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Have you ever noticed that we expend a great deal of time and energy preparing positive speeches full of joyful tidings, but we plan the breaking of bad news with all of the care of car crash?

A good friend of mine was recently the victim of what I’ve come to call an emale.

Believing her budding relationship was as secure as an anti-virus subscription, she awoke one morning to find that her partner had deleted her out of his life.

As she put it, she had been archived over email.

Worse still, he had sent her a follow-up email telling her that he had added her to the Block Sender list, so there was no point in responding.

Responding? As in indulging in a bit of mature discussion to resolve our differences or to come to some acceptance of the bad news?

Not with this archiving emale.

Making Bad News Bearable

Maybe bad news really isn’t like wine, getting better with age, but that doesn’t mean we need to treat it like a bottle of bubbles against the side of a ship.

The reality is that good news can be broken in any old fashion, but its negative opposite needs a few boundaries.

Despite the method you select to deliver your bad tidings, there are five key elements required to make bad news bearable are:

1. Accuracy - bad news that intimately affects another person should not be a game of Chinese Whispers. Get your facts straight before you share. Half-truths and rumours only prolong the pain.
2. Timing - delivering bad news in a time of stress should be avoided at all costs. Chose somewhere private and calming. If something simply can’t wait for the right surroundings, keep the urgency out of your voice and body language.
3. Phrasing - ‘think before you speak’ is great advice. Take as much time as possible to prepare the delivery of your message, using simple, precise language and follow another old adage: be firm, but fair.
4. Consistency - the recipient of bad tidings is likely to try and refute your bad news. If you chop and change your story with each re-telling, it will be much harder for them to accept the truth.
5. Reliability - if you are not seen as a trusted source of information by the recipient, it is better than someone else breaks the news.

Think you’ve got it all wrapped up?

A firm but fair, accurate and confidential email or text message that will drop the bad news in your recipient’s lap and let you walk away unscathed?

The bad news is that negative tidings are one of the most complex forms of communication.

As a result, there is a lot of misinformation floating around, like the examples below.

The good news is that by avoiding some of these traps, you are less likely to cast the blues over the target of your bad news:

I’m Telling You this for Your Own Good

Remember that bad news rarely has a flip side.

Even if you really believe there is one - he’s a jerk after all, you were never appreciated in that job, you have a great fire insurance policy - it can be hard to focus on it when your life is lying in tatters at your feet.

Give them time to absorb the bad news and to come to grips with it, before telling them to look for the silver lining.

We’re Over. Send.

Breaking up via text message or exposing a cheating husband by email breaks every rule of communication that has ever been - well, communicated.

Unless your entire relationship has been via text, or you have recently relocated to an Antarctic research station when you have access to no other form of communication, avoid this approach at all costs.

We all need support to assimilate change and the best form of assistance you can offer is by delivering bad news face-to-face.

I Know Exactly How You Feel. One Time When I…

Focus on the recipient, rather than yourself.

This means saying less and empathising more. If you’re unsure how to do this, put yourself in their shoes, rather than wrestling their shoes off and wearing them yourself.

Keep your comparison stories for when the heart has healed and they will be much more appreciated.

Oh My God, I Just Heard The Worst News!

Information brings attention. Got a scandal to share? Nothing beats a crowded room fixing on you like the last plate of hors d’oeuvres when you have bad news to break.

It is true that the urgency to share bad news can be overpowering, but do your best to avoid the drama.

The reality is that bad news is bad enough without a megaphone and a sky-writing plane.

You Bring These Things Upon Yourself

The key to really effectively breaking bad news is to minimise the impact on the other person’s sense of self.

Keep the news and the individual as separate as possible.

This means helping them see that just because the news is bad doesn’t mean that they are bad - or stupid, or worthless or unlovable.

The bad news is that bad news is unavoidable. We are all going to receive it as we live full and adventurous lives.

But the good news is that the next time we have to deliver it, we can avoid serving it up with a case of the blues by adopting a few of these simple strategies.

My Nanna lived in the comfort zone.

Taking a seat at her kitchen table was like sliding into a deck chair. A simple bit of furniture, it was where she played cards, drank wine and conquered crossword puzzles.

But most of all it was where she created an environment of ease.

What I remember most from sitting at that table were the faces gathered around it. Different ages, different personalities, but all comfortable, for the moment at least, in the space they found themselves in.

Have you had the pleasure of such a place, where you find yourself sinking into a state that seems almost disconnected from your real life?

At the centre of it, no doubt, was a force like my Nanna, for a true comfort zone is not the place you go alone, but the space in which another accepts you unconditionally.

The Skin You’re In

Putting others at ease is not something we are encouraged to do.

In a world of competition and self-promotion, where sitting at tables is becoming rare and the focus on self is all-encompassing, few people see the need for creating a comfort zone for others.

Keeping people on their toes tends to occupy our time. With enemies kept in pockets and friends tucked away in mobiles, the idea of making others comfortable seems unattractively pedestrian.

Where’s the excitement of the game-play, the rush of the repartee?

Striving higher and harder and faster, the emphasis is often on the opposite of comfort.

Shake things up.

Challenge yourself.

Go out on a limb.

Push yourself to the limit.

See what you are made of.

For many, change signifies progress and to be still is to stagnate.

Perhaps one of the downsides of our commitment to continuous improvement is that if we live by the premise that everyone can and should improve, how can we also convey the message that we accept people just as they are?

Just the Way You Are

A traditional woman, my Nanna never learned to drive.

She had old-fashioned views on most things, and was politically conservative and cautious with money.

But her strong opinions never erected a barrier between herself and another at her table. In fact, her circle of friends consisted of vastly different people.

I often wondered what they had in common, these people who came and went through her kitchen. What I remember most is the noise: laughter and yelling, waving hands crafting enormous tales of love and luck.

My mum finally put it into words.

It was my Nanna’s gift, the ability to invite people in and share a comfortable space with them.

Perhaps it is important to our development and evolution that we forever try to outgrow our skin, but I still miss those days around her hectic kitchen table, comfortable for a while in a space of easy acceptance.