Avoiding misunderstandings
Who haven’t misunderstood things while talking with others? This can happen in many ways, but I think that one of the biggest problems is the way people interpret situations. After all, the perception we have may be quite different from the perception other people have of a certain subject, as we saw earlier in the post "Can we really understand others?". But how can we avoid these situations, with the awareness that people can interpret our message in the wrong way?
The importance of defining concepts
I believe the most important thing in verbal and written communication is the intention and the message we want to convey and not so much the words we use to pass the information. I think we've all had situations where we can not say exactly what we wanted to express in words, regardless the cause. The fact is that other people can perceive our speech in a way that does not meet our intentions, which creates unnecessary situations. To avoid these situations, I think a good practice goes through defining concepts . For me, the word XPTO may have a very different meaning than someone else, so I think it is very important to define the words before we use them. In fact, this practice is widely used in scholarly and scientific documents, in the form of glossaries, footnotes, et cetera .
The importance of the approach during a conversation
When we are talking about certain topics, it is very important to measure the words we use , that is, to try to find words that are not very provocative, depending on the context. This is because certain words can invoke strong emotions in certain people, depending on their beliefs, opinions, et cetera , especially if the topics are controversial. If we are not careful, there is a likelihood that people may feel attacked and react emotionally. This phenomenon in psychology is called Amygdala Hijack, which happens when we have an immediate emotional reaction, disproportionate to the stimulus, which is associated with a subconscious threat, causing emotions to take over the rationality.
Let me explain this concept with an example: my brother once told me that his former teacher was a hardcore benfiquista (a fanatic for the Portuguese football team benfica) and that it was easy to ruin his class, just by saying bad things about his team. It seems that he defended benfica with tooth and nails, becoming quite emotional in the face of the deliberate attacks of his students.
I think we all had reactions to which we later regret, and one of these causes may be precisely the phenomenon of Amygdala Hijack. Personally, this happened to me mostly in conversations (I confess that I don’t remember what the topics were), and I remember that after everything happened, I noticed that the problem was essentially in the words that were used in the conversation and the interpretation that I had about what was said. In this sense, what helped me most to overcome these reactions was the practice of self-awareness.
Yet on this topic of the approach, it is important to have the notion that the intonation we use when we speak, the context in which we use words, and body language are factors that can influence other people's perception of our intentions. In fact, there are many comedians who deliberately repeat the same word during a performance with different intonations and in different contexts, to create funny and unpredictable situations.
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Thank you for reading so far!
This issue of communication and misunderstanding is much more complex than what has been covered here, and I'm sure a lot has escaped me, but I hope this post has helped you in some way.
I confess that I wanted to make this post following the post Can we really understand others?, but my lack of time did not make it much easier in this process. But hey! But better late than never!
If you want to know more about amygdala hijack, I would recommend you to watch this video.
If you have any questions or feedback, you know what to do!
Would you like to know more about me and my work? Then check my blog page!
See you soon,
Shaden
Ypu are definitely right. We all have different perspectives to life.
Indeed, and that's what makes communication so rich!
Thank you very much for your comment and support!
True that misunderstandings cannot be avoided sometimes.
Indeed. Even if you have the greatest sense of self-awareness in the world, to which extent do you know other people? It's hard to know how other people would react since you are not them. We are the only variable we can control, so the best we can do is to do our part in avoiding misunderstandings.
Thanks a lot for your comment and support!
@shaden. Interesting piece. At the end of the day, it boils down to listening. And when I say listening I am not only talking about the physical act of listening, but also being aware of ones biases, which, of course, we all have. Challenging ones views and way(s) of lloking at the world is tantamount to understanding one another.
I agree completely! Truly listening to others, the way you defined listening, is without a doubt one of the best ways to really understand others and, maybe, to change our perception of things. That's why we should always be opened to the possibility that our view on things is wrong.
Thank you very much for your opinion and support!
This is a great approach I think. It's extremely important that when two people start discussing this or that concept, they are using the same definition for that concept, otherwise they would simply be talking about different things without realizing it.
Exactly! People tend to jump to conclusions when we use certain words, and sometimes people think that we are talking about something that we are not. Our ability to perceive things is probably what limits linguistics I guess, so it's important to try and put ourselves in other people's shoes, as I referred in this post.
Thank you very much for dropping by and for your support!
My pleasure! :)
We pretty much always misunderstand - but only all the time.
Even our own memories are now known to be reconstructed with an overlay/ flavour of how we are now affecting the memory, and that is our own experience never mind attempting to decipher what someone else is communicating.
We live in our separate realities, or illusions of realities. We are streams of consciousness mistaking our thoughts and feelings for reality when they can only ever be our experience in the moment of reality.
Fortunately a certain capacity to learn seems to be built into the system!
Very interesting! It's true that we tend to mix our subjectivity with reality, and that alone tend to lead to misunderstandings. So yeah, from that point of view I agree that we tend to always misunderstand. But I also think that this statement weakens along with how strong your relation with objective reality is, and if you meant that with Fortunately a certain capacity to learn seems to be built into the system!, then I'll agree completely! Or am I misunderstanding?
Thank you for the awesome response and your support! You made me think there, which for me is great!
I would like to comment on , '...your relation with objective reality'
We don't/can't know what objective reality (by which I mean the world out there, beyond my brain and body) other than through
Yes, I agree, and maybe I wasn't clear enough with what I meant in relation to objective reality (same definition as yours). I'm well aware that we don't know much about the objective reality, but what really matters is the way we can experience it, and as you said (and I agree completely), we can do it consciously and subconsciously.
Personally I've been practicing self-awareness and mindfulness for, I think, more than a year now, and I can see that these misunderstandings, at least throughout a conversation, come less frequent.
Its really hard to avoid this since we all have different ways of viewing the world but if we work on our social and emotional intelligence we can understand
each other better :)
thank you for a great post!
Please check my new post, I think you will like it!
@paps
Exactly! We should acknowledge that people have different ways to view the world, there is no way around that. So the only thing we can do is to accept that and do our best to avoid misunderstandings. It's hard, no doubt about that, but as you said and I agree completely, training our emotional intelligence is crucial to understand others.
Thank you for your comment and support! I'll be sure to check out your post!
I think it's an essential part to the human experience to communicate with others who have different world views. It forces you to push yourself and ultimately change your world view.
Indeed, couldn't agree more! Communication is intrinsic to the human species and has great benefits, but it's important to do it effectively. So reducing the "noise" during a conversation is a great way to go.
Thank you very much for dropping by and for your support!