I work hard to be a good communicator. I know I have a lot to learn. Communicating online is especially tricky. We have no cues other than words on the screen to convey our meaning. "It's not what you say but how you say it" was never more true than in the online world. Lately I have been paying special attention to the aspects of language that increase my resistance to hearing a person's message, to the things that trigger my own defensiveness. Sometimes people make good points and yet some aspect of how they speak a thing renders me resistant to what they are trying to communicate. I've talked a lot about name calling. Once I hear someone call someone else a name, I find it very challenging to continue to seek to understand them. Their way of being turns me off and I'm no longer very interested in trying to understand them. Name calling is an automatic shut down for me. I'm working on staying empathetically connected during such exchanges but I have a long way to go. Even so, that's not really what I want to talk about here. I want to talk about the other, less flagrant, ways we wield langugage that enhance or, more specifically, inhibit our connection and communication.

It's trickier for me to put a name to the other things that make me stop hearing. Lately, though, some of them have begun to come into focus for me, often through discussions on this very forum. I find this space especially helpful because it is a space where people are trying to communicate consciously and with love. I want to share my thoughts but I want to hear your thoughts also. Here we have only words to convey our meanings and yet we also have a loving group of people trying hard to consciously connect, even in this sterile online space. What better place to seek the counsel of wise and conscious people?

It's easy to see how criticism and name calling shut down conversation. Some defensive triggers are stealthier though. Two of the stealthier defensive triggers that I am beginning to notice and trying to eliminate in my own language include speaking in absolutes and, for lack of a better way to say it, know it all statements. I'll start with the know it all statements.

Know it all statements - I find education and persuasion more powerful than making pronouncements or barking orders. "That's just the way it is" or "Because I said so..." don't go over well with kids and they sure don't cut it with most adults. Even when we do know a thing, it helps to remember that there was a time when we didn't. We learned from an experience. Instead of making a pronouncement and just expecting people to accept it and move on, I find I am often more likely to learn from the sharing of the experience than from the handing down of a proclamation.

We can also increase our credibility by using more humble, less declarative, language, language that conveys that the speaker views the listener as an equal rather than as someone lower on the communication hierarchy. Phrasing like, "It seems to me that...." or "The way I see it is..." or "If I am understanding you clearly..." allow us to own our own language and our own experience without assuming it to be the other's experience as well. I know when someone acts like if I don't see things their way, then I am wrong and they are right, that often makes me defensive and can lead to a power struggle in lieu of a conversation. Embracing humility reduces the chance that our conversation will morph into a power struggle. Showing some humility in our language does not undermine our authority. It gives us credibility. It also creates a space for clarifying instead of stating an absolute. Which leads me to my next point...

Speaking in absolutes - There are few absolutes in this world. When I hear someone say, "He'll never change." or "so-and-so would never do that," I can't help but kinda check out and start revisiting all the times when I have seen people change or get distratcted thinking, "How on earth would this person know what some other person or historical figure would or would not do? Ever? What about if this happened...?" I start considering all the possibilities where someone might just do the very thing that the speaker is saying they would never ever do. I fall off the communication train. And the speaker, like the engineer of that train, rarely even knows they've lost a passenger.

Sweeping generalizations are rarely technically correct. They both engender and prolong conflict. They also divert people from our point, in effect, derailing our conversation. I prefer to speak and hear statements like, "I think it's unlikely that..." It's less definiitive and makes it clear the speaker is expressing an opinion rather than stating a fact.

Overgeneralization also amps up emotion and creates a space for people to prove us wrong. When we say, "People always do such-n-such...", we create a space for the other person to say, "Just yesterday this person did exactly the opposite" or "You don't always do that. Why just last week..." Better to avoid "never", "always", "everybody" and "nobody" altogether. These words are very, very rarely true. Their very preciseness (zero versus all) makes them almost always incorrect. Anything is possible. Avoiding these over-generalizations recognizes the myriad of possibilities in this world and also helps keep our conversations on track.

So, those are a couple of the linguistic potholes that I think riddle our communication highway. I'd love to hear what you think. Maybe between all of us, we can communicate better and clearer and more lovingly as well as take these understandings out into the larger world.

I am also studying non-violent communication and I'd love to have a conversation about that as well. I don't feel educated enough to start one yet but perhaps someone else does?