Challenge Three: Expressing Yourself More Clearly and Completely

Navigating Conversations More Successfully by
Learning to Use Five Different “I-Messages”

Moving from vague complaints and unexpressed needs
to giving your conversation partners a full, clear picture of your experience and needs

Here is the simplest version of what this chapter is about: Every important thing you say to another person is a balancing act between being clear enough to be understood and being brief enough to be heard. Most of the time, brevity wins — and most of the time, that works fine. But in the conversations that matter most, our instinct to compress leaves out exactly the information our listener most needs. This chapter offers a practical map of what we leave out, a framework for putting it back in, and — perhaps most importantly — a developmental path from mechanical practice to the fluid, natural self-expression that makes communi-cation artful rather than formulaic.

A From-To / Many-View Prologue

From speaking in shorthand to saying what you mean
From assuming people know what you’re feeling to saying it out loud
From complaints about the other person to clear descriptions of your experience
From demands to requests that people can say yes to
From leaving out the reasons to sharing them
From unexpressed needs to needs your partner can understand
From vague frustration to specific observations
From “you always” and “you never” to “when I saw… I felt…”
From hiding the hoped-for good outcome to naming it
From compression that costs you, to expression that connects you
From unconscious shorthand
to the art of saying enough — one conversation at a time

3.1 The Art of Saying Enough

Every act of human speech involves a balancing act between two competing needs: the need to be clear and the need to be brief. Both are legitimate. Both can be urgent. And we need them both, in every conversation, every day of our lives.

Think about it for a moment. When a surgeon says “Scalpel” in an operating room, brevity is everything. No one wants a five-paragraph explanation. When a parent shouts “Stop!” to a child running toward traffic, the message needs to be instant and unmistakable. In emergencies, compression saves lives.

But the same compression instinct that serves us so well in urgent moments quietly undermines us in the conversations that matter most: the talk with your partner about something that’s been bothering you for weeks, the meeting with a colleague where a project is going off the rails, the attempt to tell a friend that you need something different from the friendship. In those moments, our instinct to compress — to get to the point quickly, to leave out the parts that feel embarrassing or complicated, to skip the context that seems obvious to us — produces exactly the misunderstandings and hurt feelings we were hoping to avoid.

This chapter is about that balancing act. Not about learning to talk more — but about learning to include what matters most in the limited time you have. It’s about developing the art of saying enough: giving your conversation partners a clear enough picture of your inner experience that they can actually understand you, empathize with you, and respond to what you’re really asking for.

Several educational movements over the past half-century have developed structured approaches to more complete self-expression — Thomas Gordon’s Parent Effectiveness Training in the 1960s, Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication books and workshops, the Minnesota Couples Communication Program, and others. Each of these has contributed valuable practical tools. What has often been vague, however, is the deeper rationale: why do we need these structured approaches in the first place? What fundamental fact about human communication makes them necessary?

The answer, I believe, lies in the tension between clarity and brevity in the use of language itself. We live our conversational lives zigzagging between these two pressing needs. We want to speak in shorthand — and most of the time, that shorthand works beautifully. But in moments of conflict, ambiguity, or strong feeling, what would ordinarily be our effective abbreviating leaves out exactly the information our listener most needs. And here is the crucial point: we often don’t realize we’re abbreviating. The shorthand we use feels so familiar to us that it feels like the whole message. We think we’ve said what we mean. We haven’t — we just don’t know what we left out.

This is a no-fault diagnosis. You’re not abbreviating because you’re bad at communication or because you missed some important lesson when you were growing up. You’re abbreviating because that’s how we use language very efficiently — we compress, we implies, we rely on context that we assume everybody understands. The skill we need to learn is not how to give up abbreviating. That would be impossible and exhausting. The skill we need to learn is how to spontaneously adjust the level of detail and background information we offer others, according to the needs of the situation we’re in.

So this problem is not a personal failing — it’s a built-in tension in language itself. Abbreviation is an amazingly convenient process that needs to be steered. What exactly goes wrong when we leave out too much in the conversations that matter most?

3.2 Why Shorthand Works — Until It Doesn’t

If you observe people in conversation carefully, you will begin to notice that human communication works by leaving many things unsaid and depending on the listener to fill in the missing-but-implied information. For example, a receptionist may say to a counselor, “Your two o’clock is here,” a sentence which, on the face of it, makes no sense at all. She means “Your client, who made an appointment with you for two o’clock this afternoon, has arrived in the waiting room,” and the counselor knows that. It’s amazing how much of the time this abbreviating and implying process works just fine.

But in situations of change, ambiguity, conflict, or great emotional need, our “shorthand” way of speaking may not work at all, for at least three reasons.

First, our listeners may fill in a completely different set of details than the one we intended. You say “I’m frustrated about the kitchen,” and your partner hears an accusation about the dishes. What you actually meant was that the remodeling contractor hasn’t called back. The shorthand was clear to you. It was opaque to your listener.

Second, our listeners may not understand the significance of what we’re saying. They get some of the details but miss the big picture. You mention a problem at work, and your partner starts offering solutions, when what you actually needed was for someone to understand how demoralizing the situation feels. The practical details came through; the emotional weight got compressed away.

Third, without actually intending to mislead anyone, we may leave out important parts of our experience that we find embarrassing or imagine will evoke a hostile reaction. We mention the request but not the feelings behind it. We express the frustration but not the underlying need. We share the complaint but not the envisioned positive outcome that would make the complaint worth hearing. These omissions aren’t dishonesty. They’re compression — the same instinct that lets us say “your two o’clock is here” and be understood. It’s just that the conversational context is no longer simple enough for that level of compression to work.

We can sum this up as a guiding principle: the more serious the consequences of misunder-standing would be, the more we need to both understand our own experience better and help our listeners by giving them a more complete picture of our experience in language that does not attack them.

This connects directly to the “born to learn” predicament we explored in the Introduction. You were born with a brain magnificently wired for language, but knowing zero communication skills. You learned to speak by absorbing the patterns of your family and your culture — and those patterns almost certainly did not include the habit of pausing to ask yourself, “Which dimensions of my experience am I leaving out right now?” Our cultural autopilot defaults to compression. No one taught us to decompress. That’s the gap this chapter is designed to fill.

These three failures — the wrong details filled in, the significance missed, the embarrassing parts left out — explain the practical mechanics of how compression goes wrong. But there is a deeper question lurking here: why do we leave out the embarrassing parts? Why do so many of us compress away our feelings, our needs, our vulnerabilities — even in conversations with people we love and trust? The answer turns out to run much deeper than the efficiency of language. It runs all the way back to childhood.

3.3 Saying What’s in Our Hearts: The Deeper Roots of “Missing Messages”

There is a deeper dimension to self-expression that goes beyond technique, and I want to explore it here because it shapes everything that follows in this chapter.

According to the psychologist Carl Rogers, many people arrive in adult life with a giant gap between what they actually feel and what they believe they are supposed to feel. Early in life, most of us discovered that if we said what we really felt and wanted, the big important people in our lives would get unhappy with us. Since we needed their love and approval, we started saying whatever would keep the hugs coming. We became experts in compression — not just the natural compression of language, but in squeezing ourselves into the slot where others needed us.

If we are lucky, our parents and teachers help us learn to recognize our own feelings and tell the truth about them in conciliatory ways. But this is a complex process, and often our parents and teachers didn’t get much help on these issues themselves. As a result, many people arrive in adult life with no skills for closing the gap between what they feel and what they express.

But here is the empowering truth that Rogers spent his career demonstrating: as adults, we have many cognitive abilities that were not available to us as children. We can learn to negotiate our conflicts. We can learn to confront our difficulties. We can learn to be honest about our feelings without being mean.

So we are dealing with two layers of compression, not one. The first layer is practical: language naturally abbreviates, and our listeners fill in the blanks with assumptions that may be completely wrong. The second layer is emotional: many of us learned early in life that it wasn’t safe to say what we really felt. Both layers conspire to produce the same result — important parts of our experience never reach the people who most need to hear them.

If that’s the problem, what would a solution look like? It would need to be a map — a way of seeing, concretely and specifically, what we are leaving out. Not a theory about communication, but a practical framework that names the missing pieces so that we can learn to put them back in. That framework is what the rest of this chapter provides.

3.4 The Five I-Messages: One Way of Mapping Your Inner Landscape

So what information are we including, and what are we leaving out?

In recent decades psychotherapists and psychologists in Western countries have gained a better understanding of how people who speak (and think) in English and other European languages can express their personal experience more completely. I mention this geography because the Five I-Messages are one particular culture’s way of overcoming the problems of too much abbreviating and too much blaming. So, it is offered here as one of many possibilities, not as the one correct way. Different cultures divide up the pie of human experience into differently-shaped slices, so this approach may make more sense to speakers of some languages rather than others. But it is open for everyone to explore.

I see this as one of those situations where the question is as important as the answer. What is important to me as your guide to new communication skills is that you recognize the very creative and productive tension between brevity and clarity in the language we use all the time. The challange to adjust our level of details and background to meet the changing needs of the moment will be with us our entire adult lives. I am convinced that if you recognize that, you will have the motivation you need to keep on exploring and growing. The Five I-Messages are not the only way to balance our need for both brevity and clarity, but they can be a great next step in your exploration of that process. Memorizing and practicing all the Five I-Messages can help you feel much more comfortable bringing forward exactly the information that needs sharing in a particular conversation.

Another ongoing problem addressed by I-statements concerns our tendency to immediately translate our frustrations with other people into accusations of misbehavior on their part. This is a very human and understandable thing to do, but it is also profoundly self-defeating. What I really need from you is for you to meet my needs. If I could describe my needs clearly enough, you might identify with what I am needing. You might even be able to see that at least in some circumstances you might need that too. Even if my accusations of misbehavior are completely correct, when I translate my frustrations into accusations I am pointing your attention way away from a positive statement of my own needs being met in the near future, and instead I am cataloging the way that you have let me down in the past. This criticism will probably cause you to lose face in relation to me and thus be even less capable of empathizing with a need or request of mine. And I may get so deeply unhappy with you that I forget entirely about what it was that I wanted to ask for right now. But right now is the only now I actually have. In the context of conflict conversations, refocusing on I-statements can be a way of calming down and coming back inside my own skin, a point from which both of us might start over.

Using the Five I-Messages model as a exploration guide, we can map five distinct dimensions of experience happening inside us at any given moment. When a conversation is going well, we naturally share many of them, especially the ones that fit the emerging need of our situation. When a conversation is tense, we tend to speed up and leave out information, leaving our listener with an incomplete picture that almost guarantees misunderstanding.

These five dimensions get labeled as the Five I-Messages because (A) the explicitly include you as the experiencing “I”, and (B) each one is a statement about an aspect of your own experience rather than a judgment about someone else’s thoughts, feelings or actions.

Here they are:

(1) What you are seeing or hearing — a simple description of the facts, without evaluation.

(2) What emotions you are feeling — glad, sad, angry, scared, delighted, frustrated, concerned.

(3) What needs, wants, or interpretations are driving those feelings — the “because” that connects the situation to your emotional response.

(4) What you are ready to ask for right now — a specific, doable request for action, information, or commitment.

(5) What positive results you envision — the good outcome that would follow if your request is met.

These five dimensions are always present in your experience, whether or not you express them. The question is how many of them you share with your listener, and how many you leave compressed away inside your own head — forcing your listener to guess, or fill in the blanks with assumptions that may be completely wrong.

Consider the difference. The shorthand version of a message might be: “Stop that racing!” The five-message version, shown in the following table, gives your listener a full picture of what’s happening inside you:

Table 3.1: Five “I-Messages”

The Five I-Messages	express:	Example (nurse to young patient):
seeing, hearing…	1. What are you seeing, hearing or otherwise sensing? (facts only)	“John, when I see you rolling down the hall in your wheelchair really fast…
and feeling…	2. What emotions are you feeling?	…I feel REALLY concerned.
because I…	3. What interpretations, wants, needs, memories or anticipations of yours support those feelings?	I am imagining you might hurt yourself and maybe someone else, too, or knock something over…
and now I want…	4. What action, information or commitment do you want now?	…so what I need right now is for you to promise me that you will slow down…
so that…	5. What positive results will that action lead to? (no threats)	…so that you can get out of here in one piece and I can stop worrying about a collision.”

Notice what happens when the nurse expresses all five dimensions. John doesn’t just hear a command (“Stop that racing!”). He hears what the nurse is observing, what she’s feeling, why she’s feeling it, what she needs from him, and what good will come of it. He’s being treated as someone who can understand and cooperate, not just obey. That’s a fundamentally different kind of conversation.

In the following table you will find eight examples of statements that give your listener a full range of information about your experience. Notice especially how the same observation can generate completely different messages depending on the feelings and interpretations the speaker brings to the situation. The same dishes in the sink can produce happiness or irritation — depending on Message Three.

Table 3.2: Five “I-Message” Examples (Please read across the rows.)

1. When I saw/heard…	2. I felt…	3. because I…	4. and now I want…	5. so that…
When I saw the bear in the woods with her three cubs…	…I felt overjoyed!…	…because I needed a picture of bears for my wildlife class…	…and I wanted the bear to stand perfectly still…	so I could focus my camera.
When I saw the bear in the woods with her three cubs…	…I felt terrified!…	…because I remembered that bears with cubs are very aggressive…	…and I wanted to get out of there fast…	so that the bear would not pick up my scent.
When I saw the dishes in the sink…	…I felt happy…	…because I guessed that you had come back from your trip to Mexico…	…and I want you to tell me all about the Aztec ruins you saw…	…so that I can liven up some scenes in the short story I’m writing.
When I saw the dishes in the sink…	…I felt irritated…	…because I want to start cooking dinner right away…	…and I want to ask you to help me do the dishes right now…	…so that dinner will be ready by the time our guests arrive.
When I saw the flying saucer on your roof…	…I felt more excited than I have ever been in my life…	…because I imagined the saucer people would give you the anti-gravity formula…	…and I wanted you to promise that you would share it with me…	…so that we would both get rich and famous.
When I saw the flying saucer on your roof…	…I felt more afraid than I have ever been in my life…	…because I imagined the saucer people were going to kidnap you…	…and I wanted you to run for your life…	…so that you would not get abducted and maybe turned into a zombie.
When I saw the grant application in the office mail…	…I felt delighted…	…because I think our program is good enough to win a large grant…	…and I want to ask you to help me with the budget pages…	…so that we can get the application in before the deadline.
When I saw the grant application in the office mail…	…I felt depressed…	…because I can’t see clients when I’m filling out forms…	…and I want you to help me with the budget pages…	…so that I can keep up my case work over the next three weeks.

Look at the bear examples. The same three cubs in the same woods produce either joy or terror — because the speaker’s needs and interpretations (Message Three) are completely different. Look at the dishes. Identical sink, opposite feelings, different requests, different hoped-for outcomes. If the speaker had compressed away Messages Two through Five and simply said “I see the dishes in the sink,” the listener would have no idea whether to talk about Mexico or start scrubbing.

This is the practical payoff of the Five I-Messages: they give your listener enough information to actually understand you. Without all five, your listener is guessing. With all five, they can see your experience from the inside — and respond to what you actually need, not what they imagine you need.

The Five I-Messages, then, are a map of what we compress away — and a framework for putting it back. But if you’ve been reading carefully, you may already be raising an objection: “Are you really suggesting I recite all five of these messages every time I open my mouth? That would sound robotic. My partner would roll their eyes.” That’s a fair concern — and the answer involves understanding something about skill development that most communication programs never discuss.

3.5 The Developmental Journey: From Scales to Jazz

Here I want to be honest with you about something that structured communication approaches rarely discuss, even though it may be the most important practical insight in this chapter.

People who learn the four-step or five-step formulas from various communication programs sometimes complain that using them makes them sound robotic. Their partners roll their eyes. Their friends say “please just talk to me like a normal person.” And so they abandon the whole thing, concluding that structured self-expression doesn’t work in real life.

I understand that frustration. And I want to suggest that what’s happening is not a failure of the method. It’s a confusion between a training protocol and a way of life.

Think of learning to play the piano. When you’re a beginner, you practice scales. You play every note in the scale, deliberately, one at a time. It sounds mechanical because it is mechanical — that’s the point. You’re learning where all the keys are. You’re building muscle memory. Nobody expects you to play like that at a dinner party.

But you won’t become a good pianist without having done those scales. And once you’ve done them hundreds of times, something remarkable happens: you no longer need to think about where the keys are. Your hands know. You can improvise. You can play a jazz standard and leave out notes, add notes, bend the rhythm — because you’ve internalized the whole keyboard. The scales aren’t the performance. They’re the foundation that makes the performance possible.

The Five I-Messages work the same way. I believe there are three stages in learning to use them, and understanding these stages will save you a great deal of frustration:

Stage One: Unconscious compression. This is where most of us start. We speak in shorthand without realizing it. We leave out our feelings, our reasons, our requests, our envisioned outcomes — and we don’t even know we’re doing it. When misunderstandings arise, we blame the other person for not getting it. We said what we meant, didn’t we? Actually, we didn’t. We just don’t know what we left out.

Stage Two: Conscious expansion. This is the training stage — the scales. You deliberately practice expressing all five messages, even when it feels excessive. It should feel a little mechanical. That’s how you know you’re building something new. I strongly recommend doing hundreds of exercises in which you express all five messages. Write one five-message statement a day in a journal. Practice with a partner. Work through the exercises at the end of this chapter. This stage is about training your awareness — learning to feel the five dimensions of your experience so that you know where all the “keys” are.

Stage Three: Informed brevity. Having internalized all five dimensions through practice, you return to something that looks like ordinary conversation — brief, natural, fluid. But it’s fundamentally different from Stage One, because now your brevity is chosen rather than automatic. You can feel when something important is missing. You’ve developed a kind of inner ear — the way an experienced musician can hear a missing note in a chord without thinking through the theory. When a conversation starts going sideways, you can ask yourself: “Which of the five am I leaving out? Which one does my listener need right now?” And you supply just that piece — not all five in a ritual recitation, but the one or two that the moment requires.

This is the improvisational skill that makes communication artful rather than mechanical. You don’t need to recite your times tables for the rest of your life. But you need to have learned them well enough that the arithmetic is available when you need it. Similarly, you don’t need to deliver all five I-Messages in every conversation you have for the rest of your life. But you need to have practiced them enough that when a conversation falters, you can sense which missing piece — the unexpressed feeling, the unstated need, the request you haven’t made, the positive outcome you haven’t named — would get things back on track.

And here is one more thing I want to say about this. Paying careful enough attention to a situation to sense what information is missing and what needs to be added to the dialogue is a much more subtle skill than reciting all five messages by formula. It’s the difference between reading a chart and navigating by the feel of the wind. Both are valuable. Both have their place on the developmental spiral. If you’re in Stage Two right now, doing your scales, please don’t be in a hurry to skip ahead. The scales are what make the jazz possible.

Now that you can see the developmental arc — from unconscious compression through deliberate practice to informed brevity — you’re ready for the fine-grained guidance that will make your practice of each message more effective. The next section explores each of the five messages in detail, with suggestions for expressing each one with greater clarity and care. Think of it as your practice manual for the scales.

3.6 Expressing Each Message More Skillfully

Each of the five messages has its own subtleties. Here are some suggestions for expressing each one with greater clarity and care.

Message One: What you are seeing, hearing, or sensing. Begin with what you actually observed rather than how you feel about it or what you think of it. Be specific about what happened — time, place, actions — and describe rather than diagnose. Avoid words that label or judge (“slimy,” “lousy,” “neurotic”). Avoid generalizations like “you always” or “you never.” And avoid descriptions that smuggle in emotions without naming them, like “totally disgusting” or “horrible.” Those are feelings masquerading as observations. State your feelings explicitly in Message Two.

For example: “When I saw the big coffee stain on the rug…” is easier to hear and understand than “When you ruined my day, as always, with your slimy, stinking, totally disgusting, rotten antics…”

Message Two: What emotions you are feeling. Use specific emotion words: glad, angry, delighted, sad, afraid, resentful, embarrassed, frustrated, hopeful, concerned. Be wary of feeling words that actually imply someone else’s action: “I feel ignored, manipulated, mistreated, neglected, rejected, dominated, abandoned.” Notice how these words indirectly blame the listener for your emotions. They are interpretations dressed up as feelings. Translate them: “I feel ignored” probably means “I’m feeling sad because I want more of your attention.” The real emotion is the sadness. The unmet want is the attention. Separating these makes you easier to hear.

Message Three: What needs, wants, or interpretations are driving your feelings. This is the message people compress away most often — and it’s the one your listener most needs. A large part of your emotional response to any situation is generated by your own wants, memories, and interpretations, not just by what happened. Expressing this dimension is an act of emotional maturity: you’re taking responsibility for your inner world rather than asking your listener to guess at it. Use sentence starters like “…because I imagine that…” “…because I remember how…” “…because I was hoping that…” “…because I need…” rather than “…because YOU…”

Message Four: What you are ready to ask for right now. Ask for specific, doable actions rather than emotional states. Since most people cannot produce emotions on request, it’s generally not productive to ask someone to “cheer up” or “be more supportive.” Translate those into concrete verbs: “please listen,” “please sit with me,” “please tell me what you think.” State your request in positive terms (“Please arrive at eight” rather than “Don’t be late”). And include when, where, and how — the details that prevent misunderstandings later.

Message Five: What positive results you envision. In describing the specific good things that would result from your request being met, you allow the other person to become motivated by feeling capable of giving something worthwhile. This points your relationship toward mutual appreciation and the exercise of competence — which is much more enjoyable to live with than guilt, duty, or fear of making mistakes. The positive outcome is also a reality check for you: if you can’t articulate what good would come from getting your request, you may not yet understand your own needs clearly enough.

With practice, these five messages do more than prevent misunderstandings. They accomplish something larger — something that connects this skill to the deepest needs of every human relationship. To see how, we need to step back and look at the bigger picture of what relationships require.

3.7 The Three Things Every Relationship Needs — and How Self-Expression Serves All Three

In the Introduction, we explored the insight that every human group — from a couple to an entire company — needs to do three things at once: accomplish tasks together, support one another emotionally, and accommodate the differences in temperament and experience that its members bring. Let one side of this triangle weaken, and the other two follow.

The Five I-Messages serve all three sides of this triangle simultaneously. When you describe what you’re observing and make a specific request (Messages One and Four), you’re addressing the task side: here’s the situation and here’s what needs to happen. When you share what you’re feeling (Message Two), you’re addressing the emotional support side: here’s what’s happening inside me, and I trust you enough to show it. And when you explain the needs and interpretations driving your feelings (Message Three), you’re addressing the differences side: here’s how I’m making sense of this situation, which may be very different from how you’re making sense of it.

This is why the Five I-Messages are so much more effective than either complaints or demands. A complaint (“You never help around here!”) collapses all five dimensions into a single burst of blame. A demand (“Do the dishes!”) compresses away the feelings, the reasons, and the envisioned positive outcome. Both sacrifice two sides of the triangle for a lopsided version of the third.

The Five I-Messages, by contrast, weave all three together in a single act of expression. That’s their hidden strength.

The Five I-Messages are a practical tool, a developmental path, and — as we’ve now seen — a way of honoring all three dimensions of every relationship at once. But there is one more thing to say about what happens when people begin to practice this kind of honest, caring self-expression. The effects go beyond technique, beyond even skill. They reach into the deepest currents of human connection.

3.8 What Happens When We Start Saying More

Rogers and other researchers noticed that honest, caring, empathic conversations, just by themselves, set in motion a kind of deep learning. Here are five of the things that happen when people start expressing themselves more fully and listening to each other more carefully:

1. In paying attention to someone in a calm, accepting way, you teach that person to pay attention to themselves in just that way.

2. In caring for others, you teach them to care for themselves and help them feel more like caring about others.

3. The more you have faced and accepted your own feelings, the more you can be a calm and supportive witness for someone else who is struggling to face theirs.

4. In forgiving people for being human and making mistakes, you teach people to begin forgiving themselves and starting over.

5. And by having conversations that include the honest sharing of feelings and the exploration of alternatives, you help people see that they can start to have more honest and fruitful conversations with the important people in their lives.

These experiences belong to everyone. They are part of being human. They are ours to learn and, through the depth of our caring, honesty, and empathy, ours to give. Self-expression, done with care, is not just a skill. It is an act of courage — and an invitation to deeper connection.•

3.9 The Spiral: How This Step Connects to All the Others

The “born to learn” connection (the Introduction). Most of us were never taught to express all five dimensions of our experience. Our cultural autopilot defaults to compression. Recognizing that gap — without shame — is the first step toward filling it. You didn’t fail to learn this skill because something is wrong with you. You didn’t learn it because it wasn’t in your environment. Now it is.

The listening connection (Challenge One). The Five I-Messages give your listener a richer picture to reflect back — and they give you a framework for listening to others. When someone is upset and you’re not sure what’s going on, you can listen for the five dimensions: What are they observing? What are they feeling? What need or interpretation is driving the feeling? What do they want? What outcome are they hoping for? This is what I call “listening with five ears” — and it makes you a profoundly better listener, because you know what to listen for.

The conversational intent connection (Challenge Two). In Challenge Two, you learned to set the stage for important conversations by explaining your intent and inviting consent. The Five I-Messages are what you bring to that stage. You’ve opened the door respectfully; now you fill the room with substance.

The adverbs-to-adjectives connection (Challenge Seven). When you consistently express yourself honestly, clearly, and completely (adverbs), over time you become a more honest, clear, and complete person (adjectives). Self-expression is not just a technique. It is a practice of integrity that gradually becomes part of who you are.

The “already a trainer” connection (the Introduction). Every time you model five-dimensional self-expression, you teach everyone present that there is an alternative to blame, shorthand, and silence. Your children absorb a new template for how feelings can be expressed. Your coworkers see that it’s possible to raise a difficult issue without attacking anyone. You are already a communication skills trainer. The question is whether you will train people in compression or in fullness.

The peer learning connection (Chapter Eight: Widening Circles). The Five I-Messages are excellent practice material for Purpose Partners and Circles of Six. Writing a five-message statement a day in your journal, or practicing with a partner who can give you supportive feedback, can be some of the most direct paths from Stage Two (Conscious Expansion — saying more) to Stage Three (Informed Brevity — just what is needed) in the developmental journey described in this chapter. You don’t have to make this journey alone.

Challenge Three Exercises: Telling More of the Story With the Five I-Messages

Exercise 3.1

Re-tell the story of some of your conflicts, frustrations, and delights using the five-message format. Write one five-message statement a day in a journal or notebook. Use the worksheet on the following page, or download printable copies at communication-skills.net.

Exercise 3.2

With a practice partner, take turns describing a recent experience using all five messages. After each person speaks, the listener reflects back what they heard, using the listening skills from Challenge One. Then ask: “Did I get that right? Is there anything important I missed?”

Exercise 3.3

Taking Stock. Please take some time to reflect on and write down your responses to these questions.

Think of a recent conversation that went badly. Which of the five messages were you compressing away? What might have changed if you had included them?
Which of the five messages comes most naturally to you? Which one do you tend to leave out? (Many people find that Message Three — the needs and interpretations behind their feelings — is the one they compress away most often.)
Where are you in the three-stage developmental journey (section 3.5)? Are you in Stage One, just beginning to notice what you leave out? Stage Two, deliberately practicing the full five-message format? Or Stage Three, starting to sense intuitively which piece is missing in a given conversation?
Dweck’s growth mindset (Challenge Seven) reminds us that awkwardness is not a sign that we’re doing it wrong — it’s a sign that we’re learning. Where do you notice a “fixed mindset” voice telling you that five-message self-expression will sound forced or unnatural? What would the growth mindset say instead?
Who in your life might you invite to practice this skill with you? Even one practice partner can make an enormous difference — see Chapter Eight: Widening Circles.

A Five I-Messages Worksheet: Helping my conversation partner understand what I am experiencing

Use this form to practice expressing your experience more completely. Photocopy this page, print from PDF, or download printable copies at communication-skills.net.

5 Elements of my experiencing:	Helping people understand me better by expressing the various elements of my experience — past or present — using five different “I-messages”
1. What actions, events and/or sensations am I seeing, hearing, doing, remembering or otherwise sensing? (Start with facts only, continue with feelings and evaluations)	As I (or when I) see (hear, remember, take action about)…
2. What basic emotions am I feeling (glad, sad, mad, delighted, frustrated, proud, sorry, ashamed, grateful, etc.) about those actions/events?	… I feel (or felt)…
3. What interpretations, evaluations, wants, hopes, needs and/or dreams of mine help to evoke and support my feelings?	… because I…
4. What action, information, discussion, help or commitment would I want to receive, or would I like to ask for, now?	… and now I want (want to request)…
5. What positive results or personal fulfillment do I envision that action, discussion, information or commitment leading to?	…so that I can… so that we can… in order for me/us to…

References for this Chapter

A note on inspirations: Many scholars and psychotherapists have been developing frameworks for more complete interpersonal communication since Dr. Thomas Gordon first published Parent Effectiveness Training in 1962. My deep appreciation goes to him for being one of the first great popularizers of communication skills training in the United States.

The work of Marshall Rosenberg (Nonviolent Communication) helped me understand Messages One through Four.

The work of Sharon and Gordon Bower (Asserting Yourself) helped me understand Message Five, and the importance of describing hoped-for positive outcomes.

The work of scholars John Grinder and Richard Bandler helped me understand how people “delete” various aspects of their experience from their expressed communication.

The “Awareness Wheel” of the Minnesota Couples Communication Program shows how scholars and researchers have been working to overcome the messages-left-out problem.

My small contribution to this long effort of many hands has been the framing of the Five “I-Messages”, five dimensions of experience, within the clarity-brevity tension in human communication that I believe is the fundamental reason all such frameworks are necessary.

Bandler, Richard, and John Grinder. The Structure of Magic, Vol. 1. Science and Behavior Books, 1975.

Bower, Sharon Anthony, and Gordon H. Bower. Asserting Yourself: A Practical Guide for Positive Change. Addison-Wesley, 1976.

Deutschman, Alan. Change or Die: The Three Keys to Change at Work and in Life. Harper Business, 2007.

Dweck, Carol. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. Random House, 2006.

Edmondson, Amy C. The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. Wiley, 2019.

Gordon, Thomas. Parent Effectiveness Training: The Proven Program for Raising Responsible Children. Harmony Books, 2000.

Miller, Sherod, et al. Connecting with Self and Others. Interpersonal Communication Programs, 1988.

Paul, Margaret, and Jordan Paul. Do I Have To Give Up Me To Be Loved By You? CompCare Publishers, 1983.

Rogers, Carl R. On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy. Houghton Mifflin, 1961.

Rosenberg, Marshall B. Nonviolent Communication: A Language of Life. 3rd ed., PuddleDancer Press, 2015.