preface

Chapter 1: Conversation Changes Relationships

1.
Speaking isn't innate: it's a trainable communication skill.
2.
The gap in relationships caused by lack of communication
3.
The Communication Secrets of People Who Build Successful Relationships

Chapter 2 Listeners

1.
A person everyone likes: someone who listens to me well
2.
The art of listening
3.
What to Read from the Other Person's Reaction
4.
Listening with emotion
5.
Listening to understand hidden context
6.
Understanding others and myself at the same time

Chapter 3: Building the Basics of Speaking

1.
Why do we communicate?
2.
Developing good speaking habits
3.
Small talk is the beginning of every conversation.
4.
A person who is easy to talk to
5.
How people with high emotional intelligence express themselves
6.
Good questions and bad questions

Chapter 4: Speaking to Enter Others' Hearts

1.
How far should I go with my story?
2.
Praise, do it right
3.
Speaking to Soothe Wounds
4.
Comforting someone who has experienced trauma
5.
How to Talk to Someone Who Wants to Die
6.
Speaking to Protect Me from Verbal Abuse

Chapter 5: Team Communication Skills that Drive Performance

1.
How Highly Effective People Communicate
2.
The Art of Persuasion and Negotiation: From Proposal to Rejection
3.
Conversation Strategies that Drive Team Performance

Chapter 6: Speaking is Relationship

1.
The first skill of speaking well: honesty.
2.
There needs to be distance between hearts.
3.
Accepting the other person without trying to change them

Psychiatrists open people's hearts with words every day.

How can I hear the feelings that I cannot express?
How to open your heart when communication is difficult
How do the language of work and the language of relationships differ?

Are psychiatrists good at speaking? They don't have the eloquence of speech experts or the voices of announcers.
But it is true that there are people who always worry about how to speak well.
We too want to learn speaking skills that will help us build relationships in our daily lives, rather than just being good at giving speeches.
People who communicate well have good communication skills, and that is where friendship, love, and trust are born.


When you become a psychiatrist, the first thing you do is videotape yourself during an interview and analyze it.
Through this, I am seeing more and more patients as I correct their self-talk problems.
Doctors, in particular, often encounter people who hide their true feelings.
People who come for counseling often hide their disappointment with themselves, their fear of failing to find a job, their immediate financial worries, and their anxiety about the future.
So doctors must have the ability to hear what is not being said.
This is why this book, when teaching speaking skills, puts forward the ‘listening heart’ as the first condition.


Psychiatrists listen carefully.
The foundation of good speaking is listening.
This involves listening not only with your ears but also with your heart, and reading the emotions and context from the other person's attitude.
This is where the way of speaking comes into play.
Will you empathize with their feelings, offer practical advice, or simply be a silent presence for them to trust and rely on?

Although the authors are both psychiatrists, their speaking styles, areas of expertise, and training differ.
Dr. Kim Hyo-won specializes in autism spectrum disorder and adolescent suicide and self-harm in the Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.
He prefers to be honest, and sometimes even sheds tears with the children's parents while talking to them in the clinic.
However, when advising on treatment, they sometimes use a firm tone, saying, “You’re saying you won’t treat the child even though there is a very high chance that something will go wrong?”
On the other hand, we have been training medical students' speaking skills by developing and operating a communication education curriculum at Ulsan University College of Medicine.


Professor Kim Eun-young is a professor at Seoul National University College of Medicine, where she counsels students at the Mental Health Center and teaches empathetic communication and character leadership.
Rather than giving advice, the counselor prefers a speaking style that helps the client think more deeply and express themselves by asking questions.
I think it's more important to be able to communicate than to be good at speaking.


Mr. Jeong Du-yeong is strong in communication methods that effectively deal with organizational conflict and stress.
The author provides effective communication techniques for professors and researchers at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) to manage their teams effectively and achieve results within their organizations when they face communication difficulties.
The authors emphasize that speaking is essentially a 'conversation'.
When conflict arises, both sides suffer losses.
So, it's a good idea to focus on cooperation without hurting each other's feelings.
This book shows you how such speaking can enrich your life.


Skills learned by practicing listening for '20 minutes'
Relationships depend on language skills

In our society, it is common for adolescents and young adults to have difficulty expressing their emotions accurately.
However, the authors often observe that even successful people in society and university professors are not well aware of their own desires and emotions.
In this way, feelings of anxiety or depression are more difficult to perceive than changes in the temperature of tap water, so it is inevitable that mistakes made in relationships with others will be even more numerous.


For example, students similar to the main character of “The Strange Lawyer Woo Young-woo” visit the clinic at Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology.
They are often misunderstood as having a good understanding of difficult theories, but pretending not to know the feelings of others that ordinary people can easily perceive.
While they are good at difficult tasks that can be accomplished alone, they struggle with tasks that require communication and coordination with team members.
Relationship interactions are deeply connected to language skills, and the authors emphasize that language and social skills can be improved through training in any case.
However, since you haven't had a chance to learn the skill properly, I suggest that you take the time to learn it from now on.
Language for interpersonal relationships needs to be learned separately.
You also need to train yourself in the skills of exchanging thoughts and feelings with others.


The authors received listening and speaking training during their early years in society.
When he was a first-year resident, Professor Kim Hyo-won only practiced listening to patients and their guardians for '20 minutes.'
My speaking skills improved as I lowered my own position, thoughts, and desires and listened to other people's stories.
As a psychiatrist, Dr. Jeong Du-yeong provided couples counseling before marriage.
Because it takes training to get into someone else's mind.
Medical students must also take a clinical performance test in which they interview and examine mock patients before becoming doctors.


This book begins by examining why you need to learn listening and speaking skills, and then moves on to practical applications.
First, when listening, it is emphasized that you should follow your emotions and understand the hidden context.
It also teaches you how to build speaking habits and distinguish between good and bad questions.
We also need to learn how to have emotional conversations.
For example, in comforting words, listening is key, and you must listen while 'actively responding with words and actions.'
Asking questions about things that seem ambiguous and expressing empathy for the other person's thoughts and feelings will encourage them to be more open.
At this time, the person who expressed depression, anxiety, and anger gets the effect of emotional relief just by doing so.


If you're talking to someone who has experienced trauma, it's helpful to consistently show empathy for their pain and reassure them that the changes brought on by the trauma are natural and normal.
For example, if someone you know says they want to die, the authors recommend asking them directly about their intentions rather than beating around the bush.
“You said earlier that there was no other way and that you wanted to end it all.
Some people worry that asking about suicidal thoughts like “Are you thinking about suicide?” will increase the risk of suicide, but don’t worry, that’s not true.
Here are some things we shouldn't say:
Trying to stop them outright, downplaying the issue, offering hasty advice and solutions, blaming and getting angry…

The skills of persuasion and negotiation that lead to results discussed in the latter part are different from emotional conversations and present another skill.
The beauty of this book is that we all have multiple identities, depending on our roles at work, our position in the family, and our personal friendships and romantic relationships. It teaches us how to communicate appropriately for each situation and relationship.


***
When we listen to the other person's needs and feelings, they are more likely to listen and accept ours.
This is when the relationship deepens.
The moment when we read each other's desires and emotions.
In other words, listening to others leads to understanding my own emotions and desires, and this is where new interpersonal relationships, the source of human happiness, are created.