The purpose of communication is to get your message across to others. A message is a packet of information, which has been defined by Gregory Bateson as ‘the difference that makes a difference’. Your information – what you ‘mean’ to transfer to someone else is not always what is communicated. Sometimes our messages get confused and derailed. The response is not what we expect and we know that the meaning of the message as the other person interprets it is contained in the response. Thus, our information exchange failed. The failure may lead us into another conversation entirely, unless we persevere.
Dialogue is a process of assumptions. I say something and you assume you know what I mean and I do the same. If we know each other reasonably well, we may assume correctly, but maybe not. I may use words that the linguist call a ‘complex equivalence’ such as ‘love’ and most of you will assume you know what I mean. But then again, I may not even know what I mean. The meaning of ‘love’ changes with time and context. To love a father is not the same as to love a wife. To love a father at ten is not the same as to love a father at forty. Love is a complex equivalent – everybody knows what it means – don’t they?
This is a process that involves both the sender of the message and the receiver. This process leaves room for error, with messages often misinterpreted by one or more of the parties involved. This causes unnecessary confusion and counter productivity. In fact, a message is successful only when both the sender and the receiver perceive it in the same way.
It is difficult enough to communicate under normal circumstances, but the degree of difficult is elevated exponentially when we are trying to ask someone to tell us something they don’t really want to share. Here we are not trying to give information, but to get information. This presumes that the person knows the information we are seeking and, knowing, is willing to share. When in a professional relationship, the information we are seeking is often something that the other person doesn’t even want known – yet here we are seeking.
In spite of the increasing importance of communication skills in these situations, many professionals continue to struggle with this, unable to communicate [seeking or giving information] effectively. This inability makes it nearly impossible for them to be effective in the workplace and stands in the way of career progression.
Getting your message across is paramount to achieving outcome goals. To do this, you must understand what your message is, what audience you are sending it to, and how it will be perceived. You must also add-in the circumstances surrounding your communications, such as situational and cultural context.
Perhaps the best place to start is in the receiving part of communication – the ability to hear and interpret what the other person is saying.
Empathic Communication
There cannot be right thinking and action without
right speech. | Buddha
The mind of the beginner is empty, free of the
habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt,
and open to all the possibilities.
The Beginner’s Mind
The goal of every helper must be to first understand the person whom they serve. This requires a process of engaging that person in a kind of communication in which the person can and will share their innermost thoughts from which you can infer in a kind of retroengineering their inner logic. Once the helper understands the inner logic of the person they are serving, they may be capable of helping that person either change the inner logic or find better behaviors to serve their goals.
The greatest barrier to understanding the inner logic of another person is our own inner logic. It is our own inner logic that suggests that we ‘have the right way’. We have a tendency to rush in, to fix things up with good advice, without having taken the time to really understand on what basis the person seeking help is making his/her decisions.
Communication is the most important skill in life. But as we communicate we give information about the world as we ‘see’ it. But our reality is not the ‘real world’ it is merely our perception of it. Our experience of the world is experience of an interpretation.
“We don’t see things as they are. We see them as we are.”
Anais Nin
So the first responsibility of the helper is to place his or her own inner logic aside and seek to understand the unique inner logic of the client.
The overriding concern is to first seek to understand by listening to the other person without projecting your own home movie onto the other person. Most people do not listen with the intent to understand; they listen with the intent to reply. They’re either speaking or preparing to speak. They’re filtering everything through their own inner logic, reading their autobiography into other people’s lives.
The real key to your influence with the client is your example, your actual conduct. Your example flows naturally out of who you truly are. Your character is constantly radiating, communicating. From it, I instinctively trust or distrust you and your efforts.
What you are shouts so loudly in my ears
that I cannot hear what you say.
Emerson
When another person speaks, we’re usually listening at one of four levels.
• We may be ignoring another person, not really listening at all.
• We may be pretending.
• We may practice selective listening, hearing only certain points of the conversation.
• Or we may even practice attentive listening, paying attention and focusing energy on the words that are being said.
But few of us practice empathic listening with the specific intent to understand. Empathic listening gets inside another person’s frame of reference. It involves much more than registering, reflecting or even understanding the words that are said.
Communications experts estimate that only 07% of our communication is represented by the words we say.
Another 38% is represented by our sounds.
And 55% is represented by our facial expression and our body language.
You must watch and listen for feeling, for meaning. You watch and listen for behavior. Instead of projecting your own autobiography and assuming thoughts, feelings, motives and interpretation, you deal with the reality inside another person’s head and heart. If the person says something like – “my mother doesn’t love me”, you cannot assume that you ‘know’ what s/he means. You must ask: What would your mother do if she did love you? You’re listening to understand. Empathic listening is risky. It takes a great deal of security to go into a deep listening experience because you open yourself up to be influenced. You may actually believe what you hear.
Because we so often listen autobiographically, we tend to respond in one of four ways:
• we evaluate – either we agree or disagree;
• we probe – we ask questions from our own frame of reference;
• we advise – we give counsel from our own frame of reference; or
• we interpret – we try to figure people out, to explain their motives, their behavior, based on our own motives and behavior.
When you evaluate everything before it is fully explained, what are you evaluating? Shouldn’t you be helping the person to evaluate rather than evaluating yourself? When you asked the question – “what would your mother do if she loved you? – it is probably the first opportunity for the individual to really think about what there angst means.
Probing is playing twenty questions – it controls and invades. It is also logical, and the language of logic is different from the language of sentiment and emotion. This does not mean that you cannot ask questions and we will examine later how to pose questions and what attitude to assume. But first, be prepared to listen.
Often when people are really given a chance to open up, they are able to unravel their own problems and the solutions become clear to them in the process. Too often, the expert is ready to provide a solution. Even if it is the right one, we have not helped the client learn how to address his/her own solutions. Only the client can determine whether s/he is even going to implement the solution, so their participation in finding it is critical.
At other times, a person might really need additional perspective and help. The more that this help is offered in the context of training the child to learn how to think through problems towards solutions, the more effective your modeling will be. The Feuerstein construct of mediated learning experience, in which the teacher helps the child think about what s/he is thinking and shares his or her own mindful internal states is appropriate here.
The key is to genuinely seek the welfare of the person, to let the person get to the problem and the solution at his own pace and time. Layer upon layer – it’s like peeling an onion until you get to the soft inner core. The client must trust that when you finally find out what the real issues are, you will not become punishing. Being amoral in regard to clients is not ignoring the morality of behavior – it is setting it aside at least until you understand fully the meaning of the immorality to the client.
If the client sees the behavior as immoral and seeks your sanction for it, you can certainly indicate that the behavior is immoral, even though the client may not be. You may need to separate the client from the behavior, particularly if the child is too immature to fully absorb the meaning of the immorality. On the other hand, if the client is truly and deliberately acting in an evil way, you will need to assert that the behavior is inappropriate and that you cannot, and will not, allow it to continue without consequences. At this point, the client will need to determine whether your trust in him/her is worth changing behavior for.
However, often, the client will see the behavior just as immoral as you do, but not have the solution as to how to replace the behavior. Perhaps they feel pressure from peers, teachers or parents to act in these ways. Until you know how the client feels about the behaviors, you may be acting in a way that indicates that you don’t care about the person because s/he is immoral and you lose the possibility of becoming a source of help with the problem. You are only a source of help if you are truly there for the client, even when s/he is not.
Maturity is a balance between courage and consideration. Seeking to understand requires consideration; seeking to be understood requires courage. Your character, your relationship and then the logic of your presentation, who you are, what you mean to the client, and the clarity of your thinking; these are the dimensions of trust.
Homework:
- Select a relationship in which you sense the level of trust is low. Try to understand and write down the situation from the other person’s point of view. In your next interaction, listen for understanding, comparing what you are hearing with what you wrote down. How valid were your assumptions? Did you really understand that individual’s perspective?
- Share the concept with someone close to you. Tell him or her that you want to work on really listening to others and ask for feedback within a week. How did you do? How did it make that person feel?
- The next time you have an opportunity to watch people communicate, cover your ears for a few minutes and just watch. What emotions are being communicated that may not come across in words alone?
- Next time you catch yourself inappropriately using one of the autobiographical responses – probing, evaluating, advising, or interpreting – try to turn the situation into a trust deposit by acknowledgment and apology. [I’m sorry; I just realized I’m not really trying to understand. Could we start again?]