Did You Hear What Was Said?

Hey team! Alright, so here we are. Wednesday Workshop and today’s message is on the word behind me: communication. Communication is hugely important. A person by the name of Byron Katie said, “We do not hear what someone said; we imagine what they meant.” That sometimes gets us into trouble. If we’re not listening to understand them, we sometimes are imagining what they said.

Another thing that we do (and I’ve said this before) is when we’re in a conversation with somebody, sometimes we’re not listening to what they say. We’re waiting for a time to interrupt so that we can say something. So, depending on the kind of person you are, sometimes you’re trying to understand what somebody meant, and you’re imagining it based on your own reference point of what you know about them or don’t know. What you think about them, or what you feel based on interactions. Or maybe what somebody else has said about them.

In some cases, that might be great things, and so therefore you’re listening maybe a little bit more intently. But you’re still trying to imagine what they mean. We’ll miss the meaning because we’re not truly listening very well, because we’re getting off in our own thought processes. Because that’s just the way we are. We don’t necessarily hear what people say, because we don’t sometimes even ask questions. Because we imagine from our own point of view what they’re meaning. Then we derive from that our own talking points and things of what we should say when it’s time for us to talk. And if that is an argument, we’re not truly understanding where the person is coming from. We’re only understanding where we’re coming from based on what we think they have said.

Communication needs to be a Q&A session sometimes more than a talking session. And I’m not even great at this, to be honest with you. There’s a couple of things here recently I just finished, “12 Rules for Life” by Jordan Peterson. He had a really great, I think it was in chapter nine, a really great point. I’m going to go back and look at that. I’m going to document that, and I’m going to start practicing what I heard him say. I might bring that back coming forward on a Wednesday message here at Wednesday Workshop. It was something that really sparked my interest in how it’s easier to build a great communication stance to understand what somebody actually said and what they meant, as opposed to what I think they meant.

It’s something for us to be thinking about, right? Are we truly listening to understand what somebody means and what they’re saying? Or are we just taking our own, you know, glasses and hearing aids or however you want to say it?

There’s an old book out there about how we hear and how we see. It’s about communication between men and women. The way it talks about it is, a man wears blue sunglasses. A woman wears pink sunglasses. A man has a blue hearing aid, a woman has a pink hearing aid. So, everything is going through a filter based on. I see everything blue, my wife sees everything pink. I hear everything blue, she hears everything pink. So when I say it out of my mouth, it’s coming from a blue point of view. I know it’s hard to picture colors. She’s receiving it from a pink point of view.

I think, in a similar way what we’re talking about here. We don’t hear what people are saying. We’re trying to really imagine what they’re meaning, but only through our own perspective again. Blue sunglasses, blue hearing aid.

And sometimes we need to maybe ask some questions to truly, you know, “I’m not sure I caught that, could you explain?” and getting back into that conversation. So on this Wednesday Workshop, let’s keep striving for our communication to be better by not involving our own thinking of what people are meaning, but ask them some questions, try to truly understand what they said and what they mean from their perspective, as opposed to your perspective.

And maybe our communication will get better and we won’t imagine. I’ve seen a lot of arguments and fights, not only in my own family, in my own marriage, but in other people, where I can see that people are missing each other because of miscommunication, because they are trying to believe from their point of view what the person means, and that’s not what’s being sent. It’s not what’s trying to be conveyed; it’s just what’s being received.

It’s important for us to send the message the way somebody can receive it, but it’s also for us to receive the message and truly understand what somebody’s truly saying.

Alright, God bless you guys, have a wonderful week working on your communication. Remember to be valuable, because nothing less would do. God bless you guys, I’ll see you next week.