One of
the ideals of many people is to become a ‘great communicator’. Truth is
though...very little of us truly are.
Why is
that?
I believe
that a ‘great communicator’ is someone who has the capacity to give another
person an accurate picture of what is happening in his or hers emotional and
psychological life – and in particular, can describe the very darkest,
trickiest and most awkward sides in such a way that others can understand, and
even sympathize with them.
Now I
realize that sounds very daunting, so perhaps it’s no surprise that many of us
or not such great communicators because we simply do not wish to expose
ourselves that way.
But make
no mistake: Where we don’t ‘communicate’ a message, we still manage to get our
points across, but just in toxic forms. As the expression goes, ‘if we can’t
talk it out, we act it out’
So when
someone asked me recently why we are not all great communicators, I shared
these three important reasons:
1. No
good role models
We learn
to speak by hearing others speak. And in particular, we learn to speak about
tricky topics because we hear others discussing them elegantly and kindly.
But most
of us did not grow up around ‘good communicators’. I sure know I
didn’t...My parents loved me deeply, but they did not pull off the trick of
describing difficulties within in timely, sane and reassuring way.
And then
there is the even more dangerous possibility. What if the role model was a
parent who loved us fiercely, but wanted us to be a certain way. They could not
be disappointed. It was our job to help keep them intact.
This way
we learnt that we could easily hurt someone by communicating a part of your
personality which doesn’t fit the preconceived ideas. A precedent was set...
2. Can
you be ‘bad’ and ‘good’?
In the
ideal upbringing, those who loved us would be able to do so without demanding
that everything about us is good. They could tolerate that we could –
sometimes, for a while – be selfish, angry, lazy, close minded or mean – and
yet still remain accepted.
But
mostly we come from backgrounds which fall far short of this ideal.
We feel
that if we ever lose our temper, we will be revealed as aggressive. Or if we
confess to having some lazy sides, we will be condemned as layabouts. Or if we
reveal our worries about a task at work, we’ll set off a panic about our lack
of skill.
Our
tendency to assume that others will judge us is the central obstacle to good
communication. Shame robs us of the capacity to put our case sensibly and
plausibly. It makes us long to hide our failings; we feel the only way to
protect ourselves and retain dignity is to go silent.
3. I
can’t do it
I guess
it’s no surprise that we sometimes think that communication will never work
out. Looking back at my own life I have failed so often in the past. My history
is full of failed attempts where I tried to tell a colleague, a friend or a
partner something and it hasn’t worked.
So, what
do we do? We give up.
But, to
inject hope into the situation, I learned that this fear is based on a false
assumption: The idea that we can’t learn how to better communicate about
what is going on inside us.
The fact
that it didn’t work out in the past isn’t decisive. I just needed to train
myself to accept the darkness, to reduce fear, to present myself calmly and to
not give way to self-loathing…
Only that
way we can become that great communicator after all.
