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The art of communication part 1: Know yourself

My sons,

It has been said that the most important thing one can do in one’s life is to communicate. We are a social species, a communal people. We were made for community and for communion. From the moment of birth we reach for connection with those around us. From our first breath we spend an inordinate amount of energy learning to relate, to connect, to be understood, and to understand.

If that’s true, why is it that so many of us communicate poorly? Why do we go through life feeling unheard and misunderstood? And why, oh why, do our best attempts at expressing ourselves often have disastrous results? Whether personal or professional, with friends or with colleagues, communicating about our personal hopes or our career goals, we often fail to convey our thoughts and feelings in a way that produces more understanding and connection.

Why is that?

It turns out that communicating is a skill. Not only that, but it is a difficult skill to master! It, like every other skill, requires practice, instruction, correction, dedication, and effort. And like every other learned skill, it can come with failures that are often painful, personal, and potentially very public.

But it is a skill that, with the right attention and instruction, can be mastered like every other.

I’ve been a snowboarder much of my adult life, but recently I’ve decided to try my hand at skiing. Call it a mid-life crisis desire to connect more with my children (skiing feels more multi-generational), call it a desire to be lazier (skiing also feels less effortful), or even call it vanity (skiing seems to be on the rise again, and snowboarding seems to have petered out after the Shawn White years); whatever the reason, I’ve taken up skiing. And man does it hurt. It feels like three steps forward, one major yard sale backwards.

But I know I’m learning. I know I’m making forward progress. Painful as it is, I can tangibly feel the improvement after each outing. My muscles are a little less sore, my instincts a little less fried, my attention span a little less taxed. These are all signs that my body is building a new skillset and incorporating and assimilating it into its ethos. I am a skier. Or dammit, at least I will be a skier. Someday.

The same is true of communicating. Many of us tell ourselves that we’re not that good at communicating, that we’re private people, that we leave the flu-flu stuff to the artsy types. But deep down, we long to be understood. Deep down, in places where we’re not ready to admit even to ourselves, we yearn for connection, to know, and to be known, to love, and to be loved as we are.

So how do we get better at communicating? How can we develop these skills so that we too can find our identities as communicators?

We’ll talk about this in three parts: 1. knowing yourself, 2. knowing who you’re communicating with, and 3. building and practicing your personal communication style.

Know thyself

First and foremost, we need to know ourselves. We need to know our proclivities, our preferences, and our blind spots. Communication is a two-way street, and if we want to successfully navigate those streets, we’ve got to understand the role that we play in the communication process. This begins with knowing our values, our triggers, and our style.

There’s a lovely quote I read once that speaks volumes here:

”We do not see things as they are; we see things as we are” - Anais Nin

In order to understand ourselves, our biases, and our points of view as we communicate, we need to be aware of the fact that the world is not as we see it! We see things through our own perspectives, through our experiences, through how we respond to those experiences. It therefore behooves us to understand how these perspectives are formed!

Some of this is work for the therapist’s office, and I won’t pretend to know enough to walk through that. But let me share a few things that have helped me along the way.

1. Understand how our experiences shape us

We all see the world with our own unique perspectives. These perspectives are influenced by two major factors: our mood, and our experiences.

The preeminent filter is our mood - when we are not in a calm and collected mood, every input that we receive gets strongly tainted with it. When we are sad, every input is dampened. When we are excited, every input is amplified.

Recently, my little guy has been using the phrase “me no happy” a bunch - partly as a cutesy way to express himself, but also partly as a way to communicate something that he’s unhappy about. Our bedtime routine has us each sharing three things that we’re thankful for that day, but his unhappy mood made each thing he said tainted with sadness. He had nothing to be thankful for that day, and declared that he didn’t enjoy any of it. After a good night’s sleep (of ~10 hours), he completely changed his tune and happily proclaimed that yesterday was an awesome day because of the 15 things that we had done together as a family.

This is the impact of our mood - it is the lens by which we interpret our inputs from the world. While not entirely controllable, our mood is certainly steerable. The factors immediately in our control are things such as the length and quality of our sleep, our diet and nutrition, and the amount and regularity of our physical exercise. Do we get the requisite 8 hours a night of sleep? Are we eating healthy and with moderation? Are we regularly engaging in physical activity that raises our heart rate and releases endorphins?

Then there are the factors that, while still in our control, aren’t as immediate. Things like the amount of stress we have in our lives, the environments that we place ourselves in, and the quality and security of our social connections are all factors that strongly influence our mood.

Next, our experiences. In his essay “Texts and Pretexts”, Aldous Huxley wrote that

“Experience is not what happens to you, but rather what you do with what happens to you”.

Each event that happens to us is a neutral event in and of itself, but take that event, filter it through our mood, and add a response to it and you’ve got an experience. This is why two people can be present for the same event and experience it so differently! One person may be in a pensive mood and, combined with their predisposition may choose to respond positively to an event while another may have a very different response. These responses create an experience that our minds store up and accumulate. Over time, these experiences shape our perspective and become a critical part of our decision making process, and by extension our communication process.

2. Know what we gravitate towards

We all have biases. Some of these are natural, evolutionary biases engrained in our species over centuries. Some of these are cultural biases reinforced by our experiences and our environment. Some of these are personal biases shaped by the inputs and our responses to those inputs over the years that have elevated to the realm of character.

All of these strongly influence the things that we gravitate towards; the subjects we find interesting, the ideals we are inspired by, the values we desire to emanate, and the style of communication that we prefer.

It is a fool’s errand to attempt to eliminate our biases. Rather, we should accept them, analyze them, and be acutely aware of how they influence us so that when we communicate with others we can be sensitive to their impact. A helpful exercise here is to regularly reflect on our experiences and to note (or take note of) biases and trends in our responses so that we can form a holistic picture of our biases.

3. Learn how to detect our blind spots

Lastly, we all have blind spots. Whether these are technical (ie things we don’t have the knowledge about), emotional (ie feelings we haven’t fully developed yet), mental (ie ideas we haven’t fully fleshed out, learned about, and considered), or spiritual (ie pertaining to the metaphysical, spiritual, and mystical realms), we all have many blind spots and gaps.

These blind spots end up impacting our communication in a generally negative fashion. At best they can create an awkward moment; at worst they can greatly impact our credibility and hence our ability to communicate effectively in the future.

A couple quick notes on how to detect these:

1. Be careful about strong opinions. When you find yourself expressing a strong opinion, check yourself. Strong opinions tend to be emotionally based, instead of being rational and knowledge based, and as such are generally indicators of a gap.
2. Check your defenses. Being defensive is another sign that there might be a gap. Especially when we’re not being attacked, things that trigger defensive responses are usually signs that we haven’t vulnerably fleshed out the topic and therefore have a gap there.
3. Listen to your believable people. Believable people are people who have proven track record of being right about a specific area. When they point out things in your life, listen to them!

Good communication requires deep understanding of the topic, the context, and the parties involved. The more work we do to understand ourselves and how we show up the more impact we’ll end up being able to have on the outcome of our communicative interactions!