3-Steps to Create Clarity in Your Conversations
We’ve all been there. We said one thing and the person we were talking to understood something else. Or perhaps the shoe was on the other foot—we heard one thing and the person who was talking to us meant something else. These kinds of misunderstandings happen all the time. Is there anything we can do to make them less frequent? What can we do to upgrade our understanding?
In his book, Conversationally Speaking, Alan Garner argues that the art of conversation is something that can be learned. One of the foundational principles of improving our conversations is to use “active listening.” He explains how two parties encode and decode emotions and ideas during a conversation using the example of two people enjoying a Barbara Streisand song together. One of them might suddenly feel that the music is too loud. She encodes her feelings and shouts, “Hey, turn it down!” The other person decodes her message selectively, depending on what his interior context is. This can lead to a variety of different possible interpretations. He might decode the message as, “Everything’s fine. You just want the volume lower.” Or he might decode the verbal and physical cues as, “You’re angry at me.” This process of encoding and decoding often leads to a lack of alignment between the intended and interpreted meanings.
Garner recommends a specific form of active listening to decode more accurately. He defines active listening as “telling the sender what his message means to you.” The process he teaches is to mirror back to the speaker his feelings, the content he expressed, or a combination of the two. For instance, the person in the example above might say, “It occurs to me that the way you said ‘Hey, turn it down!’ might mean that you’re angry with me. Is that right?”
Garner gets even more concrete when he gives the following three steps for the process:
Describe what you “heard [the person] say” and “what you saw [the person] do that leads you to your conclusion.”
Describe “what meaning you have tentatively attached to [the person’s] actions.”
“Ask [the person] if your conclusion is correct.”
The author recommends using this process particularly in situations where you’re not sure if you’re understanding what a person means and also when “an emotionally charged message is sent.” This week, I invite you to practice greater mindfulness in your conversations by asking:
What might the other person be feeling? What is my interpretation of the meaning behind what the other person is saying verbally and nonverbally? What would happen in this conversation if I tested my interpretation by sharing it and requesting feedback?
God Bless,
Dan
