- We Already Possess the Skills to Communicate Better
- Focusing on our Soft Skills is the Key to Better Communication
- Your Phone is Not Helping You Improve Your Communication Skills
Let me start by saying I’m not advocating throwing out our phones and moving to the woods to live off the grid. Though tempting, it’s not realistic. I’m reminding people what it means to be human and how we should use technology to augment, not replace real communication with ourselves and others. We absolutely should use our technology to assist us with the many task-based things tech was built to facilitate, but it shouldn’t be used for relationship-based communication but unfortunately, that’s what everyone is doing, everywhere.
Tech favors hard skills and it’s very effective for those things. However, it shouldn’t be used to replace conversation or be our primary form of human connection and interaction. We do not truly connect through technology, we just experience quick jolts of dopamine that mimic the feeling of connection, but they’re short, temporary and deeply unsatisfying. When my students are reminded of what a real, sustained connection and conversation actually feels like and what it produces in them, they crave it because it’s so deeply human and so rarely a part of our tech-enabled lives. This is why I wean my students of tech-based communication dependence in order to remind them of what real communication used to feel like and still can.
I use activities that force my students to talk, in person, and without the self protective barrier of tech. They have to lean into the vulnerability tied to human interaction and practice those skills. They start to remember the strength of voice inflection, eye contact and hearing and seeing how people respond to what we say and how we say it, in real time.
We can’t edit ourselves as easily in a real life conversation and that’s where vulnerability makes an appearance. Conversation requires us to be present, listen, and adapt to verbal and nonverbal messages. It is a lot easier to be snarky, terse or even rude via text than it is in person, because we see and feel the reaction, and hopefully, it forces us to adapt in that moment. Our faces and bodies get involved during real life conversations, revealing hundreds of micro-expressions, developed through our evolution to communicate information about us and our environment. Dealing with this kind of micro conflict in-person requires our humanity to kick in, and it encourages us to practice empathy, expose vulnerability and take in the energy of other people and process it, rather than just responding.
Are you starting to see why being so dependent on tech is a recipe for disaster? Our tech obsession has led us into a communication crisis because we’ve removed humanity – good and bad – from communication. We may think we’re communicating, but we’re really not. More often than not, we’re just responding, keeping the ball in the air and communicating very little value. Ultimately, we’ve stripped feeling and emotion from most of our communication, making it hard to tell the difference between how we feel and what we think.
This goes beyond simply eroding how we communicate personally, there are much more destructive outcomes that are affecting us emotionally, politically, and impacting our mental and physical health. Our news feeds fuel our anger and encourage polarization and hateful comments. We’ve steadily become desensitized and even numb to violent images and we can’t tell the difference between conspiracy and truth. We double down on our beliefs but can’t really articulate why other than to parrot unsupported superficial reasons. Ironically, we’ve become increasingly emotionally reactive, but without the means and methods of having any kind of logical discourse about what’s actually going on, keeping us in a state of hyper-reactivity without the thinking that was meant to support our responses.
These small daily behaviors are the problematic incremental steps that have led us to this uncontrollable inhuman quantum shift we’re experiencing. When vulnerability is avoided, empathy becomes threatened, conversation disappears, and aggression is released. We respond like animals. We stop critically thinking.
Look at the complexity of the world we live in, look at how people talk about politics, society, community and most importantly, talk about other people. Are we really surprised there’s nothing but deadlock, intractable stances and increasing violence? We’re living in the peripheral margins and acting on everything we see, because we’re controlled by it, regardless of its truthful value. We’ve lost our will to critically think. Critical thinking requires vulnerability, empathy and connection, but without it, we will continue to fight, and get nowhere on our most threatening issues.
Few issues illustrate this more painfully and clearly than the stupefying predictability of school violence in America. If dead children don’t motivate us to be human, what will? We’re so individualistic, we’re choosing our own agenda and gain rather than working together to keep children safe. We would rather yell than admit we might be wrong. This is not one party’s fault, it’s everyone’s fault. We celebrate the aggressive response and it allows us to feel nothing and do nothing. We have created and support apathy on a macro, social level, and apathy may be our most threatening pandemic to date.
Not infrequently, I’ve been called a canary in the coal mine or Chicken Little when I raise these vast issues about how de-humanizing our communication has become. But the warning has been blaring for decades and very few people are responding. Business leaders ask me what our future looks like from a communication standpoint. My response, sadly, is the world is slowly becoming a purgatory of terrible communication and unless we focus on re-learning, the future is grim. We need to focus on the present, and re-skill ourselves to avoid this future.
But I also point out that we can’t hold a younger generation solely responsible for our tech-obsessed poor communication culture. This is not just a digital-native Gen Z issue, this is an all generations issue. We are all like this now. We are all struggling with our soft skills, which means we must all make efforts to be better communicators.
All relationships – no matter the age – are impacted by this assault on vulnerability and empathy. My parents and their friends are in their 70s and they’re on their phones all the time. When I take my nephews to the park, I see parents and nannies staring at their phones, rather than watching and cheering kids on. The sadness of this surfaces often as I see their children looking back and seeking encouragement, only to find distracted adults. Mothers and fathers are not looking at their babies as much when they feed them and are scrolling rather than creating the eye contact that builds the connection between mother and infant. Our dinner tables have become silent as we continue to check our emails and news feeds.
Every single one of us learned to communicate by engaging with others in our environment. Whether it’s a child glancing over a shoulder to ensure they’re still being watched, a baby who is literally putting their brain together in every interaction with another person or stopping to check in with a coworker, we are missing countless opportunities to build strong connections. It’s through these processes of being social that we learn about ourselves, others, culture and how the world works.
This is why I teach, advise and coach people of every stage of life to prioritize how and what they communicate and to do it authentically, with vulnerability and empathy at the center. Imagine what is possible when we genuinely use our communication skills the way they’re meant to be used, with others in mind. The cool part though, is you can start right now. Instead of picking up your phone to check instagram or send a text after you read this, call a friend and have a conversation.