When we are in the process of inviting people to get involved in safety sometimes it seems like we are speaking a completely different language – and the truth is……we are!
In communicating our ideas, thoughts and preferences to another and receiving theirs, the messages are always filtered and contaminated by our models of the world, the way we play our movies in our head. That’s why we really never know how a person is interpreting our words and gestures or what movie they are playing in their mind of what we have said and the non-verbals we have used. We know how we intended the words to be used, what films we are attempting to evoke in the other. But we never know how it all gets filtered, recorded or shown as a movie in the other person’s mind. So we are indeed speaking two different languages.
This explains why we are much more likely to mis-communicate than to communicate accurately or effectively.
A key to unravelling this is to be aware that the meaning of your communication is in the response you get, regardless of your intention. (Dr Michael Hall). If we are able to stop the movie playing in our own mind and really use all of our sensory awareness to understand what movie the other person is playing in a no-fault, no-blame kind of a way it helps us to open our eyes and ears in a way that we can more clearly recognise the responses we receive from the other.
A key to creating an environment where two people can really gain an understanding of each other is for us to recognise there are films playing other than our own; other stories, narratives, life-scripts, beliefs etc. If we are skilled in doing this we can start to gain the information required to play the other’s movie in our mind so that we can understand what is playing in their world.
We can then ask ourselves some powerful questions:
Did the message this person receive match the message I sent?
Are the sender and the listener watching the same internal movie?
What did the receiver hear? What movie did it evoke in that person’s mind?
What words and gestures can I use to convey the film or message I want to convey?
What filters influenced this person to hear and translate things in that way?
Explorative questions about the communication process enable us to avoid taking miscommunication personally. They allow us to focus more exclusively on clarifying the messages and on developing the flexibility to vary our message until we can get through.
If you would like to explore exceptional communication in more detail please feel free to give us a call.
(Thank you to Dr Michael Hall for the basis of this article. A great read for more of this is Movie Mind by Dr Michael Hall)