If we can understand our own and other representational systems and filters we can better know how we communicate and how other communicate with us.
How often do we see people talking at cross purposes? Quite often about the same subject and even appearing to agree on the points or issues but somehow seem to not understand each other. What’s happening here? Well, often it can be a little as having a different worldview or map or talking from and hearing from a different representational system.
Next time you are talking with someone, and they don’t seem to be understanding you, if you can’t tell because you are talking at odds, it's often easy to tell by their body language, you know when their face says “eh?” Try when this happens to listen out to how they are talking, the words they are using and see if you are at a mismatch, then try changing your language to match theirs, subtly of course.
Often our external communication output is a result of our observation and internal processing of the external behaviour of others as theirs is of ours. However, in today’s society, we appear to have lost the art of listening and are too often just waiting for our turn to speak. Even if we say something as simple as “I know what you mean when I went on holiday I found…” we have just changed the conversation to be about your agenda and not theirs. This is fine if we are trying to control the conversation but if we are truly trying to understand what the person is saying we need to learn to listen, quiet the internal voice and just listen to what the other person has to say.
The rules of conversation should be your turn my turn when you have finished. Trying to avoid jumping in to soon can improve our communications skills and simple conversation encourages can help people open up to us in ways we would not experience otherwise.
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