Say It Like You (Actually) Mean It

The Vague Nature of Communication & The Importance of Direct in an Indirect World

Part One — The Default Details of Communicating

A couple ground rules from two main communication principles to get us started:

1. Communication is constant — therefore, everything you do says something.
2. Communication is irreversible — therefore, once something has been communicated, no matter how trivial, it has permanently created a reality. As Abraham Joshua Heschel says in commenting on the Jewish creation narrative, “Words create worlds.”

But the communication process gets even trickier — because how do you know what something means?

Communication is the act of encoding a message that gets sent to a receiver who then decodes the message. While in an ideal world, this could be very simple, we must face the reality that words don’t have inherent meaning. There is not a single, absolute definition to any word or piece of communication. The only way to decode an encoded message, then, is to develop a shared meaning between the sender and receiver. The evolution of language has been a constant pursuit of creating shared meaning for…