Contemplating Communication

I’m really big on communication.  I love the flow of ideas, and I love to share them with people, especially if they disagree with me.  To me, no conversation is more entertaining and inspiring than one that exposes me to different perspectives and changes the way I think.

Everyone has experienced bad communication.  It’s frustrating, irritating, and causes us to disconnect with the sender.  The only benefit to bad communication is that it makes for some funny stories in the retelling.  

Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of communicating via Google and email.  Communicating online is very different from communicating face-to-face.  Online communication doesn’t include the nonverbal cues that help us make meaning from the words.   All the facial expressions, tones, and inflections are missing.  There’s no laughter in an email.  It can be funny, but it doesn’t laugh.  A person has to deal with the bald words, stripped of their intention or deeper meaning.  It’s why emails can seem so snarky.  You don’t have any way of determining what the writer really means.  

I’m also finding that understanding the communication style of others greatly facilitates understanding.  I am definitely an abstract-random communicator.  I love to jump between ideas as the whim takes me, and I tend to get restless if I stay for too long on any one subject.  In short, I really like my communications to have a free flow and non-sequential feeling about them.  I like lots of words, too.  Recently, I’ve had to communicate with a number of concrete-sequential thinkers.  Many of these people aren’t words.  It’s as if they are given a strict allotment of words to use each day, with a substantial bonus for staying well under their word budget.  I think I drive these people crazy.  It must be absolute torture for them to read through all my meandering words in order to find my point.  For them, the objective is to get to the point.  For me, it’s the journey to the point.  

Since it’s become increasingly important that my communication have meaning for my recipient, I’ve accepted that I need to adapt my style to meet the needs of others.  It’s called writing for your audience in the writing process, which is something I learned in elementary school.  It requires grace and flexibility on my part, but in the end it makes me a better communicator.

This flexibility doesn’t mean that I strip everything away and create skeletal communications.  It means I need to change the structure and prioritize information.  Stating the point or objective of the communication becomes a top priority.  How I come to a conclusion may not be important for understanding, so, no matter how fascinating I find it, if it doesn’t promote understanding, I need to exclude it.  Decisions about what information to include become easy to make if you measure every decision against the standard of recipient understanding.

I also think that we need to pay more attention to verbalizing manners and other customary social interactions.  For example, I have to express things like gratitude and appreciation explicitly, since no one can see me smile in an email. Sincerely expressing social niceties moves higher up the list of priorities in online communications. This adds more words to my emails, but is worth the connection and rapport I establish with my recipients.

For me, communication is always about making connections and building relationships.  Reflecting on how others receive my emails and texts just makes the process better.