Principle 9:
That it is ok to make mistakes

Does the wind blow? Did you experience rain today? That's it: What is is. We make mistakes, we don't; the wind blows, it doesn't; it is what is. Your story about it-that's where the heaven or the hell is. But one thing you can count on is that people will make what you consider mistakes. You can fire them, you can yell at them, you can divorce them, and the person in front of you is going to make a mistake, count on it. So all you can really do is sit and investigate that concept. That's as good as it gets. If you believe that people shouldn't make mistakes, welcome to hell. Byron Katie: Question Your Thinking, Change the World

Without this Principle the others would all be meaningless.

They would just be a set of 'rules' that would often be impossible to follow.

The relevance of this Principle is that it is the key to the other Principles being used as the means through which we can learn to become more effective in our communication, and more effective in our ability to resolve conflict where it has become destructive.

• Where is your communication used to allocate blame?
• What do you learn from mistakes in general, whether your own or others'?
• What is your response to someone making a mistake?

• What does humiliation or punishment do to recover the situation from the effects of the mistake?
• How much time and energy goes into finding someone to blame instead of into repair, recovery, resolution, learning?

Without this Principle, conflict avoidance and conflict suppression would arise from the other Principles. People would be condemned for 'volunteering others' or for 'challenging the person and not the behaviour' or for 'speaking too often or for too long' etc.

Without this Principle, more effort would go into denial of these consequences or rejection of the Principles than into the enormous learning opportunity to develop the effectiveness of our communication that they provide.

Without this Principle, the likelihood is that continued abdication of our self-responsibility to practice effective communication and our self-responsibility to resolve our own conflicts would occur.

• If they're not going to stick to the rules why should I?
• They don't listen to me.
• Their body language was too defensive for me to talk to them.
• They kept interrupting me.

And so impasse occurs.

The destructive conflict becomes chronic, or it escalates, because effective interpersonal communication has ceased to occur. Because it is not considered ok to make mistakes.

The Principles of Effective Communication are not rules. We all make communication mistakes. We are all responsible for the effectiveness of our own communication. Irrespective of whether the person we are communicating with, or in conflict with, is practicing effective communication - in our view.

We - are responsible for - our own - communication.

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