I was a communications minor back in college. “Whoop-dee-doo,” you might say, “a communications minor?” Yes, I know that means absolutely nothing when I’m trying to highlight the idea that I’m somewhat qualified to wade into the deep-end of how people should interact with one another, but at the very least I can tell you that I took a few classes at the university level involving research into the more complex levels of communication.
To this day, I distinctly remember sitting in a lecture hall of about 400 students and listening to my professor talk to us about how he should talk to us in order to make sure we understood what he was talking about. My brain starts to hurt a little bit when I think about what that last sentence actually means, but you’re probably smarter than I am, so my guess is that you know what my professor meant.
It’s essentially Communication 101, and the breakdown is fairly straightforward from beginning-to-end regarding what needs to happen on the journey of a certain subject. Let’s start with thinking of a topic I might theoretically want someone to clearly understand in the way I’m able to understand it. For the sake of illustration, I’m going to choose the topic of Captain America’s abdominal muscles.
If I want you to know everything I know about Captain America’s abs, and I want to make sure you understand the Captain’s abs the way I understand them, it’s important that I’m keenly aware of what will happen when I start to talk with you about this very important issue.
Every topic, issue, idea, or argument starts out in its purest form as the deliverer’s interpretation of that subject. I believe that Captain America’s abs are ripped, and I think you should know that truth too. Therefore, my topic must then pass through what the communication world calls my “grid.” My grid is my personal way of understanding, reasoning, or problem solving. It incorporates my communication style and takes into account my personality; it is affected by my history and the way I was raised; it involves my social awareness and how I am able to interact with others. Basically, my grid is my way of communicating.
So, after my topic passes through my grid, we come to the point when I actually communicate it to you:
Oh, man! Do you know how awesome Captain America’s abs are? They are so ripped! See, Steve Rogers was a frail and sickly young man who wanted to serve his country, so he volunteered for a top-secret performance-enhancing experiment where he was taken to a laboratory in Washington, D.C. and injected with a Super-Soldier Serum. After the doctors administered the secret serum, Steve Rogers emerged from this special vita-ray chamber with a perfect human body. He was then put through a series of tests and training exercises that crafted him into who we now know as Captain America. He can do like, I don’t know, a million sit-ups and it shows because he has washboard abs that you can scrub your laundry on. They’re amazing!
When it’s communicated (albeit with a certain amount of bizarre enthusiasm), the topic must then pass through what is called “noise.” Noise can be anything in the immediate environment that can dilute the purity of the message. This can be actual audible noise, a cell phone buzzing in your pocket, a bad attitude on your part, a child pulling on your clothes, or a bear wrestling a chimpanzee in the background behind my shoulder as I speak to you. Anything that distracts or “waters down” the message being communicated is referred to as “noise.”
The message then takes an obvious course of action where it is received by you. It passes through your grid (which is totally different than mine), and then becomes your idea of what I was trying to tell you. The goal in all of this, of course, is that my idea of the subject be exactly the same as your idea of the subject.
Now, all of this may seem somewhat simple, but the reality is that we are all constantly misunderstood in life. For example, something we might be trying to tell someone doesn’t come out of our mouths just right. Or the person we are talking to is tired and distracted. Or the way they process information isn’t the same as the way we process information, so we get the sense that the entire conversation is one big miss. Stuff like that. You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?
Communication, in theory, is easy. Communication, in reality, is hard. My point in all of this is to help you understand how complex communication really can be. It’s a lot more than just “talking with someone.” When people attempt to share information with one another and they try to make their ideas on a subject exactly the same as someone else’s idea of that subject, a lot can get in the way to interrupt the flow. And because someone might have a frustrating history with some various past miscommunications, the temptation in the present is to communicate as little as possible as to not relive the discomfort of the past. Believe me, I understand that mindset, but communicating less with someone is, was, and always will be a bad idea.
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