Say What you Mean, Mean What you Say
As a child, growing up in India, I was fascinated by the way animals communicated with each other. Their interaction was at several different levels, from the smallest inaudible ultrasonic chatter to the loudest of cat calls. But the most spectacular of communication by animals was non-verbal and this involved a myriad of colours on display. Sometimes it changed dynamically with the intention of what was being communicated, a choreography of various moves which almost mirrored perhaps with what the celestial dance might well be. A particular incident comes to mind when I was perhaps only about 2 or 3 years old, when a peacock visited our house terrace. It was raining and I witnessed the full blown glory of the creature dancing to seduce its mate during that monsoon season. I was mesmerised by the comprehensive, naked, uninhibited expression of whatever the peacock intended to say to its potential partner. This display of nature at its best was experiential and nothing I had seen or experienced before could compare to this sight. Awestruck as I was, I looked at my mum and pointed to the bird and mumbled something inaudible. My mum replied with all the best intentions to teach her son, ‘’Oh son! That is a peacock! That is the national bird of India!’’ Now, I have the most amazing mum, anyone could possibly wish for, but as a society, which primarily uses language for expression, we always seek to oversimplify experiences, and she too just did that! In one stroke, the wonder of nature, I had just witnessed, became one word, a peacock, and that stuck forever! The almost divine imaginative vision I had just seen was reduced and labelled to a unit of language.
Communication is the fundamental basis for organising human beings as species, nations, societies, communities, families and friends. It leads to sharing of ideas and deriving collective meaning. It is the reason for the human dominance of this planet and also the hope that we may well survive into the future despite our follies and indeed expand our horizons beyond to other frontiers. When two human beings communicate face to face, there is interaction and exchange of mind and matter. They often touch each other, exchange each other’s breath and air molecules with the potential of becoming one another. They bring two realities together, with the idea of resonating and augmenting it further by adding additional points of view. The other possibility is that they may clash and disagree with each other, leading to an understanding of each other’s held views or by one attempting to dominate over the other. Often the latter is due to lack of appreciation of the other’s paradigm and a paucity of empathy within self, or simply the single purpose agenda of aggression and aspiration. All this leads to miscommunication. Our language and words are grossly inadequate to assimilate our paradigms and mind sets, contextualise our behaviours and express our experiences. It simply lacks the ability to give us an understanding of the other person’s point of view. Our language has simply and inadvertently become a tool designed to label, to evaluate and to judge others to seek out hidden agendas and to not actually ‘seek to understand before being understood’.
Many of us may have played the game of ‘Chinese Whispers’ in which a few words or a sentence is whispered into the ear of the person next to you in a group which is organised as a circle. Once the original sentence does its rounds and comes back to the first person, it is hilariously or even shockingly distorted and often completely. As our initial stimulus and thought gets encoded into language and is passed on and decoded by the next person, the subjectivity of our individual perceptual lenses that we use to view the information passed on to us with each transaction, comes into play. Similarly in real life, our individual perceptions, based on our cultural, racial, religious, gender and age based differences, forms the basis of our filtering the information to our own convenient ‘realities’ we firmly believe in. In addition, more layers are added to these filters based on the degree of emotional overlay there is in the heat of that moment. People often act and behave as a function of their emotional state based on how they are feeling, rather than how they actually are inside of them.
We often say what we have to say and unrealistically expect that not only we have been heard but also that we have been understood. We often say what we don’t mean and often mean what we are too politically correct to say. We may use body language but this can be faked too. Therefore somewhere along the line, the truth or the essence of what we wanted to convey is lost. Indeed because we don’t trust what we hear or what we are saying ourselves, we have invented new ways to lubricate human interaction further and whole new industries have been born as a result. In this respect, social media with a variety of platforms has ‘revolutionised’ mass communication, it has vastly enhanced our capacity to lie and ‘airbrush’ and filter our ‘selfies’ and ‘catfish’ the vulnerable. Deceit and manipulation often lies at the heart of such platforms augmented and encouraged even further through artificial intelligence powered algorithms. The result is a culture to glamorise ourselves and our wares way beyond what they are worth or incongruous with our fundamental value systems. The way the diction and the means to communicate it has developed and designed in the modern world, is to communicate mostly filtered content. There will be times when you say things and the jargon would be such that it would obstruct the passage of certain thoughts very conveniently.
It is therefore entirely up to us as to how we choose to express ourselves by using the language that nature gave us, which we all understand and speak, and even without uttering a word! And how we empathise and make sense of what others are trying to convey to us, before we bare our souls!
The following quote sums it up nicely and will hopefully help remove most miscommunications in real life. It does require a high level of self-awareness though….
‘’Your Perception of Me is a Reflection of You; My Reaction to You is an Awareness of Me.’’
