6.2 Planning and preparing appropriate responses

When faced with difficult situations requiring communication, it can be useful to use the interpersonal circle model to plan and prepare.

When building rapport, it is important to be mindful of two things: (i) that listening is the most important aspect of building rapport and (ii) that in any interaction a bit of advance preparation often goes a very long way.

It can be useful to ‘road test’ responses with people in advance of difficult conversations though role play. If, for example, you have a difficult meeting coming up, it can be good to get a friend or colleague to role-play being the ‘difficult person’, as this will allow you to try out your questions and conversational openers on them. A really good idea when doing this is to get them to give you a range of different challenging replies to your opening questions and comments so that you’re able to try out a variety of different conversational options in advance, in a safe environment.

Finally, the research (Alison et al., 2013) suggests that behavioural adaptability and versatility is a key skill of those capable of handling conversations really well, so no matter how good you are at adaptive cooperation, if you always stick with that section of the interpersonal circle – regardless of what your conversational partner is doing – you’ll be less effective than someone who is able to enact a range of adaptive behaviours from different segments of the circle. Trying out a range of behaviours on a trusted friend is therefore a good way of improving your adaptive responding to real-life situations.

The final activity in this course is a quiz designed to enable you to assess the knowledge you’ve gained throughout the course. Work through the questions in turn, and don’t worry if you need to refer back to the material in the rest of the course; the aim is to make sure you identify the areas you’re not sure about and work back to plug any gaps in your knowledge.