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Mental Self Help – Can You Avoid A Breakdown Of Communication? |
We all need to communicate well in order to build and maintain good relationships with people. Your job can even depend on it – you may need to sell, persuade, teach, lead… There are many times when you need to be a skilful communicator. Sometimes our communications may need some mental self help to make them better.
We all have times when no-one seems to understand us – it’s probably happened to you many times. You seem to be unable to get through to the other person, no matter how hard you try. Sometimes these differences can lead to the breakdown in relationships or even more serious consequences.
How do you get your message to the outside world?
A good question.
The first thing is to consider just how you communicate to the outside world.
You communicate with other people through your words, your body language and your tone of voice. A study of the effectiveness of these different means of communication showed that the content of the words you use is the least important, tone of voice is next while body language accounts for more than half of the communication.
When we look at these three things, the least important, your words, is the one is the one that communicates complicated ideas while the most important one, your body language, is most effective at communicating emotions and feelings. The first mental self help tip is to realise that human communications are a blunt instruments.
The exaggerated communications you see in television commercials are a result of the nature of human communication.
The final means of communication you need to think about for longer term relationships is your actions. These will enable people to build up a picture over time of how you respond in certain circumstances.
What’s In Your Mind?
One of the challenges of human communication is that we are all very complex psychological beings. You have a rich inner life. You have a complex system of beliefs, values, and deeper levels of identity and spirituality.
You have accumulated a lifetime of experiences. These experiences have been absorbed into your subconscious nature and they have produced deeply ingrained mental habits - as you get older this just gets worse!
You have also learnt from your parents, your teachers, your society… your life experiences in general a whole complex set of rules for simplifying and processing all the information that your senses take in.
One of the common sources of frustration with communication is that what you are experiencing is so complex and unique to you, you simply can’t express it!
Consider the other person
We’ve seen how complex your mind is and how the instrument of communication cannot convey enough data for use to communicate precisely. Everyone you try to communicate with is facing the same problems.
Looking at the process of communication in detail – you start with an idea which is a complex of emotions, thoughts and memories that are in your mind. First you have to simplify it and turn it in to actions and words. Which you can transmit.
The other person receives it through their senses which work a bit differently to yours, they process it through the filter of their own mind and finally they end up reconstructing a message that makes sense to them.
It’s a miracle we ever communicate at all!
However humans are miraculous creatures and we do manage to communicate quite effectively.
Mental Self Help - Enhancing your communications
The tools you have for communication are unsophisticated, to give yourself the best chance of communicating well, you need to make sure they are all saying the same thing. Your body language and your tone of voice, which tend to respond to subconscious information, and your words, which respond to rational thoughts most strongly should all transmit the same message.
In long term relationships, you need to make sure that your messages are clear and consistent over time.
The good news is that consistency in both communicating one on one and in your long term relationships happens when you are in touch with your core self and understand where you are going. In other words “when you are true to yourself”.
Mental self help note - take the time to evaluate your life and understand where you can be more consistent.
You can also improve your communications by taking the time to learn more about the mechanics of the human mind which we all use to communicate. Some basic information on nlp and the science of the mind can pay dividends!
Article source http://w4rum.com/2148.t
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| [By Kimber Fulcher] [05/May/07] |
