There are many things that I would
say I am good at in this world, and I can also identify many things I am not
good at. In general, I would say I am
not always a good communicator and it is not because of what words I am using,
but it is the manner in which I use them/my tone. I can’t tell you how many times I say
something that I think can’t be misconstrued only for my wife to tell me that I
was just incredibly rude or came across in a rather unbecoming manner. I blame this mostly on me lacking many of the
skills discussed in this week’s reading.
In particular, I would venture to say my paralanguage skills are lacking
and I think that I might use metamessages more often than I think I do, but I
also want to discuss congruence and facial gestures.
Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink devoted an entire chapter
discussing the science behind facial gestures and the hiding meanings behind
them. What the scientists he talked to
in the book determined was that no matter how well you think you can hide your
emotions, or no matter how well you think you are hiding an ulterior motive,
for a split second your face will show your true colors. For example, there was an attempted suicide
patient that was in the middle of therapy.
During an interview, she was asked how she felt, to which she responded
that she felt fantastic – never better.
At face value, it seemed very sincere, however if you slowed down the
tape of the interview, a split second before she started to answer, a look of
complete despair came over her face. It
was clear that she was still suffering greatly.
What this study showed was that you must be completely sincere with what
you are trying to say or else the congruence associated with your talking will
be off. No matter how good you are at
manipulating the multiple muscles in your face, there will be an instant where your
true colors will show through, and people will subconsciously pick up on that
mismatch, thus giving you a feeling of incongruence with a message.
As I mentioned in the introduction,
I would say my paralanguage is by far the weakest area of my communicating
skills. People constantly misinterpret
things that I say – something that drives me nuts. Looking at the 6 things that make up
paralanguage, I would say that I have problems with all of them. Most of this could be attributed to me not
taking the split second to calm my mind before speaking (remember that my mind
runs faster than my mouth and the reduction gears that connect the 2 aren’t
always engaged), however I am not sure if this completely explains my issue
with this. I fully intend on recording
myself as the book recommends – I’ll report back with the conclusions later. Metamessages is something that I have never really
thought about, however I am going to start thinking about what I say and why I
chose the words that I did when talking with people to see if I am
unintentionally inserting metamessages that are not congruent with my message.
To sum it up, I have a very recent
example of non-congruence and communication.
We have been car shopping over the past several weeks and have been to
several dealerships. One dealership in
particular really got to me because of the inconsistencies within his
message. We were introduced to the guy –
he said he was just a common guy not out to get anyone, he was a church goer,
and he just liked to make people happy.
After the intro, he started to ask the typical questions, and I started
to give the typical answers. He very
quickly completely adjusted his mannerisms but his message remained the same
nice words. He interrupted me on several
occasions, started to make more expressive hand gestures, quit making eye
contact, and changed his tone (his resonance became deeper, his tempo
increased, and his volume increased) – all this while feeding me the same lines
of “I’m just here to make you happy,” and, “I’m just a simple church going guy
that loves Jesus and my family.” Notwithstanding
the interruptions – which really pissed me off – everything that he was doing
was in direct contradiction to everything that was coming out of his mouth. Instead, had he maintained his body language
in the calm manner he had at first, maintained his paralanguage with the
non-threating tones he had originally, and did not show me the hidden agendas
he was working towards, I might have considered going back there. In the future, I am going to really think
about the lessons learned from this week’s readings as I think it is one area I
could drastically improve my ability.
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