How to communicate effectively

I love it when people talk about communication, they usually mean communications. Communications refers to media, broadcasting and the transfer of information. Many of us believe that when we have transmitted our message that we have communicated. Say, a boss goes into an office and barks demands, instructions and leaves believing that they have just communicated. How do they know what their staff actually heard, what they meant? This is the point. We believe that because we have said something that the person that we said it to has understood what we mean. This is how miss communication occurs.

I once ran a self development centre called ‘The Centre For Human Communication’. Despite the fact that we ran courses on yoga, meditation and self development people often thought that we were something to do with the telephone service. The difference between communication and communications. The role of coms in business is well known as the person running the publicity and media systems.

The coms operator does not have a clear way of understanding whether or not what they meant to convey in their coms was received by the recipients.

A word is like a train carriage and the people that the word travels to are like stations on the railway line. As the train carriage moves from one station to another people get in and people get out. Sometimes there will be a bicycle or a dog or two in the carriage and, on rare occasions the carriage will be completely empty while other times bursting at the seams. The carriage may look the same on the outside but the contents changes all the time.

Words are just like that. They are mental and emotional railway carriages. As a word moves from you to another person it’s meaning will change. Just like the carriage the word looks the same, it may be written the same but the content, the meaning, is changed. The meaning that is put on the word, it contents, is provided not so much by you the sender but by the person that receives it, that hears it.

The meaning of a word or phrase, it’s contents, maybe cultural, coloquiall, familial, or experiential. Either way it will be peculiar to us. If I say ‘I love you’ what do you hear? What do I mean by love? It might mean anything from I want to marry you, be your friend, take you as a lover, or whatever it means when you say it or you hear it. You might get the idea that communication in the real sense is actually quite difficult.

The meaning of communication

The literal meaning of the word communication is common union or to be at one with, or in the same place. When I say something and you hear what I mean then we have communicated. If I say something and you interpret it into your meaning we have miscommunicated. The art of advertising is this very thing. The coms person has to impart the message in such a way that the customer receives the message.

This takes us to the hub of communication. The majority of what we communicate is not in the word. With different research the percentages vary but it goes something like this. About 52% of the meaning is in our body language, facial expression and stance, about 36% is in the tone of our voice. Around 3% is in the volume and 2% in pheromones. It is only around 7% that is in the literal meaning of the words. This makes texts and the written word the worst forms of communication that we use.

Imagine when you read a book. In your mind, in your imagination you are creating the characters and what they look like. Then someone makes a film of the book and in your mind they completely got it wrong because the meaning that they put on the word in the book is different to yours. As we say, ‘a picture tells a thousand word’.

What do you hear if I say ‘he went nose to nose with me’? Well where I come from that would mean we went face to face or he squared up to me in an act of aggression. Well, in Arabic cultures, when males meet, they do a side on hand shake, pull into each other and tap their noses together twice. To say ‘we went nose to nose’ is either an act of love or an act of aggression depending on where you come from.

The only way that you will ever know what someone means is to ask them, ‘when you said that I heard….., is that what you meant?’ Or ‘when I said …. What did you hear?’

Communication is a tricky business. Miscommunication is probably the root of most problems at an individual and a global scale. Likewise, communication is probably the resolution of most of our problems. The magic is that when we truly communicate, when we are in the same place we begin to see the other person as ourself as though we are one.

When I say, ‘if we all look after each other we will all be okay’, I guess that in part I am saying that if we communicated we would all be ok.

Hey ho, keep talking but do it mindfully and try to communicate.

Take care

Sean x

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  1. […] Here’s Sean’s blog post for the topic, well worth a read […]

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