Interpersonal Conflict - How to refuse?

This interpersonal conflict dates back to my middle school, but I can still remember it clearly. There was a debate competition among classes in school and I was in charge of the debate team of my class. There were about six students signing up for the debate and I need to choose only four of them. I went through a short interview with each student and found out who were better. However, one of the two who I decided to refuse was my best friend actually. I thought about how to tell her about it and then I decided to let the other person in charge to tell her. I originally thought the other person in charge would tell her that we, as a team that thought she were not good enough. However, the reason that I, myself thought her as not good enough was told instead. Besides, the situation that I let the other person told her the reason made her easy to believe that it was just me who decided to refuse her. This was quite an embarrassing situation; I did not know what to do and what to say to her. We saw each other every day but felt uncomfortable.

I think this interpersonal conflict is the general case of how to refuse the people who are good friends or even relatives in life, especially in workplace. It is definitely right to put your group in the first place, but how to solve the problem left for your own?

Why Effective Communication is Important to Me

First of all, welcome to my blog and I am glad to share some thoughts through this blog with you!

As to why effective communication is important to me, I would like to first share with you what I think effective communication is about. Besides the common definition of effective communication like expressing and delivering the ideas clearly, good listening skill, effective writing and speaking skills, there is another aspect I think many people may have ignored.

It is about “not only listen to the words, but also listen to the mood”.  Besides the words and meaning one could catch, the mood or the ‘psychological need’ sometimes appears to be more important during a conversation. Sometimes people say something but do not mean it. It is because people would like to use it to express some emotional need. This is especially common among close relationship like family and close friends. One example could be dad comes back late and mom says: how come you come back so late?  If the dad only says because I have an urgent meeting, I guess mom cannot be satisfied. Actually mom does not only want to know the reason for coming back late, but more importantly mom wants dad to show that he is sorry and he still loves the family and cares about them.  The reason is that in this case mom feels herself be ignored or becomes less important thus there is an emotional need to be recognized.

Thus effective communication to me is more on observing the situation and satisfying the others’ need. This will help other people to have a sense of importance and fulfilled. I think this is the background that effective communication can be carried on afterwards.  Effective communication is around us every day and probably every moment, a good communication skill help me to play good roles in different phases of life like being a friend, a student, a child, an employee and probably a wife and a mother in the future.  All these phases come together to be life itself and the key to a satisfying life is effective communication.