Good Communication - What is it?

The definition for “good communication” is quite simple - when the ‘message sent’ = the ‘message received.’ Not a difficult concept to comprehend, but to pull it off? Well, that’s the challenge. But what makes it so difficult to pull off?

Well, we’re all such different people, and it’s easy to forget sometimes how different we truly are. Our brains work differently, our backgrounds vary greatly, and so we each deliver and process information in our own way. So while I’m almost always going to understand the message I’m delivering to someone, what I’m sending is often not going to line up with what the other person is receiving. Every thought we have is surrounded by an entire context that’s easy to take for granted, and we often fail to recognize what context the recipient might be missing. Similarly, the other side has their own context around any given thought, which will very much shape how they interpret messages they receive.

So what’s the key to navigating this tricky landscape? Perhaps it starts with seeing any potentially difficult conversation as an attempt to line up those two sides (message sent, message received), with everyone involved playing a role in making that happen successfully. It’s not entirely up to the sender of the message to say it perfectly on the first try, nor is it up to the receiver to singlehandedly glean the correct information regardless of how it was delivered. Let’s look at each side of the equation in a little more detail.

As the sender of a message, your job is to deliver this information in a way that’s going to make sense to the other side. In other words, you try to play to your audience. There’s no universally perfect way to say a thing that is immune to different interpretations; everything we say can be interpreted in more than one way. For example, you might have the best vocabulary to describe exactly what you’re trying to say, but if it’s unlikely the other person knows the term, then you’re not really communicating all that well after all. But even if you know your audience, you still won’t get it right all the time, which brings us to the other key point on this side - be flexible. A really common mistake on this end is people repeating themselves ad nauseam when the other person isn’t understanding what they’re trying to say, as if saying the same thing over and over again will produce different results. After all, what you’re saying makes perfect sense to you, doesn’t it? Well of course it does, cause it came from your brain! Find a different way to say it until it does click with the recipient.

The receiver of information’s job, on the other hand, is to question their interpretation of what was said, especially if it’s confusing or surprising. See, what we tend to do is hear a message, make an interpretation of what was meant, and then we run with that as if it’s fact. This leads to feeling real feelings that can steer the conversation in wild directions. But what if what you heard is not what they meant? The conversation will now likely get away from you, because you didn’t question that interpretation. Ask clarifying questions. Even run your interpretation by the message sender to see if it’s lining up. For example, you might ask them, “It sounds like you’re saying I’m a terrible partner and you don’t think you want to be with me. Is that what you’re saying?” Now, maybe that is what they were saying, in which case whatever feelings you’re gonna get from that are correct. But what if they were instead expressing difficulty with the current unsustainable pattern, but they’re still so in love with you that they really want to make it work? Well, now you’ve saved yourself the extreme hurt of the original interpretation before committing to that path, and the conversation can proceed as intended.

So it takes both sides a conversation to help the ‘message sent’ line up with the ‘message received.’ It takes a lot of vigilance and care. It really does require a lot of effort to make it all happen, but it’s effort that pays off in dividends. Yes, it’s difficult to check your interpretations often and ask the right clarifying questions, but it’s probably a lot more difficult to get into a full-blown fight over a miscommunication, which results in hurt feelings and anger for days sometimes. There will always be miscommunications because of our differences as well as the imperfection of human language, but what we can do better is catch these misunderstandings before they get out of hand and run conversations off the rails.

Hopefully this gives you some ideas of how to improve your communication. For more help, and more specific tools to get you there, therapy can really help. Please click here to schedule a consultation with a therapist today.