188. FACE-TO-FACE COMMUNICATION — B
Communication connects, heals, empowers, and enables us to grow to our potential. As we all know, there are many means to communicate at our disposal. However, face-to-face communication will always be one of the most important means. My own communication file includes many ways in which to enhance face-to-face communication. The triptych this week presents gleanings from that file. These gleanings are aimed at enhancing face-to-face communication. This kind of communication enables exchange of information, transfer of meaning, and synergistic transactions for creativity, problem solving, and deeper levels of relationships.
5. One of the more difficult parts of face-to-face communication is listening. Listening involves caring, hearing, interpreting, evaluating, and responding in order to gain understanding. (Post #178 offered thoughts about listening.) We listen best when we express empathy with one another. (Posts 79–81 dealt with empathy.) This type of listening with expressions of empathy requires concentration at a very high level. In an essay entitled “Are You Listening?” Elizabeth Rice lists the following barriers to listening. We may be preoccupied and not inclined to concentrate on what we are hearing. Rice notes that our mind’s capacity to think is from 400–600 words per minute, and conversations average 125 words per minute. With this gap, it is easy to jump ahead to what we think the other person might say next. Our emotional response can also be a barrier, and we can be distracted by hair, clothes, and mannerisms. In addition, a noise and/or some other distraction in the environment and, of course, simply our impatience can all be barriers.
6. Active listening is a tried and true means to effective listening. The Internet is a source for how to accomplish this type of listening, but in this post, I will focus on the highlights. To assure each participant in the communication that there is an accurate exchange of meaning, after listening in a thoughtful, non-evaluative manner, offer a few words to convey that you have understood the other person or that you need more clarity to gain that understanding. This can be a summary of the words spoken in the other’s words or yours, a reflective comment that shows you understood, a word of empathy that indicates you understood, a comment to add something, or a question for additional clarity. This is a way to “build” the face-to-face communication or to dig more deeply. Letting the other person know that you are taking them seriously and are trying to bridge meaning between you often leads to another level of communication that we call dialogue.
7. In a book entitled You’ve Got To Be Believed To Be Heard, Bert Decker adds an important postscript to this post. He says that if we want to move beyond sharing information, we must communicate with impact. This statement surfaces the dimension of credibility in our face-to-face communication. Decker says that to be believed requires not only what the other person hears, but also what that person sees and how both people come across in harmony. It begins, he says, with eye contact. Strong eye contact reflects confidence and a commitment to connect. In his essay, “Much That Is Said Is Unspoken,” Tom Pickens adds this about eye contact: “Eyes are especially important in body language. They react independently, and it is almost impossible to disguise the reaction — which is why so many people can’t ‘look you in the eye’ when they are trying to conceal something.”
Decker adds that this connection is enhanced with our posture, our movement, our grooming, and our gestures such as smiles. With all of the above, there is an energy exchange that aligns thinking and feeling to enhance those connections.
8. In her essay entitled “The Tuning Power of Positive Listening,” Barbara Scherr Trenk reported this: “Business executives are becoming aware of the high cost of listening mistakes that can mean decreased employee productivity and lost sales; educators are advocating the teaching of listening skills both because of their importance in everyday life and because poor listening can interfere with a child’s ability to learn to read. And psychologists say that many patients seek help because they need someone to listen to them.”
Q: How would you evaluate your listening competence?
Check out: https://dialogue4us.com.
