Have you ever felt like you want to talk it out, but no one is there to listen.
I mean there are people around you, but you are not sure that they can understand, or that they will understand your perspective. May be they have enough trouble themselves that you dont feel like troubling them with your problems. May be they are too busy with their lives that they assume that everything is ok with you. May be you dont want to get knocked off, with a comment saying that “this is ur problem! this is what you wanted to talk about!!”
Everyones world is teeming with their problems galore. While growing up, there were people around us to solve our problems or help us solve them. As you grow older, and hence wiser, you are expected to solve your own problems.
Its almost similar to the case when some one, an individual contributor is promoted as a manager responsible for several people. He is not really trained to get into those shoes, somewhere he just gets into it and does it. The similarity is in the sense that you dont always realize that ‘you’ are to solve the problem, specifically if you have got used to taking opinions and advice before taking any action.
Have you ever felt like you would even move the earth, if only ‘a word’ was said.
There are lot of people telling you all kinds of things, but that is not exactly what you wanted to hear. They are not the people whom your ears would love listening to. There are problems that we can solve, but there are problems that are ours, but we cannot solve. Specifically because our ‘circle of influence’ doesnt encompass the problem completely.
Communication is the essense of companionship in ones life. Problems can be created or problems can be solved by it. It is the way to set your stand, make the other person(s) understand your perspective, express your feelings, set limits, open boundaries and so on. It is expected that the other person does a similar thing and both can see the middle ground where they agree and understand what they disagree about.
But this is not as simple as it sounds, doesnt always happen too. We tend to mix up so many things into the words. Emotions, feelings and misinterpretations everything nicely mixed and served on the face. A communication breakdown has typical symptoms we talked about.
The human brain works by associating and indexing. Expressions, words and feelings are associated, intrepreted without regard to if they are right or wrong and then indexed inside the brain. One word fetches the entire episode, one expression breaks you down…. Thats the way brain is supposed to work. but this doesnt help in anyway.
Communication is not only verbal, it happens in gestures, body language and even the way one looks. There are several modes of communication. By modes, I mean direct face to face, over the phone, writing letters, emails, smses. A face to face communication is the best method. It allows the entire components to be seen at the same time.
Some times direct face to face is not possible and other means of communication take over. Unlike a face to face conversation, none of the other methods convey actually the implicit parameters. Written format specifically doesnt convey anything about the emotions involved. If you re-read a letter over a dozen times it might convey something that the sender never intended to. This doesnt seem to help either.
There are several levels of communication. A conversation requires atleast 2 people, any communication requires both parties to talk. If one does all the talking, or if one doesnt speak out anything, there is incongruity.
Levels of communication could vary in intensity, for instance, studded with emotions such as anger, could vary in depth, for instance, upto to what point one goes with the catch line, “my rabbit has 3 legs (hehehe, translated literally from tamil)”, how much time it takes for the other person to see a different point of view. Such variations dont always help.
How does one get out of a communication breakdown. Unless there is an attempt from either side there is no possiblity of the breakdown ending. First step is to behave as computer programmers do. Accept that there is a problem. Accept that it could have been caused by you. Accept that it needs to be solved. Accept that you need to work on it.
The world we live is not ours to keep, the family we were blessed with, the friends we grew with, none of them are ours to keep. There are only your memories that stick with you. There are somethings very rare on this earth, human life and affection is one such thing. Let not a breakdown in communication defeat you and your memories.
Science says humans took close to 10000 years to quantify verbal sounds into sentence and thereby to express oneself. Start talking…
Sometimes all it takes is just a single word to set things right, Sometimes all it takes is a simple smile to set things right.
