The Art Of Communication!

Today I want to cover a very mundane topic.

Something that we all can relate to.

Something that affects all our lives.

Sometimes in profound ways.

And that is the topic of communication.

But I want to approach this in a very meticulous,

Surgical way.

And yet have it be very mundane.

So that you don't have to go somewhere to verify it.

It can be verified in our daily lives.

The principles apply here,

Between you and me.

They apply in your personal relationships,

In your professional relationships,

Friends.

What is communication?

And how do we know if communication has happened?

I think we are busy talking about strategies and how-to's.

But we don't really get to the root of matters.

And according to me,

The definition,

It all starts with the definition.

What is communication?

Think of how you would define it in a sentence.

Something we do day in day out.

Most of us probably get paid to do it.

Can we come up with a definition that resonates with our heart?

But what communication might be if we were to define it?

And if you are able to define it,

Also go the extra step of asking yourself,

How do I know if communication has happened the way I want it to?

Hopefully this was a humbling exercise for most of us.

And if you think I know what communication is,

I don't know either.

I'm gonna see what shows up for me.

We all know what miscommunication looks like,

Feels like,

How painful or how expensive it can be.

But the reason I want to dive into it is because it closely relates to happiness,

To peace,

Especially when it relates to other people.

And more importantly,

People who are close to us.

Somehow in a very complex way,

The environment that we dwell in,

And the environment includes physical,

Mental,

Virtual,

And comprises of people who we interact with on a daily or a frequent basis.

They end up dictating the quality of our lives.

And we,

As a co-contributor,

Dictate the quality of their lives.

The way I would define communication would be to bring all the concerned people involved here on the same page.

That's the goal of communication,

To make sure what you know is known by them exactly the way you know it,

Or as close to the way you know it as possible.

It's quite simple.

But before you can share what you know with someone else,

You need to know what you know clearly.

Otherwise you end up saying something and meaning something else.

And we all have been in situations where,

Oh,

That's not what I meant.

This is what I meant.

And if that was the governing principle of these sessions,

Where I try to say something,

Or I think I'm saying something,

But you are understanding something completely different,

There would be dissonance between you and I.

And that dissonance would probably transpire into you not showing up the next time.

The principle here is resonance,

Not dissonance.

And resonance can only happen when there is a conscious effort,

In this case from my part,

Because it's a one-way conversation for most of the part.

Most of the times I'm the one speaking,

And you have no choice but to listen.

So the responsibility is on my shoulders to make sure I'm as precise as I can be in sharing what I have to share,

Trying different ways of making sure what I know is shared with you so that you leave with a taste of what I want you to know.

You may not agree with what I tell you.

That's a different thing.

But as long as we share this communication,

And given how digital our communications are these days,

The only tool we have most of the times is voice.

That's probably at play here as well.

You can't see me.

You can't question.

But yet I have a feeling that there is resonance.

So once we define it,

We define communication as a means to share,

To resonate.

We need to understand how resonance happens.

And most people are a reflection of us.

Sometimes we don't understand things.

Sometimes we find people who don't understand things easily.

Sometimes we are closed to listening to something.

Sometimes we find people who are closed to listening to something.

But not communicating is not an option.

So we have to try different strategies.

For me,

The vivid imagery that we can evoke through words paints a picture that we all can see.

It's like a movie being painted on the screens of our mind that we all can follow along based on my rendition,

Narration.

So we end up seeing,

Understanding,

And hopefully resonating.

I remember reading this book by Malcolm Gladwell years ago.

One of his books,

I forget which one,

Whether it was Outliers or something else,

But very explains how there's a difference between Western world of listening and Eastern world of listening,

Which the moment I read it,

I knew it in my heart was just true.

So what it means is we,

As a Western society,

Are a speaker-oriented society,

Which means that the communication depends on the speaker.

If I don't understand something as a listener,

It's not my fault.

It's the speaker's fault.

Think about your college days.

When you were in class and you didn't understand something,

You didn't go around telling everyone that I don't understand because I'm not able to understand.

It's my problem.

You felt it,

You knew it in your heart that it was the professor's problem.

He or she wasn't explaining it clearly.

That's the speaker-oriented society.

Whereas in the East,

We have a listener-oriented society,

Which means that if I'm the listener and I listen to something and I don't get it,

It's my problem.

The speaker has done everything they can,

But it's my problem to understand.

The responsibility of understanding is mine.

So given how entrenched we are into the speaker-oriented society,

I think somehow we have forgotten.

Maybe the analogy of sitting in a college class evokes one or two memories,

If not many,

About how you not understanding is your professor's problem.

We've forgotten this because now if we say something and someone else doesn't understand it,

We consider it their problem.

But it's not that way.

We can't change our stance so easily.

So we are a speaker-oriented society and we have to honor that.

And there's more power in it,

Trust me.

It makes you more skillful.

Being able to give analogies like I just gave,

Being able to understand the culture,

Pick out the relevant examples,

Paint that vivid imagery and put the point across.

There's a lot of power in it.

So the basics of communication,

The definition is important to share what we know as close as possible with someone else.

But you have to be so precise in building this imagery,

In telling a story.

It's like kids.

We tell them stories.

It's like adults.

All we remember about our culture,

About our past,

About mythology is all stories.

One of the biggest gifts we have is storytelling and that can be tremendously powerful in helping us communicate.

If you go to a theater to watch a movie and you don't get the movie,

You never say it's my problem,

It's the director's problem,

It's the cinematographer's problem,

Story writer's problem.

The same way,

We are the storytellers.

What story do we tell?

Do we want to tell?

What do we want the other person to take away?

How do you want them to feel?

Like right now,

I'm posing these questions.

I want to evoke this desire in you that this makes sense.

I want to tell better stories.

I want to be a better communicator.

And wherever you are,

You don't need any more skills to postpone communication in the truest form.

Same applies with writing.

We are all busy people.

We receive so many emails.

We write emails as if we were the ones going to read it.

So we write long emails or we write haphazard emails.

What if we applied this same definition to our emails,

To our texts,

To our blogs?

What am I trying to say here?

Who is the reader?

How are they going to read it?

When I write as if the understanding of this piece is my responsibility,

The understanding of this piece by someone else is my responsibility,

Changes the whole game.

And it's not violating anything that you're not used to because we are after all a speaker oriented society.

This session is quite forgiving for you,

Not for me.

So if you don't get something,

You can easily drop out because it's an optional session.

So the responsibility is even higher because I need to be,

For lack of a better phrase,

More entertaining,

More convincing about what I have to say so that you would show up again.

But when we go to our relationships,

To our jobs,

It's not that forgiving.

People check out.

We waste time.

Some miscommunications are expensive.

The principle is the same,

Whether you are in your relationships or whether you are in your corporate job.

What do I want to say?

How do I want the other person to understand and what route can I take to get there?

Storytelling,

Compelling storytelling almost always works.

Unfortunately,

I'm not going to get into the strategies because every person's strategy will be different.

That's the diversity we want to come up with.

I just want to evoke this simple mundane activity that we do and put it higher in our life,

In our priority list because we miscommunicate,

We break hearts,

We create frustration,

We create anger,

We get angry.

But if we come from an intentional place,

We can reduce the conflicts that we have in our relationships tremendously.

We say what we want to say,

We say what we mean,

We say what we want the other person to understand and we take feedback,

Especially from our loved ones.

Hey,

Did I say that efficiently?

Would I do better?

And the more you do it,

The better you get.

And we do it regardless of who we do it with.

We do a lot of communication,

But without knowing the definition and without being intentional.

Coming to the next abstract question,

How do we know whether communication has happened?

Most of the times your heart knows whether you successfully delivered what you wanted to deliver.

And I don't mean your mind,

I mean your heart.

You want to talk to people's hearts,

You don't want to talk to their minds.

And when you talk to their hearts,

You're talking to your heart.

Sometimes,

Without any fault of yours,

You might say something that might hurt someone's heart.

But you will know,

You'll know when you have done it and you'll know how to correct it.

Sending an email doesn't mean it was read or it was understood.

Audio conversation doesn't mean it was understood or even it was heard.

So you got to pick your friends and ask them,

Hey,

Did you get what I was trying to say?

But again,

The metric is,

Did I take the story to a logical conclusion in my heart?

Could have I paused more?

Could have I jumped a little higher,

Better imagery?

Your heart knows all these things because we grew up watching movies.

So we know what a good movie,

What a good story feels like,

Looks like,

Sounds like.

But the responsibility in both these questions lies with us.

First to ask this question and then to execute the definition that we come up with and see how we can use words in innovative ways,

Sometimes to share jokes,

Sometimes to speak the truth in a convincing way.

Avoid conflicts.

So many benefits.

Try it.

Thank you.