You mean I need to listen?

How much time do you spend listening everyday? Why is it that you can tell me exactly what happened on Desperate Housewives last week but can't remember what I said in the lecture last week?

Listening is an active process not just a matter of shutting up and paying attention. Carl Rogers, the psychologist, developed the concept of active listening. We all need to pay more attention, slow down, think less and hear people out.

Our biases often get the way of accurate listening just as with our perceptions. We hear what we want to hear or what we expect to hear. While being a good listener can be difficult at time much of the time it is simply a matter of avoid bad habits. The Free Management Library has some suggestions for good listening.

We can learn to be good listeners from sharing our mistakes in listening. Don't embarrass yourself too much but tell us about times when what you thought you heard wasn't what was intended.

The rules for conversations

How do we know what to say and when to say it? If I could answer that question and give you a simple formula wouldn't the world be an easier place to live? We all make mistakes in interactions all the time. However, we all also do a reasonably good job of making it through each day being understood and not upsetting too many people.

The rules of interaction are not very formal and have as many variations as there are people and situations. Some people are easy to engage in conversation and some are very difficult. We have days when it seems that everyone understands just what we say and days we may as well be talking to a brick wall.

Efforts have been made to state rules of conversation such as Paul Grice's work with the Cooperative Principle. I think much of what we know about good communication we learn from bad communicators or those who model what we should NOT do.

Think about those people with whom you try to avoid conversing. Tell me about those people and their habits which make them so annoying.

Nonverbal communication

The meaning of some nonverbal communication is easy to interpret and for some the interpretation is very subtle and difficult. Emblems like the OK sign made with your fingers is just like a word and fairly exact but when someone has a "hurt" look on their face we much less such of the meaning.

At least in English context is much more important for nonverbal cues than it is for the use of language. While we language we have all kinds of rules of grammar and syntax the rules for nonverbal are less obviously and certainly not as formal. Pay attention to nonverbal cues use them to help you understand what is being said but don't over interpret. Don't assign more meaning than may have been intended.

Much of the early study of nonverbal communication came from anthropologist who noted the differences in nonverbal communication between cultures. Ray L. Birdwhistell a student of Margaret Mead's wrote about kinesics. Proxemics was the concern of Edward T. Hall.

For someone wanting to study nonverbal communication deeper, I recommend the book, Nonverbal Communication in Human Interaction by Mark Knapp and Judith Hall.

I imagine that all of us have stories that are at least funny and perhaps embarrassing in which we misinterpreted nonverbal cues.