Communication: The Important Thing Is Not What You Want To Say, But How You Say It
In “The Little Prince”, the author tells us that “language is a source of misunderstanding”.
This very wise sentence on communication points out the fact that it is not easy to convert our thoughts into words and express them in such a way that our interlocutor can fully understand them. What you say is not necessarily understood as you think it is.
In fact, the messages we send are never 100% understood. If someone says, for example, “I am in love”, this refers to a reality that is very difficult for the other person to understand.
“I’m in love” can mean being passionate, having established a very strong bond with a partner, or simply feeling very drawn to someone. We need to know someone well to know what they mean when they say the phrase “I am in love”.
Words are not the only source of communication, because they are accompanied by attitudes, gestures, postures.
We can say something with our mouth and totally something else with our tone, our look or our attitude in general. Learning to communicate is a real art.
What you say…
The biggest communication challenge is talking about our inner world, including our feelings, emotions, and our perception of the world.
It is not easy to put into words everything we feel and it is perfectly impossible to have control over what we will generate in others by communicating.
To convey something, we must always take into account the reactions we trigger in the person to whom we are addressing.
We do not communicate only to convey information, but most of the time we want our words to have an impact on our interlocutors.
We want them to believe us, admire us, agree with us and understand us.
But we also sometimes look for them to fear us, obey us, allow us to impose ourselves, or just get hurt.
Strange as it may sound, our communication goals can sometimes cloud our message. Those who listen to us then cease to understand us.
What is behind your communication?
It is precisely the intention that defines the essence of each message. We can seek to flatter someone by recognizing their qualities, but also to show them that we adore them and thus make them more vulnerable to an attempt at manipulation that we are trying to set up.
This intention is not always conscious in our mind, however. Also, we very often try to demonstrate to others their mistakes by our words, without ever considering that we ourselves are perhaps going astray.
We believe that the purpose of what we are talking about is to lay bare our feelings, but we ignore the fact that we are really looking to instill compassion and empathy in others.
If we do not get it, we are convinced that the listener has not understood a word of what we have just said.
Beyond the words you speak
Human communication is a complex process, which is always tinged with confusion. It doesn’t just depend on the words we use to say things, even if they are very important, but rather a combination of different factors.
We must take into account the time, the place and the interlocutor. But, above all, we must strive to always try to say what we really want to express.
We human beings are constantly in communication. The expression on our face, the way we dress and walk, our look and all our attitudes betray our thoughts.
It is therefore evident that most of our messages are delivered unconsciously. We sometimes think that someone’s head is “not coming back to us”.
This means that his gestures and his attitudes seem to us to show an unreliable personality. We communicate every moment of our life, and all of these expressions are a basis for forming positive or negative bonds with those around us.
Communicate with our affect
The daily links we have with the traders in our neighborhood, for example, are imbued with sensations and emotions to which we do not give much importance.
But the connections we make in our lives with the people who are dear to us are fundamental to us.
It is very important that we can let go of certain mechanisms that prevent our messages from being understood correctly by others. To achieve this, we must eradicate certain forms of communication from our daily lives and create new ones.
In a simple way, it is necessary to learn to communicate with our affect. We must express what we feel in the simplest way possible and above all avoid referring to what the other is feeling.
How can we claim that we know how a person feels if we don’t know the totality of what we are feeling?
Aggressive communication always leaves harmful traces. The only companions of anger should be silence and pause.
If we don’t make an effort to summon them when we get angry, it is very likely that we are saying things that are beyond our thought.
Good communication requires serenity and relevance. We need to look for the right time, the right place, and the right frame of mind to talk about difficult topics.
Conversely, we can let our thinking flow when we feel peaceful and open to others.
In reality, what is complicated in communication is not what you say, but the way you say it.
What makes it possible to serenely maintain an important bond with a person is to find the best way to communicate to him what we feel and what we think.
Images by Robert Ireland, Pascal Campion and Christian Schloe
