Verbal Judo

George J. Thompson, PhD

• Editore: HarperCollins e-books
• Anno: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062031686
• Argomento: Languages & Linguistics
• Categoria: Rhetoric

Verbal Judo is the martial art of the mind and mouth that can show you how to be better prepared in every verbal encounter. Listen and speak more effectively, engage people through empathy (the most powerful word in the English language), avoid the most common conversational disasters, and use proven strategies that allow you to successfully communicate your point of view and take the upper hand in most disputes.

Verbal Judo offers a creative look at conflict that will help you defuse confrontations and generate cooperation from your spouse, your boss, and even your teenager. As the author says, "when you react, the event controls you. When you respond, you're in control."

This new edition features a fresh new cover and a foreword demonstrating the legacy of Verbal Judo founder and author George Thompson, as well as a never-before-published final chapter presenting Thompson's "Five Universal Truths" of human interaction.

1

Birth of a Communication Samurai

IT WAS THE most outrageous way to bust up a fight I had ever seen. I’d been a rookie cop ten days when my partner got the call. At two A.M. we were dispatched to break up a nasty domestic dispute in a tenement on the east side of Emporia, Kansas, notorious for drug dealing and random violence.

We could hear the couple’s vicious, mouth-to-mouth combat from the street. My training sergeant and partner, Bruce Fair, and I approached and peeked through the half-open door. Then Bruce just walked in without bothering to knock. I watched as he strode right past the warring couple, took off his uniform cap, sighed, and planted himself on the couch. Ignoring the argument, he picked up a newspaper and thumbed through the classifieds!

Leaning against the door with my hand on the butt of my .357, I was flabbergasted. Bruce seemed to violate all the rules of police procedure. I had never seen him enter a house without identifying himself, without asking permission, or without at least saying why he was there. There he was, treating an angry couple in a tenement apartment as if he were a visiting uncle.

Bruce kept reading and the couple kept arguing, occasionally glancing at the cop on their couch. They had yet to notice me. As the man cursed his wife, Bruce rattled the newspaper. “Folks. Folks! Excuse me! Over here!”

The stunned husband flashed a double take. “What are you doing here?”

Bruce said, “You got a phone? Look here. A 1950 Dodge! Cherry condition! Can I borrow your phone? I know it’s late, but I don’t want to miss out on this. Where’s your phone? I need to call right now!”

The husband pointed to the phone, incredulous. Bruce rose and dialed, then mumbled into the phone. He slammed it down. “Can you believe they wouldn’t talk to me just because it’s two in the morning?”

By now the fight had evaporated, the couple standing there as dumbfounded as I was. “By the way,” Bruce said pleasantly, as if just becoming aware, “is anything the matter here? Anything my partner and I can do for you?”

The husband and wife looked at the floor and shook their heads. “Not really, no.” We chatted with them a bit, reminding them that it was late and that everyone around would appreciate a little peace and quiet. Soon we were on our way.

Then I was really puzzled. Earlier that night we had broken up a similar dispute in the classic cop fashion. We quickly took control with polite authority, performed what’s known as a “separate and suture” (where the warring parties are separated, calmed, and then brought back together), and diffused the situation. That was the way I had been trained, so what was this new twist?

I mean, as a former college English professor who had taught Milton and Shakespeare for ten years, I’d seen some ingenious twists of plot. But a cop taming two animals by intruding as a rude but friendly guest? Bruce had forced those people to play host to him whether or not they wanted to.

As soon as we were back in the squad car I asked him,“What in the world was that all about? Why did we separate and suture earlier and pull this crazy newspaper-and-telephone gag just now?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve been on the street more’n ten years. You just learn.”

“Hey, I may be new at this,” I said, “but I’m no kid. [I was thirty-five.] I haven’t got ten years. I could get blown away if I tried that stunt. We need to talk. Tell me how you knew you could get away with that.”

I didn’t realize it then, but that evening marked the birth of Verbal Judo and was the first lesson in my career as a communication samurai. I had studied the martial arts, starting with genuine Indian wrestling, since I was six and held black belts in judo and tae kwon do karate, but I had never seen such principles so effectively applied to life on the streets.

It was one thing to practice the martial arts in a storefront dojo with polite, honorable opponents bowing and working together, competing and learning. (In judo I had learned the gentle art of redirecting my opponent’s energy to achieve my own goal. If he came straight at me, I would sidestep and try a move that would add to his momentum, carrying him past me where I could take control.) But I had watched Bruce Fair do virtually the same thing without an ounce of physical force. With his mouth, a newspaper, and a telephone, he had calmed two hotheads with redirective techniques he had absorbed through experience.

I was intrigued. During the remainder of my tenure as a police officer—working everything from canine patrol to hostage negotiations—I carefully watched and listened to guys like Bruce. I began systematically studying the communication techniques of salty old police dogs, carrying a tape recorder with me on every call. I listened not only to what was said, but also to how it was said. Time after time I saw older, street-savvy officers assume roles and counter-roles, suavely manipulating people’s energies to calm otherwise dangerous situations.

I quickly became convinced that good police officers are the greatest communicators in the world. They often have to issue orders and elicit compliance from hostile subjects, as when they’re derailing a drug deal and the gang members are reaching for their AK-47s. Despite my classical education, which had exposed me to the finest rhetoricians of the ages, I realized that my real postdoctoral work hadn’t been done at Princeton. It was unfolding for me right on the streets of Emporia.

I’ve made every mistake you can make in communication, so I’m no guru addressing you from a state of perfection. Rather, I’m someone who’s finally learned from his mistakes. If I can save you the kind of hassle I’ve endured, I’ll consider this endeavor a success.

I have three overarching goals. First and most important is to ensure your personal safety. Developing mind-mouth harmony is the greatest skill in the world, because if you make a mistake with either you can find yourself in serious personal danger. You can lose a marriage, stall a career, instigate violence, lose your credibility, alienate people, and lose friends. I know, I’ve done them all.

Whether you are an executive or a homemaker, Verbal Judo, if for nothing else, is designed to keep you alive. Admittedly, police officers—the primary audience for my course over the years—are much more vulnerable to violence than the rest of us. In the last ten years 855 police officers were killed in the line of duty, and more than seven hundred times that number wound up in emergency rooms across the country. We know from research that almost all of those injuries began with mind-mouth disharmony. That’s why I tell cops that the most dangerous weapon they carry is not the 9 mm or the .357 or the pump shotgun. Their most dangerous weapon is the cocked tongue. (More on that later.)

Goal number two is to enhance your professionalism. Regardless whether you’re in retail, wholesale, on a police force, part of corporate America, or working at home, you’re a professional. Everything I offer here can measurably improve your performance by reducing complaints from those you work with and reducing your personal stress.

If you can learn to use your words without causing strife and conflict, you will have fewer complaints in the work world and fewer arguments with your friends and family. This will go a long way in reducing stress, which is something you usually bring on yourself by the way you deal with people. Reduce your capacity for conflict, and you will reduce stress.

My third goal is to increase your efficiency by improving your performance level. This will have the added benefit of improving your self-esteem, the way you view yourself. Increasing your efficiency also means improving your ability to “say it right” the first time, rather than as so many of us do, having to apologize, restate, and try to explain why you fired off words that caused you problems in the first place.

If there was one thing I didn’t like about my academic colleagues it was that too few of them could practically apply what they taught. You can imagine what they thought of me, this strange guy who liked to ride along with cops and play at judo and karate on the side!

I might have felt like a fish out of water in both the academic and the law enforcement worlds if I hadn’t come up with the communication system that ties them together.

2

Motivating the Disagreeable

SO YOU’LL SEE that I’m trying to teach you with your own best benefit in mind, let me tell you briefly what I’ve come to realize over the years about teaching. Teaching is the process of moving people from what they know to what they don’t know. And I’ve found the best way to teach a motivated student is to appeal to his consciousness with a very small element of language, a metaphor and a simile, which is understandable to him so he can understand what is being taught.

A dry, boring teacher talks about what he knows, as if the student should have a clue. The student makes no movement. He hears the teacher talking about something the teacher may know well, but unless that teacher compares it to something within the range of that student’s experience, little learning takes place.

At the other end of the spectrum—and also unacceptable—is the teacher who moves students from what they know to other areas they already also know.

I’d always been taught that a teacher masters his material, goes into the classroom, and presents it. The teacher presents, the student receives. If the student doesn’t get it, he fails. But that’s not the way the real world works. In the real world a teacher has to know his audience and start where they are, taking them to where they haven’t been.

When you use Verbal Judo, you have an audience; you have someone on whom you practice Verbal Judo. Your audience may not be a class full of kids but an office full of employees. Maybe you’re dealing with an audience of one: your boss or your spouse. Maybe it’s a difficult child or a tough landlord or a problem neighbor. Regardless, like the cop on the street, you have to read your audience, know your principles—the tools with which to accomplish what you want in the situation—then decide which of the many methods will make your principles effect the outcome you want. Often the best way of reading your target audience is to see the person the way he sees himself. Which is the true essence of empathy.

Then, using the language of your audience, you can make the strange become familiar. Albert Einstein was brilliant at that. He would sit in Princeton Square and use balloons and oranges to explain the most complicated ideas. Carl Sagan does much the same. Great, profound thinkers must communicate simply. They understand the complexities, but they must make them simple so everyone can understand.

For example, you’ll see case histories here where a cop is trying to calm a frightened, potentially violent troublemaker. In the classic macho approach, the cop would challenge the guy: “Put that knife down or I’ll take you out! You haven’t got a chance. I’ll blow your head off,” things like that. That virtually forces the man to attack, to defend his manhood, to save face.

But what if that cop gently empathizes and says, “Hey, friend, let’s do each other a favor. You don’t want to spend the night downtown with us, eating our food, sleeping on our steel cot, and missing your woman. And I don’t want to sit at a typewriter for a couple of hours doing paperwork on this. If we can work this out, you can have dinner at your own table, be with your woman, and wake up in your own bed tomorrow morning. And I can go back about my business.”

You’ll come to see how this works, how the perpetrator becomes an ally with the officer to the benefit of both. What has happened? The officer has motivated a disagreeable person to a point of Voluntary Compliance—the ultimate goal of Verbal Judo. If you can see how learning that skill would improve your relationships and your life, you’re a motivated student who has picked up the right book.

3

Baptism of Fire

MY BACKGROUND IS the strangest mix of the physical and the cerebral that I’m aware of. I’m a middle-aged jock with a chip on his shoulder who could just as easily scream in your face and wrestle you to the floor as smile and calm the situation with a well-chosen word. Don’t I sound like an English Ph.D.?

I’m just like you. If I get cut off in traffic, my first impulse is revenge. If someone barks at me, my first reaction is to take his head off. Problem is, like most sane people, I’d regret it. It took me a while to realize that an expert on the art of Verbal Judo should be a man who needs it. Yeah, I do. It makes me chuckle to realize how quickly I can shake a fist (or a digit) at another driver while on my way to the airport to fly somewhere and teach my course on proper responses to negative situations.

I still say that makes me the right guy for the job. The success of my Verbal Judo Institute allows me to look back with gratitude—and not regret—on an upbringing that might have made another guy bitter.

I was the product of a soldier and his wife whose marriage soured before I turned three. My mother gave a porter a few dollars and asked him to watch out for me on a California-to-New York train ride to my grandparents in Ithaca, New York.

I recall growing up pretty much alone, walking the ravines as a mountain boy. One of the most significant things that happened to me was hooking up with an old Cherokee who taught me to trail and track. I. D. Swiftwater felt he owed my grandfather a debt of gratitude because my grandfather (a Cornell University law professor) while a student years before had done some pro bono legal work for him and kept him from losing his forty acres. So, Swiftwater took me under his wing and I enjoyed the rare privilege of learning Indian ways.

While being raised in the home of an Ivy League educator, where I read widely everyday and learned to speak correctly, I was one bitter kid. I had no idea I was getting a most unusually well-rounded background, with my grandparents’ emphasis on schooling, the genteel world of higher education, and my inclination toward athletics. I felt rejected by my mother and a burden to my grandparents. From nursery school on, my records paint a picture of the real George Thompson, the child I recognize inside me today: with a hot temper and short fuse, has trouble getting along with others, etc., etc., etc.

Two philosophies warred within me: Take no crap from anyone, and look out for number one.

I hated school. I was always challenging, always asking why, never doing what I was told before demanding a reason. I wanted to win all arguments, all fights, all games. My record was full of dire predictions. In high school I was a star athlete, an all-American swimmer, but still I had never applied mysel...