First about communication. This thing that is called exchanging information.
It’s brought home to me daily, by virtue of what I do, that communication is at the centre of much of our dis
tress as a human race. The way we speak and write. The things we say. The things we mean. The things we don’t mean. The things we do mean but pretend we didn’t say. The things we want to mean but don’t want to come outright and say or take ownership of. All of the above in one big cesspool of miscommunication.
Or we could just call it a missed chance at communication.
It was brought home to me today again because of some copy I’ve been editing. Several pages of very important information from one of our scientific programs here at MSI. Scientists have this fabulous way of writing that makes everything as clear as mud. Because nothing in science can be definitively stated, everything must be qualified. So in the end you end up not really saying what it is you really want to say but trying to say it anyway and trying to sound sort of definitive about that even though you really can’t be definitive at all.
You got that?
Yeh, me neither.
It does drive home for me though how incredibly important it is – this communication thing – and how very often we take the process for granted. Too often we think that the important part of communication is that we have said what we’ve wanted to say – even if that saying is illegible to someone else or no-one’s listening. Whereas the important part of it – the most important part actually – is that the recipient of that communication has understood us.
There’s a few things that I say to my peeps over here at MSI about communication, and have said throughout my career as a Paid Communicator cum PR person, that it occurs to me apply deeply to our personal lives.
The first of these is that – when instigating this process of communication - you should probably make sure that the person or people you are talking to want to listen or have any vested interest in listening to you at all. All too often we make the mistake I think of assuming that because we’re talking, someone owes it to us to listen. Nothing could be further from the truth. And even if you have somehow managed to shanghai someone into ‘listening’ to you, there’s no real guarantee that they are actually ‘listening’ to you at all. In fact, according to the International Listening Association (www.listen.org), most of us are distracted, preoccupied or forgetful about 75% of the time that we pretend we are listening and immediately after we listen to someone, we only recall about 50% of what they said.
(Have you ever continued to talk at someone even after you’ve become peripherally aware that they’re no longer really listening but are just being polite? I have.)
The second thing that I often tell my peeps over here is that if you are going to communicate something, and you’ve scored the bonus of having someone who wants to listen and they are doing a half-way reasonable job at it, then you ought probably to try to say this thing of yours in a way that makes sense to them or approximates as closely as possible what you actually ‘mean’. By which I mean that just because you said it and they heard it, doesn’t mean they heard what you said.
(Have you ever talked to someone using your own ‘metaphor-rich-language’ only to watch people’s eyes glaze over as they struggle to understand the intricacies of what you mean? I have.)
It strikes me that both of these things are super-applicable to our lives. It starts by acknowledging that we all have an individual language that we all speak… that we all use words in a way that makes perfect sense to us and carries with it a lot of inherent and implied meaning that we forget to double-check the other person has understood.
I constantly forget to check that what I’m saying has been understood by the person I’m saying it to. I also make the mistake in reverse of assuming that someone meant what I think they meant without checking. It’s gotten me into trouble in love and life.
How many times have you had a conversation and ‘agreed’ on something with a loved one, co-worker or friend only to find that actually you both had a very different memory of what that agreement was – sometimes a diametrically opposite understanding.
How is that possible? And yet it happens so often. What might you currently even be thinking you understand about what someone has recently said to you that is completely wrong? Ever been insulted, only to find out that the person in question hadn’t intended to be insulting? Where does the insult lie then – does it lie with the person, who didn’t mean it, or with you who carries around embedded meaning in your psyche that makes that thing insulting? Or somewhere in between? And when we feel insulted, what is it that hurts us? (Ouch, my poor head.)
It’s on a continuum of course and depending on what example just sprung into your head, you may think you know the answer to that question one way or another.
But let’s expand this out to broader conversations – national conversations. Jesus – are we even having one? Suddenly, the disaster that is our politics comes into clearer focus. What are we yelling at each other? And when I yell, is the other side even listening? If they’re listening, what are they hearing? And so, why do we yell? The speed with which we all take offence and fumigate and posture makes even less sense when seen through this prism. I mean, what are we trying to achieve? Who’s winning here? Can we all just stop yelling now?
And even more questions zooming around in my head today about this: What have I assumed I’ve understood about what I’ve heard or read today? What am I actually reacting to? Is it what someone has written or said or is it what I think they’ve written or said and the implications of that given my values and the meaning I construct in the world?
Most importantly - have I made any important decisions about someone or something based on what I think I’ve understood? Have I checked this understanding? If not, why not? Crikey – I bet I ought to check that understanding before I get pissed off at that person or people.
It’s a bottomless pit this communication and language thing I tell you. Once you jump into it, you’ll not quickly jump out.
I mean do you even know what you’ve just been reading? Maybe I don’t even mean what you think I mean at all.
Just a thought.
;)
Or we could just call it a missed chance at communication.
It was brought home to me today again because of some copy I’ve been editing. Several pages of very important information from one of our scientific programs here at MSI. Scientists have this fabulous way of writing that makes everything as clear as mud. Because nothing in science can be definitively stated, everything must be qualified. So in the end you end up not really saying what it is you really want to say but trying to say it anyway and trying to sound sort of definitive about that even though you really can’t be definitive at all.
You got that?
Yeh, me neither.
It does drive home for me though how incredibly important it is – this communication thing – and how very often we take the process for granted. Too often we think that the important part of communication is that we have said what we’ve wanted to say – even if that saying is illegible to someone else or no-one’s listening. Whereas the important part of it – the most important part actually – is that the recipient of that communication has understood us.
There’s a few things that I say to my peeps over here at MSI about communication, and have said throughout my career as a Paid Communicator cum PR person, that it occurs to me apply deeply to our personal lives.
The first of these is that – when instigating this process of communication - you should probably make sure that the person or people you are talking to want to listen or have any vested interest in listening to you at all. All too often we make the mistake I think of assuming that because we’re talking, someone owes it to us to listen. Nothing could be further from the truth. And even if you have somehow managed to shanghai someone into ‘listening’ to you, there’s no real guarantee that they are actually ‘listening’ to you at all. In fact, according to the International Listening Association (www.listen.org), most of us are distracted, preoccupied or forgetful about 75% of the time that we pretend we are listening and immediately after we listen to someone, we only recall about 50% of what they said.
(Have you ever continued to talk at someone even after you’ve become peripherally aware that they’re no longer really listening but are just being polite? I have.)
The second thing that I often tell my peeps over here is that if you are going to communicate something, and you’ve scored the bonus of having someone who wants to listen and they are doing a half-way reasonable job at it, then you ought probably to try to say this thing of yours in a way that makes sense to them or approximates as closely as possible what you actually ‘mean’. By which I mean that just because you said it and they heard it, doesn’t mean they heard what you said.
(Have you ever talked to someone using your own ‘metaphor-rich-language’ only to watch people’s eyes glaze over as they struggle to understand the intricacies of what you mean? I have.)
It strikes me that both of these things are super-applicable to our lives. It starts by acknowledging that we all have an individual language that we all speak… that we all use words in a way that makes perfect sense to us and carries with it a lot of inherent and implied meaning that we forget to double-check the other person has understood.
I constantly forget to check that what I’m saying has been understood by the person I’m saying it to. I also make the mistake in reverse of assuming that someone meant what I think they meant without checking. It’s gotten me into trouble in love and life.
How many times have you had a conversation and ‘agreed’ on something with a loved one, co-worker or friend only to find that actually you both had a very different memory of what that agreement was – sometimes a diametrically opposite understanding.
How is that possible? And yet it happens so often. What might you currently even be thinking you understand about what someone has recently said to you that is completely wrong? Ever been insulted, only to find out that the person in question hadn’t intended to be insulting? Where does the insult lie then – does it lie with the person, who didn’t mean it, or with you who carries around embedded meaning in your psyche that makes that thing insulting? Or somewhere in between? And when we feel insulted, what is it that hurts us? (Ouch, my poor head.)
It’s on a continuum of course and depending on what example just sprung into your head, you may think you know the answer to that question one way or another.
But let’s expand this out to broader conversations – national conversations. Jesus – are we even having one? Suddenly, the disaster that is our politics comes into clearer focus. What are we yelling at each other? And when I yell, is the other side even listening? If they’re listening, what are they hearing? And so, why do we yell? The speed with which we all take offence and fumigate and posture makes even less sense when seen through this prism. I mean, what are we trying to achieve? Who’s winning here? Can we all just stop yelling now?
And even more questions zooming around in my head today about this: What have I assumed I’ve understood about what I’ve heard or read today? What am I actually reacting to? Is it what someone has written or said or is it what I think they’ve written or said and the implications of that given my values and the meaning I construct in the world?
Most importantly - have I made any important decisions about someone or something based on what I think I’ve understood? Have I checked this understanding? If not, why not? Crikey – I bet I ought to check that understanding before I get pissed off at that person or people.
It’s a bottomless pit this communication and language thing I tell you. Once you jump into it, you’ll not quickly jump out.
I mean do you even know what you’ve just been reading? Maybe I don’t even mean what you think I mean at all.
Just a thought.
;)
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