By Marcia Reynolds, MCC (United States)
I heard a great story on National Public Radio's (NPR) "Talk of the Nation" about the storytelling skill of Ernest Hemingway. When asked if he could write a story in six words, he came back to his challenger the next day with these lines, "For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn." Although the story you see when you reflect on his words may be different than the one I see, the images inspired by the words are emotional and memorable.
http://www.coachfederation.org/articles/index.cfm?action=view&articleID=594&menuID=11&goback=.nvr_74761_1
Monday 18 January 2010
Interpersonal communication is not a set of skills but the result of relationships
After many years working on interpersonal communication and on ways to assess how competent a person is as a communicator, I have gradually changed my approach to it;
I have come to the conclusion that we cannot train a person to become a better communicator by teaching or transferring a set of skills. The same skills in one person seem to work and they don’t in another, they are adequate to one situation but useless in another. In order to escape from the contextual and time-irreversible aspect of communication, we have very often referred to as an Art.
But there is something that always happens; a good relationship brings a good communication. And here is where I can work. I can help people to identify what makes (in their terms) good relationships, work on self-awareness and self-resilience to enable openness and curiosity for the other… and when this happens, when the persons gets to know better how to be at ease with the others, then, communication emerges.
I have come to the conclusion that we cannot train a person to become a better communicator by teaching or transferring a set of skills. The same skills in one person seem to work and they don’t in another, they are adequate to one situation but useless in another. In order to escape from the contextual and time-irreversible aspect of communication, we have very often referred to as an Art.
But there is something that always happens; a good relationship brings a good communication. And here is where I can work. I can help people to identify what makes (in their terms) good relationships, work on self-awareness and self-resilience to enable openness and curiosity for the other… and when this happens, when the persons gets to know better how to be at ease with the others, then, communication emerges.
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