Friends, subscribers, fellow humans, We’ve reached a pause. One year. What a year. I came up with this idea for sharing weekly content in late summer/early fall of 2019. I didn’t see anyone talking about communication as I was envisioning and I was looking for an outlet. I wanted to write…
Miscommunication doesn’t really exist. “What?!! Miscommunication doesn’t exist?! It’s everywhere!” you might be saying to yourself. Stick with me for a minute. Miscommunication is little more than a figment of your imagination — an organization of your perceptions…
One of the worst things you can do with respect to communication is to think about it as nice, neat, simple, straightforward. I know it’s tempting. I know it’s easy, But communication simply is not like this. That communication is linear, direct, and easily moves from A to B, let alone that…
People talk a lot about using communication to make people aware of things. “We communicated it to them.” Awareness. What is being aware, really though? It seems to me that awareness is a recognition of some amount of information having moved from a source to receiver. Hopelessly generic.…
Every communication interaction has many layers of richness and depth. When it comes to meaning, there’s essentially always more of it. It never stops. If you look for meaning, you’ll find it. No instance of communication has just one meaning, there’s always many meanings. And meanings…
Communication is a process. This process, at any given point in time, has one interaction point populated by two (or more) people. I’m talking at a microscopically individual level, but when you consider everyone, at larger scales, communication is everywhere. We’re all communicating…
Among other things (information, meaning), communication is about change — movement from state to state. Old form to new. Change is always happening but we don’t often feel it due to incrementality. It happens just a little bit at a time. Change also quite often feels like stasis, which…
Communication is full of paradoxes. Two opposites, somehow connected to form a larger whole. Paradoxes, you know. “You gotta be cruel to be kind” as Nick Lowe teaches us, or the Ship of Theseus, or the Prisoner’s Dilemma. Paradoxes, two things that despite their apparent oppositeness…
Every conversation is communication. It’s also beneficial to think of communication as a conversation. Why? Because relationships, which grow from communication, are really just collections of conversations. Conversation and its importance to communication is an idea needs to be grasped in at…
"What do you mean?": The Innerworkings of Intentionality
Concept of Com | Ontology
People put a great deal of belief into “intent” when it comes to messages and communication. We like to think that our intended meaning matters. It’s comforting, right? But what if there is no there, there? What if our intended meaning doesn’t actually matter much at all? How…
Lots of people believe in “communication styles." You shouldn’t. Do humans have tendencies and sensitivities when communicating? Yes, definitely. We each have our own. But that does that mean you have a communication “style”? Nope. Having a communication style is to have…
Effective communication. Everyone talks about and seems to be after it. But what is it? What is effective communication? What does it mean to communicate effectively? Do we really know? Ask 100 people what “effective communication” is, and you'll get many different answers. It’s…
Transparency is a god-term. People want it. Calls for it are everywhere. “I’m aiming to be transparent here,” you might hear in everyday conversation. Transparency is supposedly one of the great communication achievements. Or so we tell ourselves. People widely accept the idea that…
Sharing is heavily related to communication. If we think about communicating as what we say and how we interact, sharing factors into the depth of communication. What we share when we communicate — the topics we cover, what we’re willing to talk about, etc. — is the literal relational,…
Everyone talks about how “openness” is important in communication, but what is openness? What does it mean “to be open” when we communicate with others? We have to think of openness in at least two ways: Openness means how much you share or are willing to share when you talk: What…
…continued from Part 1. Stopping Communication or Total Disagreement We frequently talk about “communication breakdown.” Led Zeppelin wrote a song about it. It’s not “always the same” as Robert Plant might have you believe (but that’s still a great song).…
Communication doesn’t always succeed. But it never fails. We talk about communication failing all the time. However, we need to recognize that an unanticipated outcome is not the same as “failure.” Communication isn’t an on/off switch. We’re not “communicating”…
It used to bother me when students of mine would say they studied “communications” when they were actually studying communication. That term — “communications” — invoked feelings similar that of nails scratching on the chalkboard. After escaping academia, I still…
To anyone who works with code, “==” means “equivalent to.” When coding, programmers can use “==” to make one thing the same as another. communication == relationships Communication and relationships are essentially the same thing. How you communicate with someone…
People are obsessed with the idea of clear communication. We are told that if you can’t communicate clearly, you’ve failed. People’s obsession with communication clarity can be downright pathological. Maybe you have heard your boss or colleague or spouse say: “I couldn’t…
