I want you to spend 20 minutes each day, exactly 20 minutes, writing in that journal about whatever it is you're thinking and feeling at the time. Don't take your pencil or your pen off the page. Just write for 20 minutes. I don't want you spending longer than that; just 20 minutes to think on the page about what you're feeling and thinking at any given point in the process.

2. Sign up with the very best person you can find for 10 sessions of counseling. This doesn't have to be expensive, it certainly doesn't need to be a psychiatrist or even a psychologist. It can be a marriage counselor. It can be the minister of your church. I want you to sign up for exactly 10 one-hour sessions.

3. Find yourself three partners with whom you can talk for one hour each week for 10 weeks. If they say, "What do you want to talk about?" Tell them, "I'm trying to become a better communicator and I want to talk about anything you want to talk about or I want to talk about or we want to talk about. I just want to talk to you for an hour a week in an effort to build my own communication skills."

I want each of these meetings to be built on what I call the Rogerian format. You talk for 30 or 60 seconds, or they do, it doesn't matter who starts, and then the other person puts into their own words what they have heard the opposite person say. They labor at getting it right until the person who made the original comment says, that's right. That's it. You understand. And then the person who labored at understanding gets to speak for 30 or 60 or 90 seconds. Keep these comments relatively short. After which, the other person labors to fully understand.

What we know about great communication is that both people will feel deeply heard and understood and so we want to build that kind of format in which you begin to really understand another person. Now, what I have to tell you is that sometimes in these one-hour talks, more time is spent trying to understand what the person has said than in actually saying new things. Stay at it.

Once these meetings are over consider the results in your journal. Did you do a pretty good job at understanding what they said? Are you getting better at understanding the deep thoughts and feelings that another person projects? How did it feel when the other person accurately understood you, and how did it feel when they didn't accurately understand you?