Communication skills

I was told a few times I have poor communication skills. When it happened for the first time, I almost didn't look at the issue, assuming the person who told me this can't be true. However, the last time I heard it, I began looking at this problem. This means what I need to do is to look at communication skills. I will have to do this even when I go to communication skills training which I'm planning to do. It's better to start now. Let's try.

The most important thing about communcation skills is what they are. Communcation skills are skills regarding a communication. We all know what a skill is - it is how well a person can do something. This means that an essential ingredient of doing something well is knowing what needs to be done. The better a person communicates, the greater are his or her communication skills. He or she knows exactly what needs to be done. So the most important thing to be done about communication skills (I already know what a skill is) is to make sure I know what exactly is a communication.

I thought about a proper definition of communication and my definition would be:

AN ACT OF SENDING AND RECEIVING MESSAGES

Notice the definition doesn't say anything about information. Information is just a building block of messages. Therefore, it is infinitely more important what we want to communicate (a message) than how we do this (information). Notice also there two messages in a defintion - a message that is being sent and a message that is going to be received. Why? The reason I included two messages in the definition is that if there was only one message, then an act of communication would be pointless - it wouldn't cause any effect and the reason to act is that we want someone or something to react, e.g., communicate according to the message that was sent. The reaction doesn't need to immediately follow the action, but in technical terms, it does. For example when I say "Turn right after 10 minutes pass from now", there would be no visible reaction until 10 minutes pass. However, if I found what I said to be incorrect, i.e., a person should turn left instead of right, I then may feel guilty for sending an incorrect message. Feeling guilty would be a rection to my message. In truth, all action is immediately followed by a reaction. In a given example, a person who I talk to reacts by listening to my message.

If we didn't communicate, we would know nothing. This why we read, write, talk and look. When we look, we communicate with the environment. Therefore, it is infinitely more important to look accurately then to read and write. In fact, both acts of reading and writing require looking, i.e, at a book or a song. I think there is a better name for this - perceiving.

The last paragraph says a correct perception is crucial for correct communication. In fact, I will now prove that it is probably the only thing required to communicate successfully.

Let's take the simplest case of communication. Any person can communicate a lot of things, depending on the ammount of things he perceives. His perception is on a gradient scale between being totally incorrect to totally correct. Therefore, the communication is affected by:

1) Things perceived by a communicator.
2) The correctness of perception of each of those things.

This means that the simplest case of communication would be if a communicator perceived only one thing. To simplify it further, let's assume he can either be totally right (perfect perception) or totally wrong (extremely faulty perception).

Imagine there is a person, a mirror and nothing else. The person faces the mirror. Assume the person doesn't know anything (has almost no knowledge) except what he needs to know answer the question: "Do I exist?". At the time of this illustration of how the simplest case of communication would look like, he doesn't know whether he exists or not. What he has to do is to look at the mirror, perceive what is there and say either: "I exist" or "I don't exist". The first answer would imply perfect communication skills, the second - extremely poor communication skills. Why? As I said, we communicate with the environment. In this example, it is a mirror.

Because the person facing the miror doesn't know anything except what he needs to know to be able perceive a mirror and answer a question according to what he perceived, he doesn't know what is a lie. Therefore, he can't choose to lie, although he can lie unconsciously when what he perceives is incorrect. This leads us too:

ALL LIES ARE CAUSED BY INCORRECT PERCEPTION

Let me expand on the subject of lies for a moment. Some people may think that they can benefit from lying. However, all action is immediately followed by reaction. What happens when we lie is that we send a false message. Then, the person who receives it will construct his messages according to this lie. He or she may recognize the message as a lie or not, but either way he will have to react to the lie. When he does, then the lie didn't work - so why telling it? When he doesn't, then an interesting thing will happen. His communication with the einvornment will be based on this lie. What this means, this person will in some way (by the way he acts) lie to us! This means two very important things:

ANY ACT OF LYING IS AN ACT OF LYING TO ONESELF

and

A PERSON WHO LIES IS A PERSON WHO IS BEING LIED TO

Let's close the subject of lies for we already discovered two very important things about it and it is not the main subject of this article. Let's look at the mirror from the example I gave. What do we see when we look at it? At first, it may seem obvious that we see ourselves. However, each mirror has some imperfectness which cause it to reflect an image at least slightly different from what is being "sent" to it. We can imagine a "hacked" version of the mirror that uses some technology to prevent the viewer from seeing himself in it. So, what the person should do is to examine the mirror and answer the question only when he knows for sure it is able to reflect what would be in his place.

What is interesting in the example of man and the mirror is that the man has to determine the truth that he wants to contain in the message, consctruct the message with this truth and then send this message. As I said, the message is infinitely more important than the information it contains. To make it crystal clear, notice that information is raw - it doesn't mean anything. Only the message, which includes the way the information can be encoded and decoded, along with information, can be meaningful. Therefore, the act of sending the message is not as important as actions that lead to a correct message.

To sum up, the correct communication skills require to:

1) Perceive correctly
2) Send the message

I will expand on this subject once more with another example. Let's say that there are two people communicating. Let's say one of them is extremely overweight but he doesn't care about his condition as much as he should. Let's call him a person A. There is also a person B. There is a following dialogue between them.

B: You are extremely overweight. You should do something with yourself.
A: I know.

Is this dialogue constructed according to what I said about correct perception? On the surface level, it may seem so. However:

1) Both persons may have different ideas of what being extremely overweight means.
2) It is not clear what the A person should do to fix his condition and this is the most important thing.

The message sent by B simply didn't contain the most important thing - the correct perception of what is wrong. It is because being overweight is not wrong by itself - it is just an effect of an incorrect diet caused by eating to much straight sugar.

We can increase the communication skills of B now, resulting in:

B: Hi! I would like to tell you about a book that may be very beneficial to you. It's title is "How too limit the intake of straight sugar". I think you will like it.
A: OK, I will read it. Thank you very much.

Do you see the difference? Here, we are encouraging A to communicate with the wealth of true information which he probably doesn't recognize as true. Otherwise, he wouldn't be in his condition. What we do is simply sending a true message, but in this case the message contains much more truth. Another difference is that we don't force A to accept our view about his condition. It is him who has to read the book and draw his own conclusions. In this chapter, I drew my own conclusions about communication skills. I plan to expand my view on this subject in a near future, also on communication skills training.