The Art Of Communication

In this day and age, electronic message rules the world.  If Facebook has their way, there will be no more need for telephones.  I'm sure Alexander Graham Bell would not have been able to comprehend this even in his day.

Unfortunately with the age of electronic messaging and Facebook and social media, humans are becoming a species that does not fully communicate with one another.  Our faces are buried in our phones with our thumbs typing incoherent symbols and abbreviations to one another.  We are becoming void of the art of communication.

Misunderstandings often happen because we don't know how to communicate.  Misunderstandings happen because sometimes we need to speak up.  Communication is difficult enough in the best of circumstances and trying at the worst of times.

Communication is about learning how to listen and speak up.  It is about learning how to get your thought across to another person without expecting that they should read your mind.  No one really knows what goes on in another person's mind, but yet we as a human species expect that all too often.

If we fail to try to learn how to better communicate, can we expect to be heard?  Can we expect someone to understand us if we expect them to read our mind?  If we don't practice and improve on the art of communication, how can we expect the world to understand what it is that we know?

I am always amazed that even when I think I'm stating something clearly, it can often get misinterpreted and misunderstood.  Even the simplest of statements in communication don't always get received by the recipient the way we think they do.

Hopefully the recipient speaks up and asks for clarification or we detect the deficiency of delivery.  This is one reason that the electronic messaging fails because we cannot see how the other person reacts to what we said.  The body language is not available for observation and it is a key in communication.

Let's be all that we can be as humans by working on communication.  Let's learn to find our flaws and then work to improve them.  Let's not just assume that everyone understands what we may not be saying even if we think we are saying it.

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Blog Post And Images (c) 2/1/16 by Don Shetterly

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