Communication Is Never Just Words
Communication styles vary in many ways.
It’s never just the words you use. Even the written word can convey a degree of tone, intent, and attitude.
Communication is a complex mechanism of expression employed to convey ideas. It’s how you and I can share notions, agree and disagree, and expand (or, frankly, shrink) our overall knowledge base.
Communication can be both internal and external. When you are thinking about this, that, or the other thing, you’re communicating in your head. Maybe I can do this or perhaps I should do that or I can’t stand that other thing and the like. This can get complicated when you find yourself arguing with, debating, and/or contradicting yourself in the process.
That, turned outward, can become even more complicated. Why? Because communication is never just words, and when you start to talk to other people, additional cues and such become part of the overall process.
Sometimes this is easy to read. When you stand there, hands on hips, glaring, this conveys to me, beyond words, that you’re probably angry. Other times, however, it’s far more subtle, and frequently misconstrued, misunderstood, and misinterpreted.
This is why it’s important to recognize that communication is never just words.
Subtle and not-so-subtle elements
When it comes to communication, the non-verbal, unwritten elements add a layer of complexity that can cause tons of misunderstanding. This gets especially tricky with interpersonal conversations. However, it also applies to talking to and with yourself.
I strive to journal daily. This practice allows me to write out thoughts, feelings, intentions, concerns, and other bits that are crowding my head. While this is great, it lacks the subtlety of certain aspects. Especially the many, many intangibles involved.
Whole people are made up of 4 specific elements. One is tangible, the physical. The other three are intangible, the mental, emotional, and spiritual. Everyone has these four elements to themselves, yet how developed each is varies wildly.
The intangible elements have a rather intense impact on how communication works. This is why it’s more than words. Words are physical. That means there is still a mental, emotional, and spiritual element to all communications.
Most of these are incredibly subtle. That’s because of the intangible nature of the mental, emotional, and spiritual. This is also where miscommunication is frequently born.
Words and body language go hand-in-hand when it comes to in-person conversations. Looks, how you stand, sighs, what you do with your hands, coupled with the words you speak convey an almost surreal amount of information.
Yet there’s often more happening beneath the words and body language. This ties directly into the three intangible elements of the self. These incredibly subtle forms of communication are most open to debate and misunderstandings. They’re why we go to war, learn to hate, and fail to show we care, be compassionate, and worse.
Communication is never just words
Welcome to the internet. Here, not only are you almost entirely communicating via words, but also with a degree of anonymity. This place has given the whole world the ability to connect and see one another in real-time. However, rather than increase our closeness, it’s driven us further apart.
Many people wear the sometimes blatant and other times subtle anonymity of their online presence to say things without context. They write things that are meant to be pithy but instead come across as haughty or mean. Thought, feeling, and intent are hard to convey via words alone.
This is not, however, reserved for online. You can be with a person, in the same space, and still misspeak, misinterpret information, and misunderstand. A recent experience in this department prompted me to write about this today. You think you’re expressing yourself, you think you’re reading another’s cues, and then learn you utterly failed to communicate with one another properly, and now there’s hurt.
Even the unintentional hurt caused by miscommunication feels bad both given and received. Worse, it can drive wedges between people because the languages we speak are so variable.
This isn’t just applied to the words and if they’re English, Japanese, Hebrew, or any other language. How you communicate things might be vastly, almost incomprehensibly different from how I do. This is a result of many elements of variation between every single individual on Planet Earth.
Ergo, there aren’t just 6000-7000+ living languages in the world today, but arguably 8 billion (8,000,000,000). Is it any wonder people often don’t fully get one another?
What can you do to be a better communicator?
Recognizing and acknowledging communication beyond words
The first step is to recognize that words are one of many, many forms of communication conveyance. The next step is to acknowledge this truth. Then, the third step is to make an effort to bridge the existing gaps.
This will not always work. That’s just the reality of it. No matter how hard you try to explain yourself, discuss the missed cues, the nonverbals, and the mental, emotional, and spiritual individual needs via communication, you might not get one another.
What do you do when this happens? That’s the hard part. This can end friendships, relationships, and drive wedges between people. At its worst, it can expand outwards and encompass others. No doubt, you’ve watched a couple break up and their collective friends get put in the position of choosing sides. That can lead to some major ugliness along the way. Hell, it can lead to wars.
The biggest problem with all of this is the inherent human need to be right. You and I tend to intentionally or unintentionally reach a justification. Because of this, the drive to prove points, establish right and wrong, and the like causes conflicts great and small.
You have a choice when this happens. And it will happen. Keep fighting to be right. Make your point, argue your perspective, push back. Or concede. Admit your guilt/fault/wrongness, and apologize.
The biggest thing to remember here is that you can’t undo communication of the past on any level. If I misunderstood you, even repeatedly, I can’t go back in time and fix it. This is even harder when our nonverbal communication is incompatible or further apart than any bridge can gap.
Sometimes you need to swallow your pride and walk away
I hate to be wrong. It sucks. But you know what? I have been wrong before. It’s entirely probable I’m wrong about something now. I’ll be wrong about something in the future.
I have a choice when this happens. Stick to my guns, keep communicating all the ways I believe myself to be right, and obfuscate, misdirect, or even lie to maintain my sense of or belief in my rightness. FYI, that way lies madness. You create broader miscommunication and detach yourself from your personal truths, wellness, and wellbeing. At its worst, it leads to belief in demonstrably untrue things. I’m looking at you flat-earthers, anti-vaxxers, and Trump supporters.
Or I can admit I’m wrong. I can acknowledge where and how you and I misunderstand one another, where I fucked it all up, and the like. Further, I can recognize, acknowledge, and be accountable and responsible for my part in a communication failure.
It takes two to tango. Communication with others is never just words, and the numerous language variables of the intangibles are differently challenging with different people. That, however, begins within you and me.
Become more consciously aware and mindful of your own nonverbal, wordless communication styles. I’ve had a real eye-opener into how what I do and don’t do, without words, can create an incredible degree of misunderstanding, which in turn leads to hurt feelings. That sucks.
Yet I can choose to learn a lesson from it, and by recognizing, acknowledging, and being accountable for my failed communication beyond words, I can grow and learn. You can do this, too.
Maybe, just maybe, when more of us do this for ourselves we can impact the collective consciousness and improve communication beyond words to and with others.
Do you recognize your nonverbal communication styles?
This is the six-hundred and forty-third (643) exploration of my Pathwalking philosophy. These weekly essays are my ideas for – and experiences with – applying mindfulness and positivity to walk along a chosen path of life to consciously create reality.
I share this journey as part of my desire to make a difference in this world and empower as many people as I can with conscious reality creation.
Thank you for joining me. Feel free to re-post and share this.
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