Socratic Life

In order to talk about the different ways in which to improve our communication and start increasing the amount of information that is going back and forth it is necessary to recognize the different inhibitors both external and internal. Next it is necessary to learn new techniques with which to replace these inhibitors.

Defining The Model

While thinking about the best way to do this, one may wish to define some of the parts or sections that we will try to improve upon. Lets start, by defining the parts of the communication model.

The very model itself has a definition. It is known as Interpersonal Communication. This is the sending of messages or data from one person or small group to another person or small group of people with an effect and immediate feedback.

What are the are the characteristics or parts of the interpersonal communication model?

Messages

To have any level of communication occurring there must be something being sent and received. For an example we can take a look at our brains. In order for thought to occur there must be a sender that sends a signal, a signal sent, a receptor to receive it, stimulus upon reception and an effect based on the stimulus. These messages can be packaged in a number of ways including Audio, Visual, Tactile, Olfactory, Gustatory or any combination of them. In understanding this we can see that interpersonal communication does not need to be spoken or between two people standing in front of each other. It can be done on the phone, through instant messaging, video conferencing or Morse code. It is also important that we point out the fact that these messages do not need to occur because the sender or receiver wanted them to. The way that someone stands or blinks or smells can all be messages that are being sent.

Persons

In order to have interpersonal communication, we must have at least 2 people. A sender and a receiver. It does not however need to be limited to this number. Interpersonal communication can occur between small groups of people as well. As all communication does we need to start with oneself. Communication with oneself is can be called intrapersonal communication. We need to separate these two in order to fully understand them. We will also need to separate mass communication and public speaking from our topic as well. Mass communications and public speaking are usually unidirectional only, meaning that the message goes from the speaker to the audience but not from audience to the speaker.

Reception

This may be the most obvious point but it is worth understanding. In order for Interpersonal communication to happen there must be a message received.

Effect

The effect of the message can range from total agreement to an inaudible grunt. In order for it to be interpersonal communication the receiver of the message must somehow be different because of it. This is the effect. It doesn’t necessarily need to be seen or observed by the sender.

Feedback

It is here that I would like to spend the most energy. Feedback is the message that the receiver sends back to the sender after receiving a message. In order for this to be interpersonal communication it is necessary to have relatively immediate feedback of some kind. From nodding of the head in agreement to a lengthy banter of disapproval, we can see where feedback comes into the interpersonal communication model.

Encoding and Decoding

In Interpersonal communication the message must first be taken from thought and then formulated into an audio signal or one of the other ways to send a message. This is called Encoding. By taking this message through input stimulus and translating them into thought we are decoding them. A lot like a message sent from one end of a battle field to the other. It must be first encoded, written down, sent, received, decoded and then understood.

Competence VS Performance

Competence otherwise known as linguistic competence, has to do with our capabilities in the linguistic sense. This is relevent to our understanding of sentences, and punctuation. We have learned rules that when followed allow us to put sounds together that make sentences. Our competence lies in our ability to take this set of grammatical rules and match the sound with the meaning.

Performance is more abstract. It has to do with other factors such as how tired we are or if we are stressed out or not. If we are feeling flighty and have a short attention span, this has to do with our performance. There are many things that can influence a poor performance.

It may be that a person is totally competent in communication and knows all of the rules. In order to communicate fully and properly though, we must work on the performance.

Let me start by showing you an image I found while looking through one of my college communications books.

What does this say to you?….?

Communication is not just something that we can expect to happen to us. Its not something that we do to other people. It is something that all parties involved participate in. It is an action, an active tool that, when used effectively can merit extremely productive results.

Why is communication important?

During life, anything that you see, perceive or experience is communicated to you some way or another. Everything that we do requires some type of communication. There is always communication going on.

As you can see in this picture there are 2 receivers who are also senders. They are coding and decoding a message at the same time and they each have an environment that they are working in to encode and decode a message. Although these environments many times overlap, we must be aware that each person has an individual environment.

If we look closely at this image we can shift our view to be aware of the “noise” that presents itself as the communications is happening. One’s first thought when looking at the word noise is that this is of the external nature. A radio, Fan, Lawnmower or TV. I think about things that are distracting like loud noises, bright light, or other people. We may do better by replacing the word noise with a word like “Inhibitor”. This shifts our focus from an outside stimulus and redefines the subject to mean, an agent that inhibits or blocks an activity.

It would follow a path of reason that we can label these inhibitors in 2 different states.

1) External

2) Internal

The first of these, External, can be anything outside of our minds. This can be left mainly to our physical surroundings and understanding this, is a great first step to increasing our abilities in the communication model.

Finding ways to limit or discontinue the external inhibitors creates an atmosphere that welcomes clear communication.

It is the second of these however that I would like to focus on in greater detail.

These internal inhibitors can also be viewed as blocks. Blocks that when put together create a wall in the communication model.

The 12 Communication Blocks

1 ) Comparing

Comparing brings difficulty into the communication model because when one uses this block they are always looking at who is bigger, better, smarter, more funny or more philosophical. Here, when someone is trying to speak to you your are comparing their stories to your own and saying, ” My experience is so much better than theirs” or “My family is so much better at communicating”. In the end you didnt get anything out of what they said because you are constantly measuring your self up to what is being said.

2 ) Mind Reading

Mind readers rarely are even listening to the words that are being said because they are paying attention to the non-verbal cues and body language or perceived intonations and suggestions from the other people in the communication model. They may not really believe what is being said because they fell that maybe the other person is being untruthful or not telling the complete truth. They think ” She probably really wants to stay home and relax and is just saying she wants to go to the movies because I want to go.” or “Everyone can tell that I am strange and they dont like me but they just don want to say anything” These thoughts arent even based on the reality of what the other person is saying but a vague intuition and foggy interpretation based on hunches or paranoia.

3 ) Rehearsing

This is when you arent actually listening to the other persons thoughts because you are to busy rehearsing what you want to say next. You may have only heard the first three words before you start to formulate what it is that you want to say as soon as the other person takes a breath. It is hard for this person to get anything from what is being said because they rarely pay any attention to the thoughts or interests of the one talking.

4 ) Filtering

When a person filters they “listen only to what they want to hear”. This is when a person decides if they are in any type of danger or what mood the person is in and then they lose focus. They may listen just long enough to see if the person speaking is in a good mood or not and then their minds start to wander. A person might listen to her husband long enough to see that he is not angry at her and let her mind wander but not listen to his frustrations about his day at work. Filtering also is a way of avoidance and blocking out anything that is stressful, negative or unpleasant to here. You may not even remember that something was said. You simply don’t remember.

5 ) Judging

Judgments are labels and they have an enormous effect. If you have already decided what a person is like or not like you may block out everything else that they have to say. You may see someone that you think is “stupid, immature or lazy” and then not listen to anything else it is that they are saying. You might even get through the first sentence or two before you decide that ” they are on a tangent again” and then stop listening. This can also work with any other judgments or labels that you place on someone that is communicating.

6 ) Dreaming

Dreaming is lead by personal associations and ends in a shotgun array of random thoughts. A person will tell start by saying that they went to the bank… and you start thinking about the bank, you just got paid, paychecks come every two weeks, there is a concert in two weeks, you like music…… and then tuning back in later they ask what you think should be done about their 12 year old dalmatian. You can see how this might be damaging to the communication model.

7 ) Identifying

Identifiers take everything that is said and reference it to something that has happened to you. The speaker may be trying to share with you a problem that they are having with a difficult coworker and that reminds you of someone that you work with and you start to tell them about the time when you had to go to hr because a coworker was continually yelling. Everything that someone says reminds you about a time, place, thought, experience or something that you have done. You are so engaged with referencing your own experience that you have no time to listen.

8 ) Advising

Advising comes into play when you are great at solving other peoples problems, and ready to tell people about it. You are so ready to instill your wisdom and knowledge on someone that you dont even let them finish what they are trying to say. They can be into the conversation only a few sentences before you start to suggest a way to solve the problem and you may not have gotten to the most important thing of all, the speakers feelings. Acknowledgment and compassion are generally what people need when they are expressing pain or unease about a situation. They now feel like you didn’t listen and alone because you weren’t able to let them express themselves.

9 ) Sparring

Debating and argument are more important than understanding or being understood. Sparring leaves you focused on finding things to disagree with. The other person rarely feels heard or understood if at all. You are so adamant about your beliefs and preferences that you often are willing to damage a relationship in order to be win an argument. One of the most predominant types of sparring is the put-down. This is manifest in sarcasm, discounting, or passing off.

10 ) Being Right

You will go all out to win. You will do just about anything including, lying, twisting things around, making an excuse or verbal abusing in order to be right. You will stick to your guns no matter what is being said or who you are talking to. This often leaves the other person feeling unheard and discouraged.

11 ) Derailing

Derailing occurs when you get bored or no longer want to talk about the subject at hand. You may be uncomfortable and dramatically change the subject in order to derail the conversation. Another way of derailing is to make continual jokes in order to avoid the discomfort of really listening to what is being said.

12 ) Placating

Placating is simply agreeing with what is being said in order to be nice and pleasant. You may not even be listening, but you don’t want to rock the boat so you will agree with everything. You are usually tuned out and apart from the conversation.

The Belief System

I would like to touch for a moment on belief systems and bring your attention to how our belief systems effect each of these inhibitors. Belief systems can be seen as the way that we think or how we digest our interpretation of our experiences and then act on what we believe is happening. This belief system is a result of past, experiences, behavior patterns and thought pathways.

Everything that has happened to us, Everything that we have experienced, seen, believed, Everytime we talk to someone, react to a problem or protect ourselves from a perceived danger, we are creating little pieces that are added to our belief systems and internal inhibitors or blocks.

It is our job to analyze ourselves in our communication and change our belief systems or our created reality and change our minds or the belief system and create a new perception or way of thinking. We are then able to recreate the blocks from an inhibitor to a strength in communication. Very often the very things that plague our progress, when worked out and changed, become our most promising talents and strengths.

Relationships and Roles

As we learn to monitor the inhibitors that we use in our communication it is important to understand the different roles that we have in our lives. Depending on the role that we are playing our communication styles and the inhibitors can change from minute to minute.

Do we use the same communication inhibitors with our children as we do with the our boss? Where you might use placating with one person you may use sparring with someone else.

You may be a Father, Friend, Husband, Teacher, President, Police Officer, Employee and Coworker in the same afternoon. One of the ways that you can find out what inhibitors that you may be using is to start making a list of all of the major roles that you play in your life and write down the different inhibitors that you use as you find yourself in the different roles.

You may find that you use one or two a majority of the time, but most likely you will notice that you use most of them some of the time.

Circle of Influence

When you notice which of the inhibitors that you are using in each of your roles, it will become more apparent how using different communication skills will benefit you. Not only will relationships start to improve but as communication gets better you will find that people start to listen and communicate better with you as well.

Looking at our circle of influence, starting with ourselves, the circle then moves out to our spouses, children and families and then to our friends, churches acquaintances and communities. Our circle of influence gets bigger and bigger as we appropriately influence the people around us through service and good communication. If we don’t know how to properly communicate or positively influence those around us our circle of influence gets smaller and smaller until we cant influence anyone.

The concept is that when we learn proper influence and good communication in our roles, we learn better skills and the right way to influence people.Our circle of influence then gets bigger. People welcome our conversation and let us influence them more. Our circle continues to get bigger and bigger until we can influence everyone through our sincere desire to serve and communicate with compassion and skill.

It starts with yourself and moves continually outward until you have the mastery and skill to communicate with anyone, anywhere and in any situation.

You own how you communicate and only you can make the difference.

You have most likely seen the secret and know all of the rules of positive thinking, affirmations and self-mantras. You may have also read some books by Tony Robbins or Stephen covey. I truly do believe that the way to self improvement is consistently using these techniques to reprogram the structure of your thinking that has become a natural reaction through years of use.

It can be difficult to retrain yourself to be positive even in the face of your environment’s negativity and chaos. Using positive affirmations, visuals and other techniques you can transform your life and develop into whoever you want to be.

Thinking about positive affirmations has lead me to believe that there must also be positive De-affirmation and the realization that you may be doing something that needs to be changed.

Change requires work.

If you are doing something that you want to change and change requires work, you will have to work.

In saying this I bring up one of the most important positive De-affirmations that we can work on.

Procrastination.

If we could overcome this one area, our lives could be transformed at a pace that far outruns our normal strategies and current thinking patterns.

How can we Positively De-affirm?

One of the best ways that we can do this is to Recognize that we have a certain behavior or our thought habits run through a certain pattern. We can then Decide that we want to change this pattern or belief system. After our decision to change we should not continue to beat ourselves up or deliberate on the behavior that we want to change. This is where positive affirmation comes in. We start the process of Replacing our current beliefs and thought patterns.

You must believe that you are no longer a procrastinator.

Say to yourself, I do things efficiently and speedily. I am a very efficient person. I love to work hard. I am an organizer. I do things as soon as the opportunity presents itself. When a task that I have the proper responsibility for shows up, I do it as soon as I can every time! I enjoy finding tasks that make my life cleaner and more positive. You must feel as if you are the hardest worker that there ever was. Think as if you were the most efficient person that has ever existed. You are this person.

You see, usually you let “reality” control your thoughts. You react to events that go on around you and you let yourself become a pawn. This type of thinking has to stop. Remember the “Work” that I talked about? This is it! This is where you can dramatically improve your lifestyle, your income, your happiness and your way of life.

You are now relieved of having to respond and act like you are expected to. You are now in the reality of “As If” This reality has been given to you by yourself. The reality of “As If” is your potential and is everything that you ever thought you could be or do.

You are a doer. You dont even know what “putting something off till later” Means.

You will be surprised at how “reality” starts to fall in line with “As If” .

Here is how this works

Think = Behavior = Reality = Think = Behavior = Reality ——->

Usually, as you can see we let this so called reality rule our thinking. We then bahave or react the way we have so many times before and the way we will continue to unless the cycle is broken.

Now we can break the cycle.

We virtually change our realities. We change our beliefs.

“As If” Reality = New Thinking = New Behavior = “As If” Reality = New Thinking = New Behavior

Think-Act-Be

It is your Socratic Life.

How you think describes who you are.