I’ve encounted a series of posts by a blogging writer who has been saying what I wanted to say, only he’s been saying it way, way better. And as you’ll see, one of the reasons he says it better is that he has what some call “authority.” Dale McGowan makes a deliberate effort to hear what others are saying, and he makes deliberate efforts to be heard. It appears to me that he is regularly successful with both intentions.
At the risk of oversimplifying, I’ll say that the purpose of his series, “Can You Hear Me Now?” is to offer up his advice for “how to stop talking past and through and around each other, how to hear and be heard.”
I am not an "educated" man if you evaluate such things by the number of institutional certificates a person receives. However, my “college years” included a stint of seeking a degree in “Communications,” and I don’t mind sharing that Dale McGowan’s blog series is far more helpful than anything I encountered in that effort.
I wish I had directed you to his blog earlier so that you could have followed along as the posts appeared instead of having to play catch up. I hope you won’t be overwhelmed. I really want you to take all of it in and ponder it. And a secondary hope is that you’ll take a few moments to share your impressions with me.
Here are a few disjointed teaser quotes from different posts in the series:
“I started drafting — phrasing, rephrasing, venting, deleting, adding modifiers. As I did so, both my accuracy AND my “hearability” increased.”
“If I don’t take a minute to think about how something will register from the other person’s perspective, I don’t deserve to be heard.”
“I needed to speak to my concerns without doing a leg-sweep that left the other person nowhere to stand.”
“It causes me to take just that little extra bit of care to be accurate, to be fair, but also honest — to be myself, but also to improve myself.”
“I’m a Facebook Slut. I climb into friendhood with anyone who asks. My 600+ Friends fall mostly into five groups: Family, K-12 friends, College friends, Post-college friends, and Readers of my books.”
“There’s a natural and adaptive human tendency to cling to the familiar, to distrust difference... Most of us read magazines and watch news channels and listen to talk radio that reinforces our worldview rather than challenging it.”
“…we’re dividing ourselves up into smug, self-satisfied silos, each with everything it needs, including pundits devoted to telling us how very smart we are to be in the silo we’ve chosen….I simply can’t stand the smugness of the silos—especially when I feel it starting to percolate in myself… Our siloing has a double effect: One silo loses the ability to speak AND the other loses the ability to hear.”