One reason why, in my team building seminars, I address communication skills that apply to both personal and professional relationships is because ALL of your relationships really have to do with team building.

You see, if you are experiencing much relationship strife at home, your workplace morale, motivation and performance are going to be adversely affected by that.

In a very real sense, the people in your personal life make up part of your overall team for life-success.

It’s also true that when an individual experiences interpersonal conflict on the job, the emotional “echo” of that conflict comes home with him, and often spreads a sour mood into the household, sparking conflict there as well.

This becomes a vicious cycle as it can set the worker up for lowered morale, lowered performance, and a stronger tendency to engage in more personal conflict when he returns to work.

Effective communication at home supports effective communication in the workplace, and vice versa.

There are many skills involved in communicating effectively, but none more important than the skill of maintaining a positive focus.

You demonstrate this communication skill by talking about what you want, instead of talking about what you do not want.

For success in both professional and personal relationships, including romantic relationships and parent-child relationships, two communication skills are essential:

1. Talk about what you want.

2. Don’t about what you don’t want.

This applies to both verbal communication and to nonverbal communication.

A person may nonverbally talk about what he does NOT want by rolling his eyes, grunting, grimacing, shaking his head, or through any number of other facial gestures and wordless mannerisms.

We verbally talk about what we do not want by complaining, by worrying out loud, by putting others down with derogatory labels like “He’s lazy” or “She’s untrustworthy”.

Applying the communication skill of a positive focus does not mean that you go into denial about problems. It means that you frame your speech around solutions.

One aspect of the power of talking about what you want is that it keeps you feeling motivated, which helps the person you are speaking with to feel motivated with you.

You share the attitude of appreciation, enjoyment, encouragement.

This positive attitude translates into team bonding with the person you are communicating with.

It also helps you to feel more positive, and thus to be more energized and constructively engaged.

Another positive aspect of positive speech is that it is really just a voicing of positive thinking.

The power of positive thinking is in the fact that what your mind focuses on your life re-produces.

In other words, speaking about what you want means that you are thinking about what you want, and thinking about what you want helps it to happen.

By contrast, talking about what you do NOT want means that your mind is focusing on a condition you want to avoid, but that focus is bringing more of that condition into your life.

Additionally, complaining, criticizing, and worrying out loud acts in opposition to team building by transmitting an attitude that your listener will naturally want to block, ignore, separate himself from.

The next time that you feel tempted to talk about what you dislike, what you find wrong, what you fear, pause for a moment to exercise the 2 communication skills involved in team building training for relationship success: Think about what you want in place of what you do not, and talk about that.