Miscommunication Leads to Complications
Lauryn Hill, on her 1998 CD The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, sang that “miscommunication leads to complications“. Relating to personal and world Peace, truer words were never spoken, sung or rapped. There’s a process that verbal communication goes through, and when you consider what happens in that process, it’s a wonder that we communicate at all.
In any verbal communication, there is a person who is sending the message: the sender. And there is at least one person who is supposed to be receiving the message: the receiver. In between the sender and the receiver there are several things that distract from and/or distort the information being conveyed. You see both the sender and the receiver have filtering systems, which are comprised of their personal beliefs, their personal histories, and how they physically and emotionally feel at the moment that they are trying to communicate. Are they tired? Are they angry? Are they distressed over something? Between the sender’s and the receiver’s filters is something called noise. In this case, the definition of the term noise is not limited strictly to those things we hear with our ears. Noise consists of anything that you can perceive through your five senses. Some examples might be: a sound outside the room that you’re in, a strange smell, a physical pain you’re experiencing, an attractive person walking by in the background as you are trying to listen to the conversation. Noise also includes anything you might be saying to yourself while the conversation is going on – your self-talk – it’s cold in this room, I’m hungry, what is this person talking about – anything that distracts you from hearing the message is considered noise.
Gordon Graham, a leader in the field of self-image psychology, working in both the change management and the addiction/recovery fields, suggests that due to what goes on in the communication process the average person hears only every third word. That might sound something like this, “Gordon leader field image in change the fields that what in the process person every word.” While that might put you on the same page, some conversations require that we be on the same paragraph. Some require that we be on the same sentence. And some require that we be on the same word. How many times has it happened to you – you thought you heard what the other person was saying, but you missed it – either by a lot or by a little. And because you missed it by a lot or by a little, not you’ve got trouble.
For this podcast I want to illustrate how to build trust through communication. And I want to provide a method of communication that is in effect an insurance policy against the complications that come from miscommunication.
Your insurance policy is something that I refer to as mirroring. It works like this: it’s a four step process.
The first step is that the sender sends an uninterrupted message. Step two is that the receiver repeats back in their own words their interpretation of what the sender said. Step three – and this is your insurance policy – the receiver asks the question something along the lines of, “Did I understand you correctly?” “Is that what you meant to say?” “Is that right?” Asking a question like that allows the receiver to be 100% wrong in their understanding of what the sender was trying to communicate. Step four – the sender confirms that the message heard was correct or not, and if not, the sender restates the part of the message that was misheard or the entire message if need be. And then you begin the process again, until both the sender and the receiver are satisfied.
It’s very important to understand that the goal of communication is to be understood – not to be right.
To help you visualize both the mirroring process and the communication process, there’s a document that you can download on the optimisimisaskill.com homepage.
In our last podcast, When Your Feet Hurt, Everything Hurts, I suggested that when you’re involved in an unhealthy relationship, every other aspect of your life suffers. Now I’m not going to define what is or isn’t a healthy relationship, except to say that healthy relationships require that all participants either be healthy or be sincerely working towards it.
The cornerstone of healthy relationships is communication. Without communication, caring about someone as an individual is impossible. Now that’s not to say that we don’t care about our brothers and sisters around the world who suffer from either natural or man made disasters and sometimes both. I want to suggest that to truly care about another individual, you have to truly know that person as an individual. And the best way for that to happen is through healthy, effective communication.
One of the more underrated components of healthy communication is trust. Think about it. If you don’t trust someone, do you even really care what they’re trying to communicate to you?
So how do you build trust? Well, there’s two ways, really. First, through your actions – you do what you say you’re going to do, when you say you’re going to do it. And the second is through verbal communication. In the mid- to late- nineties, I worked for a management consulting company, and we had a technique that we referred to as “the Platinum Rule”. The Platinum Rule says that we treat people the way that they want to be treated, not the way we want to be treated. Let me give you an example of how that works. After leaving that company I became a teacher, and for about eight years I taught drug- and behaviorally-addicted parolees how to get into recovery, change their dysfunctional behaviors into healthy ones, and hopefully stay out of prison and get off parole. Now I consider myself to be a very open person – I’m one of those touchy-feely kind of people – I like to get involved and rub elbows and get in people’s space so that I can get to know them, and they can get to know me. Dealing with the clients that I was dealing with in these classrooms, that was a prohibitive barrier to reaching understanding. Due to the hostile environment in which many of these men and women were either living in or had just come from, these were people who needed at least three feet of space before they could begin to feel comfortable. So if I’m leaning over their shoulder trying to show them how to do an exercise, they’re not listening to me. Because what they need is their space. My preferred communication style is not only not relevant – in this case it’s a deterrent – the noise in their head, their self-talk, is saying, “Get away from me.” It’s so loud that communication is next to impossible. If I treat them the way I want to be treated, then communication is lost. But if I respect how they want to be treated, their defenses come down, and there’s a better chance to be heard.
OK, so how do you get to the specific information – and specifics are the key, that will tell you how a person wants to be treated? For a person you don’t know very well or at all, say a new co-worker or someone new to the neighborhood, they key is to observe. Go slow and watch. And if you pay attention, you will get the information that you’re looking for. Now if it’s a person that you are already in an established relationship with, say a friend or family member, what you do is you ask.
In our next podcast I will give you specific questions to ask that will provide you with the specific information that you’re looking for. Again, the goal is to communicate in a manner that is meaningful to those you want to be in a healthy relationship with.
I believe that relationships are a measure of the quality and quantity of the amount of Peace that individuals live with. And as I’ve stated many times, world Peace can become a reality when enough people find Peace within their own heart. To be involved in an unhealthy relationship only takes us further and further away from the Peace, love and understanding that we all crave.
