Surviving Breakdowns in Communication

You ever think you know the words to a song? Like you just know that’s what your
fave singer is saying but some how you find out you been singing it wrong for
God knows how long? Communication works the same way. Your perspective plays a
huge part in communication. You can hear what the other person is saying but
there is a possibility that if you’re not listening fully, you’re going to
misinterpret something based on how it made you feel. I’ll give an example of
what this looks like sticking with the song metaphor. Biggie’s Hypnotize...I
promise y’all for the absolute longest I was singing “but I just love your
fancy razor” instead of “flashy ways” like, what? How does that even make sense
right? It doesn’t! But that’s what I heard. It wasn’t until I was much older
and my brain finally started to realize “wait a minute, something isn’t adding
up” that I was able to listen to the song again and hear what was actually
being said. This is one very important piece of communication; you must be willing to recognize when something isn’t adding up and that your perspective might not be the only one that is “right”.

This brings me to the next important piece of communication; effort. I will use one more song to support
my metaphor; Clones by Tierra Whack. The chorus goes “westbound, eastbound.
Everybody walking like me now. Everybody talking like me now, heard I’m who they
wanna be now” and if I’m being honest I could not make out the “westbound,
eastbound” part for the first 12 or 30 listens of this song lol. It just wasn’t
clicking to me. So I made the effort to look up the lyrics to help me
understand because I really liked the song. It’s important to be able to do
that when communicating. If someone is important to you but there is a clear
disconnect in communication, you have to make the effort to get clarity.
Don’t be like me, muddling through one of my fave songs for weeks singing gibberish
when it took me two seconds to find clarity.

I
encourage you to reflect on conversations you’ve had where there was a
a disconnect in communication. And what could have been done to resolve it. Also,
let me know what songs you’ve spent too much of your life singing incorrectly.
This should interesting.