Yes! We are different ...

Of course we are different. I can see it every day. I’m married so I can experience it, and even more, I observe how men and women are different in a childhood. When my daughter comes to me trying to tell me what just has happened, so she starts “Dad! You know… My friend did this… and I said this… and she said this… “and so on. But when my son comes to tell me what happened, he say “Papa, I did this and that”. He is shorter and more to the point. Women are more talking individuals, they love to talk about feelings and they can’t be themselves without showing their feelings. Men are different, they don’t talk much, even if they do, and they do statements without questioning a lot.

Here is funny example how different we are

P.S. By the way I made this post shorter to show how different we are in communication. 

Who is behind this pretty face?

Every time we meet a person we have never met before, we start reading this individual. The way we read him or her is like a puzzle. We get a lot of pieces that should be in a right spot and thus making all together a good looking picture. With every statement, movement and gesture the other person makes we build our own dictionary that helps to interpret this person. We get information, start analyzing it and make conclusion if statement is proven or not, legitimate or not. There is a chance that our first judgment may be incorrect, because first impression is often deceptive. It is also proven by saying that a fair face may hide a foul soul. Within a time we accumulate enough information to build our own approach how to perceive our interlocutor. However, within some time we can adjust our approach, but in most cases we will be using the same approach for the rest of our life. Significant impact on one’s perception makes kind of relationships we have between us, but it is just a part of our approach that we have built according to many factors. Thus, from my perspective, it is completely impossible to perceive others without in some way judging or categorizing people. 
To make those judgments fairer we just need to be as fair as possible. The only way to make it possible is to judge according facts and acts, but not according feelings. 

Good and bad speakers...

Have I ever been influenced by a speaker? You must be kidding… I think there is no one in this world who would intentionally said “NO”. All of us have been influenced by a speaker. When we say “been influenced” by a speaker we mean that we have decided to do or not to do a thing. It really doesn’t matter, if by a speaker we really mean a person who would step out and give prepared, good organized and accurately delivered speech. It could have been just a small talk with our friend, or caution from a highway patrol, who warned us about speeding, or even kind advice of a waiter, who would recommend us some delicious dish for dinner in a restaurant. We are being influenced by people’s talks every day, so no one can say “NO”.

Being a Christian makes some influence on you. Every Sunday I and my family go to church. It’s been since I was 6 years old. So for last 23 years I’ve heard over 2500 sermons, that fairly can be count as a speech as long as they are held in a public places for an audience, which is gathering of 2 or more people. There were a lot of outstanding sermons and prominent preachers, but even though I can’t just pick one preacher who would influence me the most. All of those speakers had something in common, something that marked out their words and made memorable for me. There were few things. First, they talked about me. Every prominent sermon I remember was about me, it had somehow to do with happy or grey days of my life, my successes or defeats. Second, they didn’t just talk about me; they were ready to talk to me. In other words, they were prepared to speak, their speeches was well organized, had clearly stated main ideas that were easy to follow. Good speech like a well design building, because it has some order or structure that makes it better than others. After a good speech you just get that kind of feeling. IT WAS REALLY GOOD!

Have I ever heard bad speakers? Sure thing… Why they were bad? I don’t remember, that’s probably the reason, why now I can be so kind to say “ those were not so good...”        

Where am I going?

The most interesting and most relevant to my life idea from Chapter 2 would be the one where author says “communication is unsuccessful whenever the meanings intended by the source differ from the meanings interpreted by the receiver”. My goal is to get to the point where my communication skills would be so well developed that I could formulate and send meanings without having receivers interpret it differently. I believe that it is ultimate goal I will be working on whole my life. I will be trying hard to learn receivers, and will succeed if those are going to be people whom I meet pretty often. In order to achieve this goal it is necessary to follow few steps:

1. be open minded - it means that I really need to avoid judging people who are different;
2. see what’s beyond – ability to read and understand people on a deeper level is crucial for successful  communication. I would call it the hardest thing to learn to do;
3. become guru in message engineering – that’s where every communicator faces biggest challenge, because message should be built correctly. We are dealing here with sender’s intelligence and wisdom in formulating message and sending it correctly.

I hope that by the end of this class I will be closer to achieving that goal. 

Lets play, lets communicate...

Being father of three kids I find it very true that communication can and should be considered as patterned interaction. Especially when I observe my kids grow up. When my son began trying to speak, the first thing he started with was catching our attention. Then he was trying to say something, but as every kid when starts talking but it sounds like nonsense sounds, we couldn’t get what he was trying to say. Later, when we learned his language a bit our communication began to bring fruits. Even though other people couldn’t understand what our boy was asking, we clearly knew what he wanted. We were playing by the same rules of communication that other people didn’t know. 

Another example, when we can clearly see how communication is like a game. Lets imagine situation when we meet a new person. In order to get this person know better we need some time to learn rules of communication. We need to catch up on how to interpret acts of that person. After some time, we come to the point where we can read game rules with a shorter time. Pretty often I need just one glance from my wife to understand what she wants. But it didn’t happened immediately after I met her. After being married for over 8 years we created our rules of game, which is know as communication. 

Building world though communication

For every person in order to understand an idea or complex concept it is necessary to find a practical analogy of that idea and implement its meaning in life. Thus to make an understanding of communication in the social constructionist perspective, lets apply it to everyday life. Just imagine yourself in a gathering of random people you have never met. After some time each of us will start looking for similar people by considering alike expressions of culture or belief. By seeing people who wear and talk like us we tend to start grouping together. This tendency demonstrates and proves that communication is like a boundary that surrounds people and holds them together.   For me as a one who was born outside of the United States it was always interesting to compare two cultures and see similarities and differences. One of those ideas is a value of each person as individual in American culture. In contrast, in most republics of the Soviet Union, there was no such thing as a valuable individual. The only respected was a group or collective, so everyone had to think like group. There was no such thing like personal opinion. By having an option to choose think differently and choose people who confess similar ideas as we do, we feel free and happy. It makes us desiring to develop and grow mentally, financially and socially. We are not tied in boundaries to live by someone’s ideas and rules. We live how we believe would be right to live and we find alike to us people through communication. 

Visualization as a key to successful speech

The most interesting for me in chapter one was idea of using visualization. There was a mnemonic system that required involvement of imagination. Orator had to visualize a villa where each room contained an idea. I believe that within centuries this system had developed dramatically. Each of us can confirm that the most memorable speeches imprinted in our memory because of visualizations that were in introduced to us.







Contemporary orators have stepped even further, they use technologies like Power Point presentations and projectors to
make their speeches easy to memorize. For example, every speech that Steve Jobs kept was performed by using technologies. There is a saying that eyes are mirror of the soul, through our eyes we apprehend the most information. Through visualization ancient orators learned how to be successful in speeches; today visualization helps us in grasping information from speeches. Lets visualize what’s next?

Do morally good speakers exist? 

Idea to have morally good orators is a very good idea. Thus ability to speak publically would be considered not just as ability or set of skills, but as privilege. I wish that every speaker in our world would be morally good, but it is IMPOSSIBLE.  From historical prospective we find that successful and persuasive speakers were not always ethical. No need to mention, Osama bin Laden, Hitler, Stalin and many others were great orators, but yet unmoral people. Immorality of some of those is unquestionable, when others from certain angle can be justified as ethical. 

It depends on what kind of ethic you rely on. For example, from Muslim prospective, Osama bin Laden was acting ethically in accordance of Islamic morality, when western people can say, that his deeds were completely immoral. Thus we can conclude that phrase “ethical orator” is subjective. Even within the same country understanding of morality can vary significantly. For example, on one hand, there are speakers, who support, practice and justify homosexual relationships, thus saying that it is morally good, on the other hand, there are orators who claim that such kind of relationships are completely immoral. 

This case demonstrates us that we have to rely on the same ethical concept and follow the same moral rule in order to require some kind of morality from speakers. 
Honestly speaking, I would really love to have all speakers to be ethical, according to my understanding of ethic, but we live in a free country and each of us understand it differently.