Speaker 1: Communication is key when dealing with annoying roommates, and today I'm going to teach you and talk to you about the three most important things to keep in mind to be able to have effective communication. For all the best tips and tricks and advice on mental health and life and love, please subscribe to my YouTube channel. I'm here every single Thursday. If you don't know me, I'm Tess Brigham, licensed psychotherapist and board-certified coach, and I'm here to help you today talk about roommates. Roommates, right? I think everybody has at least one nutty roommate story, and I know for myself that I've had great roommates and not-so-great roommates and roommates that really were tough and challenging to deal with. But I will say that, you know, some of my best friends that I've ever had in my entire life were roommates. People that I had no idea, I'd never met them before until, you know, we decided to move in together in a city and we became fast friends. And you know, one of the things that's really hard about once you leave college and high school is making friends, and roommates is a great way to do that. So I do always encourage people, obviously you want to check them out first, you want to go with your instincts and your vibe and your gut about the situation, but being able to meet a lot of people your own age and live together is a great way to build new relationships. So, but what do you do if you have the annoying roommate? And maybe the roommate's not even that annoying, it's just a few things that they do that really irritates you. Well, today this is what we're going to talk about. I want to teach you the three most important things that you need to keep in mind when communicating with a roommate. So I want to give a little bit of a bonus tip here in the beginning, which is this. A lot of times I'll tell clients, you know, communication is key. You have to be able to talk to people about how you're feeling. And the first thing they'll say to me is, but I don't like confrontation. And the thing is, is that it doesn't have to be a confrontation. If you walk into a conversation thinking this is going to be a confrontation, this is going to be a fight, it could easily lead there. What you want to do is you want to focus on intention. What is your intention when you decide to go and talk to this person? Okay, so that's really important. You can communicate with people, you can share with how you feel with someone else, you could disagree with them, and it doesn't have to be a huge fight. It doesn't have to be a confrontation. Okay, so tip number one is this. It's all about timing. Timing is key for everything, right? You don't want to rush to the roommate right when they get home from work and be like, you did this, you did that, right? That's not going to work. It's just going to put them on the defensive and get upset. So what you want to do is you really want to think through what is it that I want to communicate with them? When do I think is a good time? You could either even give them the heads up and text them and say, hey, there's some things I want to talk about. You know, do you have time tonight or tomorrow? Okay, great. Let's figure it out. You know, give them a heads up about what's it about. So they're not feeling caught off guard that you're just kind of coming at them with that. So timing's everything. If there is a particular incident that happened, something specific, timing becomes even more because you don't want to wait till three weeks later to say something. You want to say something within 24 to 48 hours from that incident. It doesn't have to happen right in that moment, but it does need to happen within a certain time period after the moment. So that way your roommate's not going, wait, what did I do three weeks ago? What? Huh? Yeah. All right. So timing's number one. Two, tone. Tone is everything, right? How we say things to people, our tone is really important. So my tip for you is come at it from a place of curiosity, not the you did this, you did that, you're a slob, this bothers me, that bothers me. Much more of, you know, I'm really curious about what happens for you. You know, we all agreed that we would each do the dishes on our designated night and I noticed that a lot of times you're missing that night. Is it not a good night for you? Let's talk about, let's strategize so that you can be successful. Curiosity is much better. It always lightens people up. They don't feel so defensive and they're not jumping to it. And sometimes you might discover that they didn't know that that was their day or they were confused about the chore chart or, you know, they, they see, you know, they see where they're at when they do the dishes as clean and maybe you don't see it that same way. So it's a really important curiosity. And number three is, this is an old standby when it comes to communication, but it is vital. I statements. I feel, I'm sad. I'm frustrated. I'm this, not you're a slob and you need to clean up after yourself, which is, I get really frustrated when I come into the bathroom and all of the towels are wet and I want to talk about how, what can we do differently? Do we need to get more towels? I'm frustrated when I come home from work and the dishes from the breakfast in breakfast are still in the sink at just kind of, you know, it, it makes me feel like I have one more thing to do. The I feels are really important. They put people, put their guard down and we all know what it feels like when someone comes at us, points at us and says, you, you, you, right? I have a great video that might help you. If you're someone who struggles with talking to people or setting boundaries, it's called stop people pleasing and set boundaries. You can find it here in my channel and that's it for today. If you like this video, if you have someone in your life that you want to share it with, please do spread the word. And if you like this video, give it a thumbs up, put a comment below and even better subscribe to the channel. All right. I'll see you next time. Bye bye.