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Act first—communicate later

If you find you’re caught endlessly in the same argument, try this: act first, and communicate later. This may seem counterintuitive, but it can work. It means that you find the solution, fix the problem first, and then discuss why it happened later, with the sole intent of ensuring that it doesn’t happen again.

For example, when my daughter was fourteen, she was notorious for leaving clothes lying all over the house. It drove me crazy! Every Friday, our house cleaner would come and freshen up the house. Our job was to have the house tidy before she arrived so she could clean effectively. I would do the laundry and put my daughter’s clean, folded clothes on her bed for her to put away. A few hours later, I would find the clothes in a heap on the floor. When I pushed her to tidy her room, she would scoop up the clean clothes and toss them into the laundry basket!

Of course, this was enormously frustrating for me, so one day I took all the clothes lying on the floor in her bedroom and stuffed them into garbage bags, took them to the garage, and continued with my day. It didn’t take long for her to see that the room had been “cleaned,” which was fine, until she realized that her clothes were in fact missing and not just back in the laundry. She panicked, worried that I had thrown her clothes out.

Finally, I had her attention. After she calmed down and realized that I hadn’t thrown her clothes out, I handed her the bags of clothing and resigned my position of being her personal housekeeper and laundress. It was a decision that ultimately worked for both of us.

My decision to bag and hide my daughter’s clothes, although extreme, prompted real communication. She finally heard what I was saying and understood, and together we worked out a solution.

Beware of unsolicited denials

If someone is going out of their way to deny something, they just may be guilty. This might be a heads-up for you.

An unsolicited denial occurs when someone blurts out something that refutes a statement that is not related to the topic of discussion—something very unexpected. For example, “It’s not like I was feeling guilty—I didn’t do anything wrong,” when feeling guilty was never part of the discussion. So where did the guilt come from?

It’s likely there are some truths bubbling away just under the surface. When someone claims innocence for no reason, they almost certainly are guilty of something, and you’ve just caught a glimpse of the real person behind the statement.