One thing I love about human communication is how vast it is.
At the mega level, there are nearly eight billion people on this planet, all constantly communicating, forming an unquashable consta-buzz that never, ever stops. We literally have books which allow the dead to communicate to new generations of the living, continuing a connection that can go on for hundreds, even thousands of years.
The mega-level of human comm, impressive.
But for my money, things get even more impressive at the micro levels. Which is where I most like to work. There is a pure mechanicalness that dominates human communication, especially in its most basic activity block, the conversation.
When you look at the mechanics of conversation, it’s like taking apart two watches talking to each other. Live human communication is an intricate trading of back and forth, on talk sub-mechanics like turns, talk time, topics, terms, interruptions, talk-overs, back-channeling, etc.
And that’s just on the verbal level. Now add in paralanguage -- tones, volume, speed, timbre, variety -- and nonverbal/behavioral comms -- facial expressions, body positions, hand movements, etc -- and the micro suddenly gets so complex that you wonder how we can even manage it all.
And, of course, on some level, we can’t. We all have communication dysfunctions. Every single person on the planet has communication mechanics and sub-mechanics that they don’t do well. We all also have communication functionalities on which we are absolutely masterful. But no matter what you master, dysfunction is also always there, peering over your shoulder, lowering the quality of your communication, sometimes even fatally wounding it (aka, I’ve had conversations with people who claim to be lifelong sales people, and they take so much of the talk time that I can’t imagine anyone actually enjoying a conversation with them, much less trusting them enough to buy from them).
The first step in dissolving those dysfunctions is to see them. I’ll talk in the next part of the Fix Your Dysfunctions series about exactly how you do that. How do you see what you don’t do well? And then how do you fix those communication dysfunctions that you see?
It’s a fascinating process. And it’s absolutely core to being good at the human thing. Good comms equal good life. In so many ways.