Communication is one of the fundamental necessities of our relationships with other people, whether it is a stranger, work colleague, family member, child or life partner. While our interpersonal relationships can be rewarding, many of us find ourselves in situations of mis-communication and communication breakdown, often leading to interpersonal conflict.
Do you find that people often misinterpret what you are saying or your intentions? Have you ever felt that you have totally missed the meaning of what someone else was communicating to you? Do you have difficulty expressing what you would like to say? Rest assured, many of us are confronted with situations like this in our relationships with others! We are left feeling like we are not being heard and our relationships suffer. In the end, our most developed societal tool is also one of the most productive conflict factories in the history of mankind.
In order to tackle two problems with a single solution, we’ve devised a comprehensive article on communication – and how improving it can not only improve your personal relationships, but also ensure that your professional life is on the right lane.
What is communication?
Body language, sign language, verbal language, writing, gestures, broadcasting – you name it, it is part of the process of communication. Communication is a broad concept and its history can be traced from a wide variety of pathways. Gesture and body language are the most primitive forms of communication, being practiced even before humans were able to produce ’sound’ verbal language. Verbal language is possibly the most prominent human form of communication (albeit not the most used – it is perceived to be only 7% to 11% of communication). Some philosophers affirm that our capacity to verbally communicate with each other is the link which separates humans from other animals in the evolutionary scale.
Written language, another particularly prominent and advanced form of human communication, was initiated not so long ago – around 3,000 B.C. when the Egyptian civilisation created their first set of hieroglyphics. The complexity of human communication evolved analogously with the human capacity of learning, invoking major evolutionary changes in the brain structure and resulting in our capacity to improve (or arguably complicate) the way in which we communicate to each other. For the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on verbal communication and body language.
Interpersonal Communication
Interpersonal communication can be defined as the transactional process of creating meaning through mutually responsive entities – or less formally, transmitting and receiving messages to and from other individuals. When people are communicating, they’re being bombarded with information which, in most cases, they vastly fail to perceive. Why? Because people are not aware of the manner in which others perceive the world and themselves. They may have a rough idea, and even share some commonalities, but being able to predict interpretation of meaning to its full extent is impossible. However, it is possible to recognise some general trends.
Interpersonal communication has a core structure: sender, receiver, message and context. When the first ‘message’ is produced, a receiver will interpret that message according to his personal background (values, culture, experiences, knowledge and more) and according to the context in which the message was produced (situation, relevance, sender characteristics and more). To effectively communicate, people need to be able to align each individual’s background information to the verbal or cultural significance of the message being transmitted. Relationships are based on that common level of understanding, and the more people fail to communicate to each other, the more they develop personal assumptions that could lead to conflict.
Barriers to communication
Considering its complexity, understanding the core challenges to interpersonal communication can vastly improve the process of interpreting people’s messages, and helping them understand how to interpret yours. According to Bolton (1993) there are twelve major communication spoilers, listed in three different categories:
Judging
1. Criticising – making a negative evaluation of the other person.
2. Name-calling – stereotyping the other person.
3. Diagnosing – analysing the other person’s behaviour.
4. Praising evaluatively – making excessive positive judgments to the other person.
Sending Solutions
5. Ordering – commanding the other person to do something you would like.
6. Threatening – controlling the other person’s actions by warning about consequences.
7. Moralising – telling what the other person should do in a given situation.
8. Inappropriate or excessive questioning – using close-ended questions in excess.
9. Advising – giving the other person a solution to a problem.
Avoiding the Other’s Concerns
10. Diverting – “pushing” a solution to the other person’s problems.
11. Logical argument – attempting to convince the other with an appeal to logic and facts.
12. Reassuring – trying to stop the other person from feeling negative emotions.
Improving Communication
There are many effective strategies to help improve interpersonal communication. Effective communication does not only involve the transmission of a message, but also ensuring that the other person is devoting enough attention and that the environment is appropriate to transmit the message (controlling the ‘noise’ and ‘interruption’ levels).
Attention is the major skill that needs to be ‘practised’ during the communication process. The more attention devoted to a dialogue, for example, the better a communicator can recognise body language and voice trends. Furthermore, understanding the context of each message and aligning that to the other person’s cultural and emotional background plays a key role in creating reliability in the interpretation.
Basic Communication Skills
Such rules are beneficial for any communication process, but particularly important during a formal relationship.
1. Listening well – valuing the client and demonstrating interest for the conversation.
2. Observing – observing body language, voice tone and emotive expressions.
3. Acknowledgement – the recognition for the client’s initiative to state his/her issues.
4. Awareness – ensuring that the counsellor’s body language is appropriate for the context.
5. Thinking – reasoning about what is and what is not appropriate input to the process.
6. Verbal expression – ensuring the use of the appropriate tone, rhythm and volume of voice.
7. Reflecting – clarifying and verifying what the client has expressed to the counsellor.
Subscribe to our FREE eZine.
By: Pedro Gondim
Posts Tagged ‘Personal Relationships’
Cross-cultural Personal Relationships
November 26th, 2009Marrying even within your own culture can be a challenging experience. Once you get past the wedding day and the romance you are left with the everyday task of loving somebody who is not like you. Differences can be a source of inspiration or conflict.
But what are the challenges of marry into another culture?
A desire to understand another’s culture will not prevent conflict. You have your own cultural beliefs that you bring to a relationship and you will in the first instance use that framework to judge a person or situation. However it is important to gather as much information about your partner’s culture as you can. For example their rituals, their religious beliefs, the role of extended family in your partner’s life and how much autonomy does your partner have in making decisions for their life. People in the West have a great deal of independence from their extended families. Those in the East value close family relationships. This will impact on your relationship.
Do not assume your partner is going to change with gentle persuasion from you. This is probably a mistake people make generally in relationships. People need to be accepted for themselves and if you need to change somebody to ensure you can have a relationship with them, it begs the question why choose the person in the first place. That’s not to say that change will not occur as you spend more time getting to know someone and what they want in the relationship. Trying to change someone’s cultural tendencies will create more unnecessary conflict.
There are many situations that arise in life that call for us to draw on ‘common-sense’ ways to deal with them. That common-sense is made up of our past experience, our habits, our value systems and our taken for granted ways of how to react to things that happen in our life even small things. Remember you and your partner do not possess the same common-sense view of the world. In some situations like how to eat food correctly or what to do in a temple, choosing the ‘when in Rome’ approach can save a lot of unnecessary conflict. But there are some things that are not so easy to solve by using this approach especially if they call into question fundamental values and beliefs. Again just because you choose to live in your partner’s country does not mean you have to compromise who you are.
The answer to all of the above conundrums and potential areas of conflict is to communicate. Be prepared to talk about issues in your relationship particularly in the ‘getting to know you stage’. Then make a commitment to communicate throughout your relationship. Never make assumptions, particularly in a cross-cultural relationship.
Discuss issues like how much free time is normal in a relationship. Discuss your finances and whether both of you are going to work. How will you raise children? Where are you going to live and will there be the enough job opportunities for whoever is going to work. Communication is the secret to avoiding unnecessary conflict and to resolving conflict should it arise. Some cultures are more adept at direct communication than others. Nevertheless without some degree of commitment to discussing issues being made, your chances of a successful relationship become less and less.
One practical way a couple can find out if they want to enter into a cross-cultural marriage is for either partner to seek a fiancée visa. A period of time in your partner’s country will allow you the space to really get to know your partner and their culture and will provide sufficient information for you to choose whether you want to marry your partner. Bringing your partner from the Philippines on a fiancée visa to the USA? Check out the relevant websites for information on the completion of the K1 visa application form.
By: Duane Beadle
