The Mind Of Communication
The technology-driven decline in our bright, verbal and written communications may negatively affect our physical health and mental happiness. In the absence of healthy relationships, anxiety, depression, and likely certain diseases as well have been on the upswing.
The adverse psychological and physiological effects which result from the loss of audible, verbal or written contact are worthy of constant awareness. This trend generates another impact overlooked, a diminishment in mental capacity.
We transmit effects both superficially and privately, is particularly true of communication. Its daily accessibility is repeated, allowing for practice, correction, refinement and the numerous, varied virtues it calls upon and exercises. Conversation, audible, verbal or written, constitutes one of the best ways of training the human mind.
Below we illuminate the many qualities that can build through active, effortful participation in communication
Some months ago, the author decided to write short stories on Medium. After writing my first short story, something magically happened. A beautiful English teacher followed my script and made suitable, enlighting comments. In my mind, I could visualise her extraordinary beauty, hear her voice soothing what I wrote, hypnotising me to write. Overhear her concerns about her own life, and as a result, I wrote about 76 stories in 4 months, keeping the following controls in cognisance. It is okay to write every day, but it’s not okay to publish every day.
Restraint
The behaviours to engage in a verbal or written contact happen with little conscious awareness, it can be easy missing the extent to which communication require strenuous control.
We control body language expressions, demonstrating interest and friendliness, avoiding eye rolls, inappropriate looks of shock, disgust, boredom, and postures that read as closed-off, nervous, or defensive. We take note of what we say, abstaining excessive negative complaints, gossip, and inadvertent insults to the person to whom we are speaking as well as people they know. We must keep ourselves from saying foolish things, whether, as in empty meaning, wounding feelings. We listen attentively and react appropriately what the other person says, hit the right tone and content in our responses. We choose our words carefully, articulate them well, talk neither too fast nor too slow.
A written conversation takes a tremendous amount of mental discipline, which is why, whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert, you feel fatigued after a night of writing. On the path to self-mastery, dialogues are an underrated tool.
Focus
The written conversation is a singular exercise in being present in the moment. To engage it entirely, shut down outside world distractions and disengage from devices like boy or girlfriends. Listen attentively to people, even in overhear mode. Return the mind to the present each time it wanders. Commit the idea that there is nowhere else you’d rather be, than right there, right then, with this other person, even if it is in an illusion.
A Preference For Application and Performance
It’s easy to be the person waiting for other people to make the first move, hoping someone else will come to start talking to him. It’s easy, especially in a group, to keep a low profile, only half-listening, and let others do the heavy communication lifting. Enable others to introduce all the topics and think of questions to ask.
Passive behaviours were the hallmarks of passivity or outright laziness when we did not listen enough. Overhear is a crucial tool too as it can accelerate your mind to create.
A good conversationalist isn’t idle or inert, an initiative taker. He realises that like any other worthwhile endeavour, written conversation implies work. Instead of waiting for a great discussion to happen, he sets one in motion and injects the energy that keeps it going.
Tranquil Serenity
If well-written conversation requires an inclination towards action, it also compels mastery
Each partner offers responses that address what the other person says, and the passion can only grow out of attentive listening. One cannot perform listening in a state of stress and anxiety. It is difficult to hear what the other person is saying if you are visiting an emotional storm within. Fear will make your words nervous, clumsy, hastened, and whined. A good conversationalist must, therefore, learn to suppress his nerves.
Humility
Diminutive talk often cloaked with contempt and less flattering form of pride. It’s the same manifestation of skipping the less exciting early phases of any new effort, to jump right into its more mysterious depths. Like the man who avoids starting at the bottom rung of a job to work his way up, the man who despises small talk believes that such domestic talk conversation is beneath him.
A conversationalist knows the development of any pursuit starts with basics, gaining a grasp of the fundamentals. He is not too good for small talk but is willing to start small, and patiently let the discussion grow bigger.
Mastery of Research
The conversation is surprisingly rich, diverse, and nuanced. Much to notice as you journey through dialogue, the places where you and the other person connect and disagree. Topics are stimulating talking. Pauses, hesitations, and subtle changes in tone emphasise or misrepresent the words spoken. A suggestion mentioned in passing points to stuff he’d like to divulge but is having trouble talking about it directly.
Turning a discussion into an in-depth exploration, or into a curious investigation, you must be a detective. Keep your mind highly attuned, listen to the spaces between the notes, decipher clues others would miss. The art of communication also develops the art of noticing.
Controlled Reflection
Talk about ourselves and fail to ask the other person anything about themselves, failing to listen to them when they do talk can be another platform for expressing narcissism.
But done correctly, as an actual exchange, few things can get us outside ourselves as conversation, allowing a space in which you can cultivate a real interest in others. The excellent conversationalist animated by questions like: How can I understand this person better? How put them at ease? What feelings and experiences underlie this disclosure? What are they trying to say? The excellent conversationalist willingly cedes the floor and spotlight to answer these questions. He can curb the need to interject, and to turn every subject back to himself. The excellent conversationalist transcends ego preoccupation to notify, highlight, and absorb ideas of another. Free from jealousy or insecurity, he recognises, appreciates, and compliments the strengths that surfaced as another person speaks or writes.
Skill
The conversation is a skill, an arena for competence and strategy, like chess. The interview is also an art, a cooperative act of creativity, like the refined musical. Partners flow together, play the right notes, move to harmonic music composed. The members of an orchestra, build something together that could not create apart. The impact of responses within this collective combinator creates fresh, life-giving emotions, interests, penetrations, and designs.
The places and periods in which conversation most well-known, in the agoras of ancient Greece, the salons and coffeehouses of 18th century Europe, have also produced much of history’s most original thinking and philosophy.
Bravery
Every step into the conversation is a step into the unknown. How will it go? Will it result in the connection? Intimacy? Embarrassment? Hostility?
It’s because of this unpredictability we approach the threshold of a conversation, especially one with weight, we feel anxiety, even fear. And, for this reason, crossing that limit, knowing not where it will lead, takes courage.
Questioning and Openness
Every person sovereign country, a micro-culture, a world on its own. And the passport visiting these territories is communication.
Every person teaches us if we approach them with openness and curiosity. The person has different experiences and filters the world through them, and each can give us a different angle on life. These may be facts or insights, or subtle shifts on forces shaping humanity, the struggles people are up against, and people think the way they do.
We learn from everyone with whom we converse applies to new acquaintances, friends and family members we known for years and decades.
The common habit is believing we know everything there is to know about our long-time associates. Dedication is keeping relationships fresh, remaining perennially curious and seeking new secrets, no matter how long we’ve known someone.
Kindness
Engaging another in conversation is a gift. You offer a listening ear, interest, humour, encouragement, warmth, compassion. Give time and energy, your presence and your love, your body and mind. Provide a resource for people today feels most starved.
Attention.
Engaging in conversation is hospitality. No matter the location or circumstances, takes on the role of host, sense of welcome, putting others at ease, helping them come home, find themselves.
Self Knowledge
It is easy to think we are calm, confident, charming when we’re by ourselves. It is easy to think ideas indisputably brilliant when only sounded in secret places of our minds.
When we interact with our fellow humans, we realise we are other than what we thought. We know we are not smooth and secure as we like to imagine. We are lazy, distracted, and self-occupied. Opinions which seemed crystal clear, emerge confused jumble when we articulate them. Our bulletproof ideas turn out to have some very airy holes.
Story Telling can be uncomfortable because they challenge the inflated self-perception we form in seclusion. Conversational partner serves as a sounding board, allows us to hear our thoughts more clearly. Our partner acts as a mirror, which will enable us to see our flaws more clearly in the reflection.
Adjusting Odds
Listening to someone else requires not using the time they speak to think about what you are going to say when they’re through.
When your turn to talk, you have a moment to gather your thoughts, before offering a coherent response. It is then impossible to know what to say before saying it. You make it up. You improvise.
The response depends on preparation: the reflections we’ve taken time for beforehand, the ideas we’ve contemplated in advance, the manners we’ve practised previously.
The spontaneous delivery of spoken content depends on confidence, comfort with riding the flow, a faith in leaping without looking.
Properly Aligned Affections
Saint Augustine argued that virtue is mostly having your loves in the right order, while sin is allowing them to be disordered. Communication is an excellent way of ensuring you prioritised them correctly.
When you fully tune into a conversation, show you love your conversation friend more than you love your digital device, boy friend, girlfriend or foe.
When you refrain from sharing juicy gossip, show that you love integrity more.
Set aside office work to have a conversation with your spouse, show that you love relationships more than money.
Charm
People rarely change being lectured. A direct argument produces defensiveness.
The less guarded conversation, however, can strike another with sudden impact. Communication can change the direction of someone’s life.
Sometimes we offer a fresh angle on an old problem. Other times, we remind them of something they once knew, but had forgotten, or felt, but couldn’t articulate.
Often the influence through conversation comes not in the form of dramatic light bulb insights, a steady process the positive language we speak, slowly bring out the goodness. Communication leaves someone better than we found them.
Insight
Have you felt your anger at someone swell in the space when you were apart? The more excited about them, the wrong they had done, your rage grew. When you saw this person face-to-face and looked in their eyes, your anger melted away. The dimensional abstraction you had created of them in your mind, where you could see their flaw, was again replaced. The positive memories you share, their good qualities, your feelings of affection, reasserted themselves.
Such is the power of the idea, and power activated an order of magnitude higher when we interact in person. We recognise the commonalities in hopes, fears, and struggles. We realise that people are making it this mixed-up world, the same way we are. Thanks to mirror neurons, we feel what the other person feels. People experience patience and compassion that overrides the misunderstandings and unfair characterisations that arise when we only communicate just digitally.
love People
In communicating at a distance, we must secure our empathy for others and their very humanity. We must see people as means rather than ends in themselves, as objects used, manipulated, discarded.
When talking on our phone, while nominally interacting with a cashier, we treat them like robots.
When we sit at a party without saying a word, we treat them as badly
When we text to break up with someone, we treat them used for pleasure.
Conversely, we chat with the cashier, as a creature of flesh-and-blood, with hopes, dreams, feelings, and life outside this role and that name-tagged frock.
We comment about the weather to our fellow party guest, and we acknowledge that we share the same reality.
And breaking up with someone, we recognise a multifaceted human being, with whom we are not only willing to share mutual enjoyment, but also discomfort.
Make room in the schedule, space in bandwidth, to converse with another, we fulfil the most basic of human needs to be recognised, acknowledged, seen. We en-value people with our words. We love them with heroism.
Conclusion
The arrows of conversation work both ways. Cultivating inner dignity leads to outward respectability. The generosity of spirit leads to the charity of speech. An ordered mind leads to a well-ordered exchange.
At the same time, as Story Telling calls patience and courage, effort and creativity, humility and influence, virtues created through practice.
Conversation both requires character and refines it. Available daily, such exercise strengthens the soul of the individual and society. The family, town, state, and country, emerges from this skill and art, the power and pleasure, of exchanges of communication.
