3 Rules for Communication: A Must in High Level Marriages!

While implementing these rules for communication won't address the root issues of your marriage, it WILL help you move faster in the SAME direction towards healing and oneness. 

In this episode, Chelsey shares 3 rules she and Zach implemented and still use today!

Transcript

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Welcome back to the High Level Wife Podcast. I am Chelsea Holm, your hostess, and I just posted a reel yesterday, I think is when you're listening to this, about our three rules for communication. And I wanted to share them with you, but I wanted to caveat this with the fact that communicating more is not actually going to get to the root issues within your marriage. But it will help you to work through them much faster because communication breakdown usually happens because we haven't learned the skills. So, more often than not, what you're the way that you communicate is how you experience communication, how you witnessed your parents communicating or not communicating, um, or simply you didn't experience it at all. And so you're just wild westing it out here, right? Um, and so if you can look at communication first and foremost as simply another skill that you can learn and you can get better in, right? First of all, it removes the shame that the pattern that you're currently functioning in and how you speak to your spouse and how you receive words from your spouse is simply a learned behavior. And with anything, we can unlearn and relearn a way that is not hurtful to us and actually helps us to move forward faster together. So, our three rules for communication that my husband and I implemented and has been always super helpful in how we communicate. The first and foremost is to always assume the best of each other. I cannot emphasize this enough that too often what happens is we have husbands assuming the worst of their wives and wives assuming the worst of their husbands. And how can we be on the same team? Imagine a football team or any sport, right? Go sports, uh, where you didn't trust one another, right? You didn't um you assumed that your your this is why am I using sports metaphors? I feel like I should I need to go back to food metaphors. Sports metaphor is not my thing. Um, but anyways, but what if you just like if your quarterback didn't trust the the receiver and so he just refused to to throw it to the receiver? Like, are they ever gonna actually move forward and win the game? No, right? Or what if a receiver didn't trust that the quarterback is actually gonna get the pass to him? So instead he just takes the football, right? Not according to the play, and it doesn't work out that way, right? Because that's not how it's set up. And so we always have to assume the best. Assume the best. And so that leads into the second one is that if you are misunderstanding, you ask for more information and clarification. Like this is what you said, it this is how I took that. Is that accurate? Or am I missing something here? What am I missing? Right? Because again, we're gonna assume the best, and now we're gonna ask for clarification. Um, and then when you do that, you again remember, so this is number three. Remember that you are on the same team, pulling in the same direction on the same mission. So when you do these three three things, when you apply these three rules for communication, you're going to be able to be much more effective in how you communicate with one another. I think one of this is a little bonus for you, is just to understand that you and your husband are not the same. You and your wife are not the same. You guys communicate differently. More often than not, you are saying the same thing, but you are saying it differently. This just happened yesterday, actually. We had a couple over for dinner, and they had asked us, you know, how long have you been married? And Zach and I were saying the exact same thing, but we were saying it different. He was saying, We've been married 17 years, and I was saying, This December, we will have been married 18 years. So, as you can see, we were saying the same thing, but we were saying it differently because this is how God made us. Men and women are different, we think differently, we communicate differently, and so if when we try to battle against that and try to make our spouse communicate in the way that only we understand, but they don't understand, it's like demanding that a man speak Spanish when he's never spoken Spanish a day in his life, and also demanding that when you speak Spanish, he understands when he doesn't understand, right? And so if we can sit back and we can understand that or just have this understanding for one another that we speak differently, then we're gonna go back to that first one, assume the best. Okay, if I misunderstood, I'm gonna ask for more clarification, which is number two. And the third one is we're pulling in the same direction. Imagine if you had two horses that were pulling in opposite directions. Are they going to be effective in moving anything? No, but they're sure as heck gonna wear each themselves out, they're gonna wear each other out, they're gonna wear the equipment out because that's not the the way that it was intended to be used, right? But when you have two horses pulling in the same direction, not only can they pull double what they could pull on their own, but they can actually pull three times as much as they could pull on their own when they're pulling together. That is God's design for marriage and how it looks when we are on mission pulling in the same direction. God multiplies the impact that we make. So if you follow these three simple rules for communication in your own marriage, you are going to find that you are able to move in the same direction faster. Now, of course, this is probably another episode, and I think I've already uh recorded one at some point about conflict. Um, but so much of communication is simply stepping back and learning, having an awareness of the patterns that are not serving you guys, that are that are pulling in opposite directions against each other or pushing against each other. And once you can have it, once you create an awareness around these patterns, then you can disrupt them and you can get back to these three rules of pulling in the same direction. So, of these three rules, which one are you going to implement first? And you can start implementing these without speaking to your spouse, but I highly recommend that first of all you send this episode to your spouse and you guys make an agreement, come into an agreement together that you are going to begin applying these and implementing these. Those words mean the same thing, applying and implementing, right? I don't know why I said them both, but you guys are going to be putting these into practice together intentionally and intentionally and diligently continuing to return to them when you start to maybe not assume the best, you start to assume the worst. Nope, we're not gonna do that. We assume the best. So that when you guys have conflict or you have differences that are coming up, you can audibly say, Hey, we're on the same team, honey. We're moving in the same direction. Um, I misunderstood. Let me get some more clarification. Um, I'm assuming the best. I know you would never hurt me on purpose, say anything that would intentionally hurt me, and I would never say anything to intentionally hurt you. So then again, we're gonna assume the best, and we're gonna ask for more clarification, and we're gonna remind ourselves we're on the same team. Implement these in your marriage, and you will notice that while it might not solve the deepest root issues that we have going on because those are heart issues, it is going to make everything a lot easier and able to move in the same direction faster. See you on the next episode.