Stop, Communicate, and Listen

This is the third in our series of posts based on Desiderata. Today’s special guest blogger is Adam from Adam’s Peace. Please “stay tuned” throughout the month of October as bloggers analyze this poem from a variety of viewpoints.

Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even to the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.

To me, the entire Desiderata is an excellent road map for personal development. It isn’t perfect, but that is because we are unique ourselves, not because of any flaw in the poem.

This specific section touches on communication, and gives good general advice. I would like to dissect it into specific pieces, because this poem is very specific in its points. First, though, I would like to touch on a couple of key points about communicating that is very important to understand.

For the image, I selected a photograph that my wife had taken a couple of years ago of a rose in order to illustrate a point. Please realize that it is incredibly difficult to have a picture of communication. I had many different ideas for a picture of communication, such as pictures of messages, or of people giving speeches, or perhaps of different media that are used. Unfortunately, none of these images really spoke with the emotion that I wanted them to, so I picked a symbol that holds a very clear and universal message. I hope that this helps you to understand that when I say communication, I don’t simply mean words spoken or read, but I am including the whole range of ways that we communicate, through symbols, actions, and even
through inaction.

Communication 101:

The purpose of communicating is to influence other people’s ideas.

There really is no other way to describe communication. You can plant new ideas, challenge conflicting ideas, or strengthen compatible ideas with your words, or really, with any form of communication.

The key to communication, though, is that the message is what your audience receives. The message is never your original thought. Your thought has to be translated into words… then from words into sound waves, or into letters on a paper or computer screen. Next, the sound or letters may take any sort of journey, as close as from your lips directly to a friend’s ear, or as far away as the other end of the world. Anything can happen to the message between you and your audience, and with technology, it may take any amount of time.

The next barrier is the other person… The words must be translated back, from the sounds or letters, into a conscious thought in the other person’s mind. Here, all sorts of changes can be made to the message, often based simply on this person’s mood. In fact, a room full of many different people can all listen to the same speech and all get different messages. I don’t expect any two readers of this post to get the same exact message either.

This is the first key to this section of the Desiderata.

Speak your truth, quietly and clearly;

Since the purpose of communication is to influence people’s thoughts, it is best to be trusted. If I were to tell you that my blog has a readership of five thousand people, you might believe me for a few minutes. Looking at my Technorati stats, though, you’ll see that I run a fairly small time blog, temporarily enjoying the benefits of being high on a long, widely distributed list. After you caught me in my lie, you would likely never visit my site again. Instead, I believe that I only have twenty readers, not including myself, based on my Feedburner stats.

Ask yourself, would you be more willing to trust someone who comes out and tells the truth, even if it is a bit embarassing, or do you trust people who only talk about how great they are?

Turning it around, does your audience, whoever they may be, believe you? Is your message being heard the way you want it to be, or is everybody changing your message based on their distrust of you?

Speak your truth. Be humble. Make certain that you are understood.

Listen

The flip side to this is the fact that it always takes at least two people to communicate. Until I have my wife proofread this post, and until I send it to Bob so that it can appear on his site, I am not communicating.

There are two great reasons why it is important to listen. First, you can learn from fools, and second, to improve your trustworthiness in your own communication.

For about a year, I had a job tutoring at my school. I have to say, this job helped me to learn far more than taking the classes themselves, because I had to deal with inquisitive idiots. I don’t mean to put them down, and the only reason why they were ‘idiots’ is because they simply didn’t have practice at thinking of how to program a computer. That lack of practice, though, gave them a perspective that helped me tremendously.

They didn’t know what the limits were.

At first, while I was helping them with their class work, when I would come across one of those foolish questions, I would simply point out the limits… but after a while, I began asking myself if there really were limits, or if I was simply repeating the same narrow method that I had been taught. Most of the time, those limits were real… but every once in a while, a silly question would turn into the inspiration that I needed for my own projects.

The students that I tutored didn’t understand the importance of their questions. In fact, when I tried to explain how their questions were helpful, it tended to confuse them more. But, when I told these students how they were helping me, they started learning faster. I found that these people were listening to me solely because I had proven that I was listening to them.

Summary

Communication has two directions. Without both directions, simply because of human pride, communication is not practical. We must be trustworthy, humble, and clear in our speech, and we must also listen, even to the most outlandish of ideas, if we are to ever communicate effectively. We don’t have to follow those outlandish ideas, but at least listen.

Photo: Copyright 2005, Trina Alexander