In this solo episode of the Super Connections podcast, host Jennifer K. Hill shares a communication framework she learned from partnership expert Allison Armstrong, blending it with insights from Isabel Tierney, David Guillaume, and the concepts in The Celestine Prophecy. She explains why many conflicts arise from unclear expectations and introduces a three‑step “process of clarification”: (1) repeat back what you heard, (2) write the agreement down, and (3) deliver it with kindness from the “green zone.” Hill describes how to enter the green zone through heart‑focused breathing, timing conversations when both parties are emotionally available, and checking in on each other’s bandwidth. She then demonstrates a feedback structure that starts with a positive, adds a constructive request, and ends with another positive (the “good‑bad‑good” method), contrasting it with hyper‑critical feedback that triggers the red‑zone, defensive reactions. The episode also explores “control dramas” – recurring relational patterns such as going aloof, interrogating, or playing victim – and how recognizing them gives us a choice to act consciously rather than reactively. Throughout, Hill provides concrete examples from business partnerships, romantic dating, and friendships, urging listeners to apply these tools to achieve clearer, more compassionate communication and thereby “super‑connect” with themselves, others, and their purpose.
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Welcome to Super Connections. I am your host, Jennifer K. Hill, helping you with the Golden Triangle of Connection, where you will super connect to yourself, others, and your purpose. Join me each week as I will share from some of my favorite tips and tools for super connecting, and I'll bring in some of my favorite friends and thought leaders to help support you On your journey to super connecting to the life of your dreams. Hi, Super Connections tribe, and welcome back for episode 3 of the Super Connections Podcast. I am Jennifer K. Hill, and it is my joy and honor and privilege to get to join with you every week for little tidbits and tools from myself, as well as wonderful, incredible guests and thought leaders. On how to super connect to yourself, others, and your purpose. So today I was actually inspired by a call that I was on earlier with a friend and a struggle that she was going through. This episode is for you if you've ever experienced breakdowns in relationships around your communication. Many years ago, I studied with an incredible thought leader by the name of Allison Armstrong. She studied men and women. 30 years understanding what has them connect and what has them disconnect. So today's tool is going to be what I learned from Alison Armstrong in a class that I did with her on partnership. And you can find great information on Alison and this work on her book Celebrating Partnership or on her website. So let's talk about partnership for a moment and what makes a great partner. Something that surprised me and quite frankly delighted me since I've been applying it in post-learning this with Alison many years ago is this idea of partners needing to go through a process of clarification. Now, what does that mean? Let's imagine that we're in a business partnership with somebody and I have certain expectations and I'm partnering with somebody else and that other person, let's call them Person B, has certain expectations. The reason a lot of us wind up in conflict with one another is because of the fact that person A, let's say me in this case, and person B, who's the person you're negotiating or doing the deal with, they don't come together to come into a clear agreement about what person A and what person B is going to be accountable for. So Alison came up with this technique called a process of clarification that she says all great partners go through a process of clarification. So let's say for a moment that I have a new business partnership I'm entering into. Now, a mistake a lot of us can make is not, number one, repeating back to other people what we heard them say. Just as AI and ChatGPT hallucinate, so too do we as human beings hallucinate, and we imagine or we think we shared what person A or person B said, But we actually never crossed back and checked in to see if what we heard was accurate or inaccurate. So when we're going through a process of clarification, step 1 is to repeat back to the other person, it sounds like what I heard you say is that you're going to be accountable for doing the operations. I'm just making this up as we go. And that you're going to be accountable for onboarding new clients, and then I'm going to be accountable for Business development and for sales and for bringing new potential clients to the table. Okay, so easy enough. Maybe some of you are already doing it. Step 2 is to write it down. Write it down whether or not you believe in formalized contracts or not. It doesn't have to be a formalized contract. It could be something as simple as an email just to have a record of what you both agreed to and what you both said you would or would not be accountable for in this partnership. And then step 3, as we go through this process of clarification, is to do it with kindness, with love, with compassion. In episode 2 with Isabel Tierney, we talked about how do we move from the red zone to the green zone. Well, when we're having these processes of clarification, I would encourage us to do it from the green zone, not from the red zone. And I'll give you a really beautiful example of how this looked. With Allison, and then I'll tie it into the story of the friend I was on the call with today. So let's imagine that I am negotiating this with you from the red zone. This could look like, well, I need this way, and you're going to do this, and I'm going to do that, and you need to get it to me by this time. That might be me communicating with you, my partner, whomever it is, from the red zone where it's Reactive rather than responsive. So how do we instead come from the green zone, as Isabel taught us in the last episode? So first, we would do whatever technique it was— heart-focused breathing, breathing into the abdomen, as Isabel taught, going for a walk— centering ourselves so that we know we're about to come from a place that we're intending to come from, and that our message is going to be received. In fact, I'm gonna give you a little bonus tip here from my favorite podcast I listen to every week. It's called the David Guillaume Podcast. He's been one of my teachers and really helped me in this. As David always says, also, when you're going through this process of clarification or whatever it is, be sure that this is the right time to have this conversation. How many of us could mitigate or prevent arguments, upsets, frustrations, Just by asking ourselves, is this the right time to have this conversation? Okay, so we've determined we put ourselves in the green zone. We're no longer in the red zone. We've asked ourselves, is the other person emotionally available to have this conversation? You can even find out. You can do this intuitively and just ask yourself, oh, does this feel like the right time to do it? Or you could verbally ask the person. You could even say. You know, how are you feeling today? Do you feel like you're at 100%? Did you sleep well? There was a brilliant woman I once knew who had all of her team worldwide in a global marketing team put on a scale of 0 to 5 where they were at, 5 being they're doing amazing, 0 being they're not doing great. And maybe you have an agreement with all of your partners that you only have important conversations where you're both at a 3 or higher on a given day. Everybody with me so far? Great. So we're in the green zone. We pause to either intuitively ask ourselves, is the person available to receive what we're about to share with them? Or we've actually physically asked them to see if it lands. Can you talk about this right now? Do you have the emotional bandwidth to talk about this? And then 3 is once we've done those things, we do it in a place that is kind and loving and compassionate. We talk to others the way we would want to be spoken to. So I'm now going to backtrack and give you the example of a wonderful exercise I did in a class with Allison on partnership. So she had us partner up, boys, boys, girls, girls, boys, girls. It didn't really matter who was dancing with whom gender-wise. It just mattered that you had one partner. You had Partner A and Partner B who were practicing dancing with each other. And in this exercise, she had Partner A lead first. Followed by Partner B. Well, so they go around, and then the goal of Partner B was to give A feedback the first time, how they would just naturally do it, maybe in a more critical way, of the feedback of how A did leading. So let's imagine that Person A led, Person B now was the person being led in the dance, and Person B gives the feedback in a critical way, which sometimes we do, right? In business, in romance, Oh, I didn't like how you spun me. That was too quick. I now feel dizzy. That really wasn't fun at all, and I really didn't enjoy it. You could have done a lot better. Right? You might think I'm being crazy, but how often do we give feedback to our children, our friends, our spouses, our business partners in this hypercritical sort of a way? Then we reversed, and again, B was the lead and A followed, and A gave feedback in the same hypercritical way to B. Now, the second part of the exercise was the beautiful part that really changed my perspective on how we can superconnect and supercharge all of our partnerships. And then the second time that she had us do it, she had A lead and B give feedback. But the second time around, B gave feedback in a loving way, sharing what worked, what they loved, what they would love to see more of, instead of in a hypercritical way. So imagine again, the exercise is just completed, and let's say I'm B giving A the feedback. That might look like, oh, A, you know what I loved? I loved that the pace that time was a little bit slower. Though, you know what I would love more of is I noticed my favorite part of the whole dance is when you dipped me, and if you could even slow the dip down a little bit, that would be amazing, so that way I can kind of maintain my balance. Now, can you hear the difference in that? That in situation number 1, it's critical, and most of us are going to respond from a red zone, right? From a place of defensiveness. Though when we pause, when we give feedback in a way that is not hypercritical, where we use the good, bad, good method, starting with the positive, what we liked, what we'd like, or what we appreciated, following up with what we would like to see more of, and then finally closing out with something else good that they did. How much more enjoyable is it when we receive feedback like that from our business partners, our spouses, and our friends? So I'm now gonna finally close the loop on this whole conversation. We've talked about which zone to come in when we partner or give feedback, going through this process of clarification, and we've also talked about doing it at the right time and how important it is the way that we give the feedback. Now, I said this whole conversation and this episode was inspired by a call I had earlier with a friend. This friend of mine recently met a nice gentleman, a nice man, and they had, you know, a lot of fun. They spent a couple of days together with some mutual friends who had set them up, and now both parties are not clear on whether or not, you know, is there there there? Are they going to date? Are they not going to date? Now, if you're somebody who's been married for many years, you can use this in any circumstance, whether it's business or friendship. It's any place where there's a lack of clarity that you can use this. So she and I were just talking and I said, my friend, I said, what if instead of agonizing over it in your own head and hallucinating, to use that word again, of all the possible scenarios, he likes you, he doesn't like you, there's something there, there's nothing there. What if instead you just got really authentic and said, hey, I had a great time. Thank you so much. And I just wanted to let you know, if you wanna be friends, I would love that. If there's a romantic interest, I would also be open to that as well, though I'd love to clarify with you what you would love to get outta this relationship so that way we could, you know, develop whether it's a friendship or romantic interest so we can both get on the same page. And my friend said to me during the call, oh my God, Jen, you mean I could just say what's in my head and get it out and share rather than going aloof on the person? I said, 100%. And in fact, I recommended a book to her called The Celestine Prophecy that I just read myself. I had never read it before. And I actually wrote a LinkedIn article on it. You can find a LinkedIn newsletter I put out once a week called Inspired Living Tools. So if you look up Inspired Living Tools, you'll find the article in there where I wrote this book about— or sorry, this article about the book The Celestine Prophecy. And in The Celestine Prophecy, they talk about these 4 control dramas that we're all playing out. Where we might go on loop, we might become an interrogator and ask annoying questions of somebody. We might become an instigator where we're attacking mentally, emotionally, physically somebody else in a relationship, or we might go poor me or victim mode. And so I wrote an article about this on LinkedIn, and I'll see if I can deep dive into it into a future episode so you can get a better understanding of it. At a high level, she and I discovered, this friend and I, that she was going aloof. And the way this relationship would've normally played out was that she would eventually withdraw her energy and go aloof for fear of rejection. How many of us can relate to that? So instead, how do we move above our control dramas? And below, we recognize them. Just as Isabel said in the last episode, recognize when you're in the red zone, and that gives you access to getting out of it. The same is true of these control dramas. If we can recognize when we're in the control drama of the instigator or the person who goes aloof, the moment we've become aware of that, we now have a choice whether we consciously actively participate in that or not. You can notice you're in a control drama, such as going aloof on a friend or a colleague or a loved one, but you have the power to choose rather than being at the effect of your control drama. You get to actively choose how much or how little you want to participate in it. So I know I've given you a lot of information today. I promise I'll try to give you maybe one tip going forward when I'm doing these solo episodes for you. And my intention for each of you, wherever, whenever you're listening to this, is that maybe there was some little gem or some nugget that came up for you, whether it's just knowing the right time to ask somebody for something or about something. Or going through a process of clarification, or maybe it's just being in the green rather than the red zone when you go to ask for something you need. My intention is that out of today, out of these 15 to 20 minutes that we've spent together, that you find a way to be able to communicate your needs, wants, and desires with loved ones, business partners, friends, whomever, in a way that works for you. And works for them, so that way you can super connect to the other people in your life. Thank you so much and have a beautiful rest of your week.
