Communication

This week we discussed the topic of communication. How it is so important to be able to communicate effectively. In the beginning of class our teacher had an object lesson. He had us take a "pop" quiz but all of the questions were written in Danish. He wanted us to answer the questions, even though none of us knew how to speak it. Some of us were able to kind of guess what was being meant just by the words themselves. He then went on to explain how in communication sometimes we can infer what we are hearing, but that doesn't necessarily mean we know what is being said. When you are communicating there are three things; Tone, words, non-verbal. They don't even all of the time relate. For example, you can be saying something that's pleasant, but your tone in how you say it can come off unpleasant. That's how sarcasm is. What you're saying doesn't always mean the same thing if you inflect a certain tone or body language with it.

President Harold B. Lee said that we need to communicate so we can't be misunderstood, not just so we can be understood. This was really profound to me because sometimes you feel like what you're saying makes perfect sense, but someone else could be decoding it differently. Decoding is the biggest problem in relationships. Brother Williams gave a little diagram to help us see this visually. We have our thoughts/feelings and based off of how we feel we encode some type of message. Then the other person then has to decode what we've just said and gets thoughts/feelings based on what they think was said. In other words the person you are talking to could be decoding what you're saying MUCH differently than you were intending.

He gave an example of a husband and wife he knew. They were having marital problems because she felt like he was cheating on her or wasn't completely honest with her. She thought this because she would hear from her friends (who happened to be attractive) how funny her husband was because they ran into each other in the grocery store. She thought he was flirting with other women because he had never told her the stories of seeing these women in the stores so she felt he was trying to hide it from her. In actuality, he didn't tell her he'd see the women because he knew his wife felt insecure and he was trying the whole time to get away from talking with them anyway so that his wife wouldn't get upset. He loved his wife so much that he didn't want her to feel insecure so he wouldn't say anything, and when she would find out she felt betrayed because she felt he was trying to hide things from her. She was decoding what he was doing as being sneaky, when that wasn't what he was doing.They were both trying to solve a problem, but unless they have good communication and a shared meaning then it can just create conflict.

It's important to not only have good communication, but to understand a shared meaning. Teaching better communication skills to couples in the short run worked, but in the long run was actually detrimental because they can still misunderstand each other. Unless you both are on the same wave length and really understand each other, relationships won't improve by just better communication.