6. Lesson Six: Communication

Through this lesson, you will learn:
  • how to communicate positively
  • that the way you communicate indicates your level of respect for others and for yourself


Introduction

To live is to communicate! Communication is the foundation for all interpersonal relationships, and our daily lives are filled with one communication experience after another. Through communication we reach some understanding of each other, learn to like, influence, and trust each other, begin and end relationships, and learn more about ourselves and how others perceive us. Through communication we learn to understand others as individuals and we help others to understand us.

Yet to achieve these benefits, we need skills of communicating effectively in all of our relationships. This lesson gives you some strategies for being a good communicator.

 

NOW LISTEN HERE!
A poor listener lives in an incomplete world and doesn’t even know it. How well do you listen? Most of us have the ability to hear. We’re born with it. Sounds occur and our brains detect those sounds through our ears. All of us know that. It really seems so simple. But this seeming simplicity can be deceptive.

The gift of hearing is truly a precious one. Just ask people who suffer from hearing impairment or loss. They can
tell you of the countless important sounds great and small that they cannot hear properly or cannot hear at all. The word “hearing” relates closely to the word “listening.” But they do they mean the same thing? If you can hear well can you listen well? Basically the answer is “yes.” But a key term in this question is “can you?’

Let’s try another question. If you can hear well, do you listen well? This becomes a bit more interesting. If you belong to the majority of people and answer honestly, you answer will be “no.” When we really stop to think about it, we know that listening and hearing are not necessarily the same thing. Try a little experiment. Stop reading for a minute or so. During this time write down a list of all the sounds you can hear. Listen for sounds you might not normally be aware.
Listen…!

After a minute or two you will likely have put a good list together. The sounds you become conscious of during this experiment are likely all occurring before you stopped to listen for them. But were you really hearing them before? The answer is “yes.” But you may not have been conscious of hearing them. Just think of it. Each day we hear all sorts of things without consciously realizing it. Good listening is really a skill of self-activation. Now, if we’re not conscious of hearing some things, do these things matter? The answer may well be “yes.”

People may grow accustomed to the weirdest of noises, especially if those noises follow an identifiable pattern. So you find Jane saying about her husband, George, “He can sleep through anything!” In fact, of course, even if you do sleep through loud or irritating noises, those noises may still be getting through to you. But you may register them in your dreams or in changes in your brain wave patterns. In other words, you may hear those things at non-conscious levels of brain activity. Our bodies respond naturally at times to outside noises. Did you know, for instance, that your finger swells measurably when you hear a loud sound?

Theoretically, an ultra sonic sound generator can be rigged up that could produce sound that could kill you, or at least cause a lot of destruction. And you wouldn’t hear a thing!
Well we hear all sorts of things all the time. And yet, most of us don’t register what we hear in our conscious minds.

In his book The Natural History of the Mind, Gordon Rattay Taylor points out that the brains central problem is “how to cope with too much information.” We’re all being bombarded with incredible amounts of information these days. Members of our families, friends, associates at work, the general public, radio and television, and just the general hustle and bustle of our electromechanical civilization seem to crowd in on us.

Often, we may find ourselves saying, “I can’t cope. It’s too much!” This is what Marshall McLuhan meant when he referred to the “implosion effect” of our electronic media. These media, whether in the form of telephones, radios, public address systems, television networks, or holographic transmission devices, are all accelerating our information bombardment. The only way to survive all of this is by developing our own ‘screens’ for incoming information. Our brains have literally been programmed to screen out certain types of information and only to let through those types of information that we consider important. This has to be. We have to do this type of screening just to survive.


But the screening you now possess is a construct of you life experience and education. It’s a form of programming based on past events that you often had no awareness of. Your brain screens may no longer be serving you well. You can test your own screening activity the next time you are at a party. You may be in deep conversation with someone else, oblivious to a conversation others may be having across the room. At one point, however, someone in that other conversation speaks your name. Do you hear it? More than likely you do.

You’ll feel your ears perk up just like the family dog, when it hears something new. Your brain’s unconscious sound monitoring system picked up the sound of your name. This sound has special significance for you, so it registered at the conscious level. A trained mechanic does the same sort of thing when he listens to you cars engine. So does the skilled doctor when she applies her stethoscope to your bare chest. And the experienced sailor does the same when he hears the sound of the wind in the sails and the water against the hull. We say that people with these kinds of hearing skills “know what to listen for.” In other words, part of their training has been in selective forms of listening. In the course of doing your job you must apply selective forms of listening as well. Perhaps you listen for key words. You may listen for different motional tones. Or you might listen for contexts. In your life you’ve developed all sorts of things that you personally listen for. And you sound monitoring system, or listening pattern, is unique to that others do not hear at least at the conscious level.

We don’t just listen passively to those chucks of incoming information that do penetrate our consciousness. As A.Z. Young says in his book, Programs of the Brain: “Recognizing speech, like seeing and other perceptual acts is an active process of ‘reconstruction,’ not a mere passive reception.” We reconstruct what we hear in terms of our own inner values, knowledge, and desires. And our brain screens provide the bulk of the reconstructing activity at the unconscious level. So we do tend to hear what we want to hear and, in the main, we do this quite honestly! Listening is very much an active part of the way we deal with the world. We listen in a way that we’ve developed over many years of life. And most of us never pause to take stock of our listening.

When was the last time you examined the way you really listened? Chances are it’s been quite some time, if ever. We all know some people who never take stock of their listening habits. They blithely assume that their listening is automatically effective. But they are the very people who are most likely to hear things that weren’t said, or to miss
important things that were said. A poor listener really suffers from a form of deafness. She or he lives in an incomplete world and doesn’t even know it. A poor listener can be a real hazard at work. Instructions may not be followed correctly, heated arguments may flare up, or organizational decisions with disastrous consequences may occur. If you can improve you listening you will automatically improve your ability to function effectively at work and at home.

Check out this video that provides humour to the effective listening issue:

You can begin to improve you listening ability by taking stock of your listening habits from time to time. Realize that you may inadvertently have fallen into certain habits of exclusion, inclusion or interpretation that are giving you a distorted version of what you’re hearing. In business and home situations?” Pay attention to the comments others may make about your listening habits. If you’re honest with yourself, you will find specific things that you can deal with to improve your listening.

ROADBLOCKS TO COMMUNICATION
1) Ordering, Communication


“You must …“, “You have to .. . .“, “You will .. .
-can produce fear or active resistance
-invites “testing”
-Promotes rebellious behaviour, retaliation




2) Warning, Threatening


“If you don’t, then ...“, “You’d better, or .. .
-can produce fear, submissiveness
-invites ‘testing’ of threatened consequences
-can cause resentment, anger, rebellion






3) Moralizing, Preaching


“You should ....“, “You ought to …“, “It is your responsibility
-creates ‘obligation’ or guilt feelings
-can cause a person to ‘dig in’ and defend his/her position even more (i.e. who says?)
-communicates lack of trust in a person’s sense of responsibility



4) Advising, Giving Solutions
“I would do is ....“, “Why don’t you ...“, “Let me suggest …”
-can imply that the person is not able to solve his/her awn problems
-prevents a person from thinking through a problem, considering alternative solutions, and trying then out for reality
-can cause dependency, or resistance


5) Persuading with Logic, Arguing


“Here is why you are wrong ...“, “The facts are …“, “Yes, but …”

-provokes defensive position and counter-arguing
-often causes a person to ‘turn off’ speaker, to quit listening
-can cause the person to feel inferior, inadequate




6) Judging, Criticizing, Blaming
“You are not thinking maturely ... you are lazy.”
-implies in competency, stupidity, poor judgment
-cuts off communication from a person over fear of negative judgment or
-person often accepts judgments as true (“I am bad or retaliates ‘You’re not so great yourself!)


7) Praising, Agreeing


“Well, I think you’re doing a great job!” “You’re right? -- that teacher sounds awful!”
-implies high speaker expectations as well as surveillance of person’s ‘toeing the mark’.
-can be seen as patronizing or as a manipulative effort to encourage desired behaviour
-can cause anxiety when the person’s perception of self doesn’t match speaker’s praise


8) Name-calling, Ridiculing

‘‘Crybaby”, “Okay, Mr.& Smarty …“
-can cause person to feel unworthy, unloved
-Can have devastating effect on self-im2ge of person
-often provokes verbal-physical retaliation




9) Analyzing/ Diagnosing

“What’s wrong with you is “, “You re just tired…“ “You don’t really mean that”.
-can be threatening and frustrating
-person can feel either trapped, exposed, or not believed
- stops person from con for fear of distortion or: exposure


10) Reassuring, Sympathizing
“Don’t worry”, “You’ll feel better”, “Oh, cheer up”
-causes the person to feel misunderstood
-evokes strong feelings of hostility (“That’s easy for you to say!”)
-person often picks up speaker’s message as: It’s not all right for you to feel bad”.


11) Probing, and Questioning


“Why…”, “Who…”, “What did you …”, “How…”
-since answering questions often results in getting subsequent criticisms or solutions, people often learn to reply with non-answers, avoidance, half- truths, or lies
- Since questions often keep the person in the dark as to what the speaker is driving at, the person may become anxious and fearful
-person can lose sight of his/her problem while answering questions spawned by the speaker’s concerns


12) Diverting, Sarcasm, Withdrawal


“Let’s talk about pleasant things ....“, “Why don’t you try running the r1d”. Remaining silent: turning away.
-implies that life’s difficulties are to be avoided rather than dealt with
-can infer that a person’s problems are important, petty or invalid
-stops openness from person when he or she is experiencing a difficulty