Do you ever wonder why you talk the way you do?
I mean talk in the broadest sense, as in why you have the communication patterns you have. Why these repeating patterns? Why not others?
It’s an important question. Especially so if and when you want to step in and take control of how you communicate. (As opposed to letting your internalized operating instructions control you.)
Maybe you want to upgrade your skills, because you need more success in specific situations or with specific targets (ie, want to make sure your jokes land when you do public speaking?).
Maybe you want to identify any dysfunctions you might have picked up along the way, any habitual ways of communicating that don’t serve you well, that cause people to downgrade you, or even avoid talking to you.
The point being that if you want to “change” your communication arsenal, you often need to know where that arsenal came from. So that you know how much you need to concentrate on severing the root causes of your behaviors from the behaviors themselves. Because there’s nothing more frustrating than seeing the mechanical changes someone needs to make, but not being able to help them to make those changes because you haven’t clearly laid out what is anchoring them to their current talk habits.
Here are some of the possible causes of your rooted communication habits. (And they are many, btw. Because people be complicated.)
() “Nature” made you this way. In other words, some deep-seated biological DNA tells you to communicate this way. It’s there at birth. It’s pre-programmed into you. (Seems like a thin explanation in a world where we can affect so much with our conscious cognition, but, hey, maybe? Plays well with the “This is just how I am, take it or leave it!” crowd.)
() Your inner world tells you to speak in a certain way. Your “personality” is “expressed” in how you communicate. There is some inner sanctum -- consciousness, subconscious, the mind, the you of you -- that exists in you, and directs you to communicate with the world in the way you do. If you want to change your comm behaviors, you have to change that inner world they are intricately linked to.
() Your moral code tells you to speak in a certain way. You communicate as you do dependent upon what you value, how you think people should and should not act. (This is why you can be labeled a “bad person,” if you communicate in certain ways -- ie, if you’re a “narcissist,” you gaslight people, and therefore gaslighting communication styles are evidence of narcissism).
() Your “family of origin” taught you to communicate this way. We all grow up in some form of family. All families have communication patterns. We absorb those. Sometimes so deeply that we use them our entire lives. For better or for worse.
() A strong bond with an individual may have given you your comm patterns. Sometimes we don’t learn from entire families -- we learn from intimate individuals. Maybe you talk like your Mom. Or your Dad. Or a sibling. Or a close friend. Or, later on, you might learn to talk like your romantic partner.
() Culture teaches you ways of communicating. This is an astoundingly powerful influencer on communication -- often the culture you are born into determines a majority of your communication style (think of the unique head movement common to many people in India -- that movement doesn’t even exist elsewhere, but it’s used by untold millions of people in India).
() Institutional training. Schools are especially concerned with influencing how people speak. You’re told to speak with “respect” (only certain tones are deemed respectful). To speak only after being granted permission (crazy how many adults still raise their hands to get a turn). All institutions -- legal, military, police, religious -- attempt to exert influence on how you communicate.
() Occupational training. Nearly every job in the world contains instructions on how you need to communicate when you do that job. So much so that you can see people almost instantly begin to speak how they think they are expected to speak for that job. If you call an office, the receptionist sounds pretty much like every other receptionist in the world. That isn’t by chance. We absorb talk styles from our jobs, and carry them everywhere (ie, let a teacher have a talk turn, it often turns into a monologue, because that’s how they’re used to speaking).
() Formal training. Some people -- actually, quite rarely -- get formally trained in communication. It’s really odd to me, since communication is literally the system we use to accomplish everything in life, that so few of us get trained by strong experts in communication itself. Most of our training is highly informal, gotten in pieces here and there, from people who don’t think deeply about the breadth and intricacy of communication. Formal training is probably the least used method of communication training there is.
() Psychic wounding can cause people to communicate in strong ways. Depression, anxiety, shyness, reactions to abuse, reactions to intense/strong personalities -- your communication styles can sometimes be tied back to psychic wounds you have received. (Kinda makes those comm styles hard to change, because they’re attached to psychic states that are scabbed over and hard to change).
() Habituation. In some ways, almost all talk patterns can be traced back to habituation. You talk like this because you have talked like this many, many times in the past. Often for thousands of days, across thousands of interactions. Deeply grooved habits can prove incredibly resistant to all forms of change, because they’re neurologically burned into your mind.
() Neurological imprinting. We all have brain pathways that get grooved according to how they’re used. Talking requires brain activity. (Seriously, it does.) So the configuration of your brain tells you to speak a certain way, and speaking a certain way configures your brain. Be aware.
() Neurological impairment. Any form of brain impairment can force you into communication patterns. Aphasia, dementia, lack of sleep, inebriation -- any time you mess with your mind, you mess with your comm patterns.
() Absorbed observation. Humans learn. No matter what is going on, we learn. Often by observation of others. Hence we can “pick up” communication styles from media, from strangers, basically if we experience it through our senses, we can learn from it.
() Experimentation. Often we don’t just “learn” our communication patterns, we learn something, then we experiment with how to make it work for ourselves. I clearly remember the day I decided to experiment with saying curse words. I thought I’d probably get hit by god lightning. But I said “Damn” anyway. And I waited. That experiment showed zero immediate repercussions. And so off I went into an entire life of constant profanity.
() Inhibitors. When humans are allowed to communicate in any way they want, they tend to expand how they communicate. But if there is some entity that reacts negatively to something -- “That’s mean!” Or, “I don’t understand” -- then we shift. We are often inhibited toward only certain communication patterns. Find the original inhibitor, you can sever someone’s ties to it.
There you go, a decent intro to the main origins of communication. I use this little grid when I assess someone’s comms as part of a training or a coaching for them. Because it’s always helpful to be able to see the progression toward what you’ve become. Especially when you want to take control of the next progression -- toward what you want to become.