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When communication stops

By BEN NELMS
bnelms@TheCitizenNews.com

When communication stops, imagination starts. And imagination often runs in a direction that can cause misunderstandings and trouble. Regardless the setting, the situation, the variables or the players involved, this little premise holds true. Here’s why.

Humans possess the wonderful ability, the basic need, to make sense of what’s going on around them. They want to understand, or at least they say they do. This tends to be the case across every spectrum of life: in interactions with family members and co-workers, in boardrooms and bedrooms, in personal and business relationships, between governments and citizens, even with acquaintances and strangers. It’s also true among nations. And, when asked, most people do say they want to be understood. If you have any doubt about the importance of this little aspect of life and the interesting emotions that can accompany misunderstandings, just tell your wife that it’s no big deal if you don’t understand the point she is trying to make. Or say that to your boyfriend. Or to your boss or your children or your constituents!

To be understood and to understand others, especially considering the billions of conversations that occur around the world each day (the current global population is just over 6.4 billion) requires effective communication, not some flimsy excuse for it. So here’s the rub. There is a vast difference between conversation that is effective and conversation that is ineffective. It’s the difference between two general approaches involved in a conversation where the least amount of subjective opinion or assessment, hence the possibility of emotion-based misunderstanding, comes into play. For example, standing outside at noon with a spouse on a cloudless day and saying “The Sun is in the sky,” is very objective and the statement will likley gain agreement. But let those same two people begin discussing politics, religion, a friend’s relationship, what color paint is best for the living room, whether a piece of property should be rezoned or how to squeeze the tube of toothpaste, and see what often happens. On some of these occasions, objectivity flies out the window, replaced by frustration-laden misunderstanding that can open the Pandora’s Box of imagination. For example, “Sometimes I don’t think he wants to understand me,” the woman says to her best friend. “Sometimes I wonder if he even loves me.” From misunderstanding to doubt to imagination. It may be an oversimplified example, but we’ve all heard or said something similar. It is no secret in the world of humans that subjective opinions and emotions so often become a part of the conversations we engage in. On those occasions, whether consciously or unconsciously, we open the door for misunderstandings to occur. That’s why it’s important for each of us to be responsible for the words we speak and responsible for how we hear the words of others. So to put the difference between effective and ineffective conversations into terms and to establish a frame of reference, let’s call one approach “talk” and the other “communication.”

Talk is like a one-way street. It’s not as bad as being unwilling to hold a conversation but it’s in the ballpark. Talk often relies on subjective, opinion-based reasoning that is built-in to the words being spoken, with the speaker busily trying to prove their point to get their way to win the support of the listener (or to win the argument). Talk has a vested interest in the outcome of the conversation, especially when the topic involves even the least amount of emotional content. Hence, talk is closed and tends to exclude the other person. On the outer fringes of talk we find “arguments,” where both people are likely to have resorted to emotions-only expressions. Any possibility of a clear understanding having been thrown out the window, one or both are left to their imagination to try to figure out what’s going on. And imagination can easily run to the negative, leading to hurt feelings, even physical altercations.

Communication, on the other hand, is like a two-way street. Communication relies on the willingness of the person to restructure or minimize the use of subjective, emotionally-charged words that cloud the issue and put the listener on the defensive. Hence, communication is more objective. A person engaged in communication will be more open and inclusive of the thoughts and feelings of the person they are speaking with.

Though sometimes nearly impossible to dispense with, negatively-charged words and tones of voice set the stage for the other person to dismiss or condemn what’s being said. And this often happens in a very subtle fashion, so much so that we fail to see it ourselves. This is unfortunate, given the passion that we all sometimes have built-in to our points of view.

So maybe it’s worthwhile to consider the approach than promotes understanding rather than the approach that prevents it. All things considered, why waste our time and energy, or that of others, by doing something that is set up to fail from the beginning? Isn’t that a little self-defeating, a little crazy? The world is already complicated enough. Things just tend to get worse when communications stops.