Very often in recent years I have heard the word manipulation with a very negative connotation. To be honest, this topic has not always bothered me much. Maybe I’ve rarely encountered it in my life, and even among clients, or maybe somewhere, intuitively, for myself a very long time ago, even in my youth or even childhood, I divided it into two concepts: good and evil manipulation. For me, these are two fundamentally different processes. Evil manipulation, for me, pursues exclusively the interests of the manipulator, and brings undoubted harm to the other party. Moreover, both psychological and any other. Good manipulation is aimed at achieving the most acceptable result in the current situation, for both parties, with fewer losses. This is probably why I have always been so tolerant of the word manipulation. For some reason, an image popped up in my memory of how my grandmother was treating me: “Now you take this medicine and in the morning you will feel much better, or at least tomorrow evening. And when you are completely recovered, we will make dumplings for you! Do you want it?” Kind manipulations work not only with children, when you treat them or stimulate them to develop. Good manipulations are quite applicable between adults. Often, it seems to me better to kindly and quietly push a person towards solving a problem in a way that he probably does not see himself, than to go into open conflict by setting ultimatums. “Darling, it’s great that I came up with an idea: when you go fishing, you’ll take me on the way to my parents’ dacha. And when I get back, I’ll have everything ready and we’ll cook fish soup. Well, we’ll take the cans at the same time. Do you mind?” There’s also something like this like hidden manipulation. This is when you don’t speak directly to a person, but to some third party, in the hope that the first one will hear and perhaps take it into account. How many conflicts and scandals have I personally managed to avoid by simply telling my acquaintances on the phone about something that I would like my husband to hear, but not as an edification, but as information, I calmly digested it with myself and drew conclusions: “Imagine, it turns out it’s possible Make reminders for yourself in your phone for the day, but don’t write a to-do list, just a buzzer. On the one hand, a bell rings at the right time, and on the other hand, you train your memory, remembering what it means!” You can object to me that it is better to talk directly through the Adult-Adult transaction line. Unfortunately, this does not always work out this way. For many reasons: bad mood/well-being of one person, accompanying factors (not a simple situation in a team), and simply even being distracted by other problems. Therefore, these simple techniques help to avoid unnecessary conflicts, live the day in harmony, without raising your voice. It's the same with children. Especially when they are in their teens. Therefore, you can offer them some alternative solutions in advance. And several are even better. So that they do not see the manipulation, but feel that the right to choose remains with them. So you can treat manipulations without strong hostility. The main thing is to use all this for the benefit of everyone, try not to raise the level of emotions to the limit, and be based on goodness and rationality.