself: “Renée, say this back to him.”

So I did. And as I sat there repeating his feelings back to him, I noticed something. Something in him settled. Some of the fight went out of the room. He looked like he felt heard.

Then it was my turn to speak, and his turn to repeat what I’d said. Hearing my own words come back to me, without being argued with, took some of the fight out of me too. I felt heard.

When I’d finished, the counsellor asked, “How can you help him with how he’s feeling?”

“I don’t know. I can’t fix it,” I said.

“And you don’t need to.”

That single line took apart every argument I’d been building. I couldn’t change how he felt, and he couldn’t change how I felt, but just having it acknowledged did something neither of us expected. I understood, finally, that what he was doing had nothing to do with me.

If you find yourself interrupting, or feel a “but” rising in your throat, that’s the moment you’ve been triggered. You don’t have to argue with how someone feels. You just have to hear it. Arguing only entrenches people further, since now they need to defend the feeling instead of moving through it.

Rule 5: You’re Never Done

Being an accountant, I hoped that would be the end of it. Resolved, filed, closed. It wasn’t. There are always new numbers to wrangle, new issues to sit through. I got a lot of practice, and in the process, learned enough to help other people do the same.