Most of societies problems result from a failure to communicate needs
or wants effectively. Often, most arguments occur from people
communicating different things that the opposing party is not receiving
and that party then communicates things back that the first person then
also does not receive. The result is akin to the following argument
Person 1: My shoes are brown.
Person 2: No, your hair is brown.
Person 1: Are you looking at my shoes? They clearly, are the same color as this brown bag so they must be brown.
Person 2: Your crazy! Your hair's not blond and it's not red or even black so it's got to be brown.
Now
this is an oversimplified version of an argument, but make no mistake,
arguments just as ridiculous happen often and the main reason is both
parties are communicating ineffectively. Now I grew up with your
grandma, who was a school counselor, so I was versed on effective
communication early and often. As an aside, I believe many of societies
ills have come from the diminished role of counselors in our society.
It is almost to the point where sitting down and talking about feelings
and how to communicate seems like a waste of time, when it couldn't be
further from the truth. Effective communication creates time. If you
can communicate exactly what you want there is no repeating, no
rephrasing, no questions (for the most part) and this would create
minutes an hour, hours a day and days a month of extra time. So it
seems like a good investment rather then converting school counselors to
extra administrators or relegating them to picking out your schedule.
Is the decline in marriages that stay together a direct result of the
average person being unable to communicate even with their spouse? I
would say yes. Correct the communication plague and a lot of other
problems would then be gone, but anyway. Now there are lots of
principles of good communication and the most effective person to learn
these from are a counselor or someone trained in it. For you, you can
talk to your grandma but here I will just address broad principles that I
have seen and used. The first thing is understand what the person
you're communicating with is trying to say. This doesn't always match
the words they are saying. For example the greeting "how are your
doing?" followed with the answer "how are you doing?" and that ends the
communication. If you look at the words both parties didn't answer the
other questioned and just walked away. The reality is they we're
communicating "friendly greeting" followed by the other's "friendly
greeting" so there is no answer because their wasn't actually a question
despite what the words would lead you to believe. So in any
communication event the first thing that is of utmost importance is
understanding what the other person is communicating. Often I will
rephrase the person's statement into what I believe is the essence of
what they mean in an effort to clear up any miscommunication such as
"I'm dying" "Are you hurt?" etc.
