Communicating: What did You Say?

Communication, communication, communication.  Whenever someone has a problem in a friendship, marriage or life you seem to be the answer. Is that true? At least partially. The problem may not be that you aren’t communicating, but that you are miscommunicating. Sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. First, what is communication? It is how we express a thought or an idea. Is talking the only form of communication? NO! We communicate through our body language, facial expressions, nonverbal cues, our tone, through texting, emails, and social media. It is important that our nonverbal cues, tone, and words all line up.

When we communicate, we encode what we are thinking into words. Then the words that we say travel through the air or media and into another’s ear. Then he or she has to decode and process what we said. Hopefully, our message comes across clearly! If not, then there has been a miscommunication. There are many ways that a miscommunication can happen. We could misspeak, or if we texted our friend instead of talking to them, then they missed out of our facial expressions and tone. Or our friend can misinterpret what we said. Who would of thought that talking and texting others could be so difficult and complex!

I will share an example when I miscommunicated. Let us see if you can figure out what I did wrong. 😊 In my sophomore year, I had to teach my Leadership class about verbal and nonverbal communication. Imagine that you are in my class. When the teacher turned the time over to me, I walked up to the front of the room with my notes. I slammed down my notes on the podium at the front of the room and angrily said, “Today is going to be a great day. We are going to have so much fun!” Do you think that my classmates believed me? Would you? Why not? It is because my body language and tone did not match what I said. There have many studies done that show that our nonverbal cues are between 50-80% of our communication. That is HUGE!! Have you ever read a social media post or a text and attached a different tone than the author was trying to convey? I know that I have. Now you know why we tend to have more miscommunications more on social media/texting than in face to face conversations. We are missing out on at least half of the conversation!!

The words that we say are also important. When we want others to understand what we are experiencing, we should express how our emotions and thoughts were affected by the events. This is known by many names. In child development this is called, “Emotion coaching,” while some schools call this, “mindfulness.”  I do not know about y’all, but when someone (like my parents) explains why I should/should not do something and how it affects others and myself, then I am more likely to be obedient. I like how my teacher showed us one way we could do this. This is what he drew on his white board.

I know that my example is kind of weird, but you get the general idea. Now that you have some practice here’s a POP QUIZ!!!

We all know the nursery rhyme of Jack be nimble. (If not, here it is: Jack be nimble. Jack be quick. Jack jumped over the candle stick.) Let us pretend that Jack’s mother saw what he was doing. She decided to talk to him about what he is doing. Pick the response that would help Jack understand what his mother is experiencing. She should say,

A) “Jack, you are GROUNDED for 20 years!!! You are never allowed to play with the candlestick again!”

B) “Jack! Don’t do that! You scared me!”

C) “Jack, when you jumped over the candle stick, I felt scared, because I thought that you were going to catch on fire and get hurt. In the future, I would like for you not to do that.”

The correct answer is drumroll……C! C helps Jack understand how what he did connects to what his mom thought and felt. A is okay. It tells him that he did something wrong, but he may not know what he did wrong or why it is wrong. B is slightly better. It conveys that his mom was scared when he did “that,” but he still may not know what exactly “that” is. Maybe he was picking his nose at the same time.

That’s it for this week! I’d love to hear what y’all think! Do you have any awesome miscommunication stories? What’s your favorite way to communicate? What do you think about technology’s effects on communication?

Keep on dancing!!

💙

Emily