Communication between people takes on many forms. From body-language, to hand gestures, facial expressions, music, spoken words, written words, visual representation (pictures, drawings, film, PowerPoint, etc.), all the way to the modern-day use of emojis. We have learnt to employ these various means to make our thoughts, viewpoints, and feelings known to others.
Clearly, some people are better at the art of communication than others. Some are born communicators who seem to instinctively know what to say, how to say it, and when to say it to whom, in a very succinct, pithy and impactful way. Others learn the necessary skills and get better gradually.
However, we need to get one thing clear: being a good communicator does not necessarily make you a good person. Conversely, those who are not particularly good at communicating their message are often people who have something worthy to say. And humanity being what it is, we tend to listen to the articulate, amusing and engaging and ignore the awkward and boring, thus potentially connecting with the wrong messages and adopting less worthy thoughts and ideas.
Two forms of communication I deliberately omitted from the above list are particularly interesting and worth further consideration.
Listening, in my view, can be as powerful as, if not more than, any other form of communication. Strangely, we often consider listening as a sign of passivity, disengagement and lack of anything to say. In reality however, we only learn when we are listening, and through this learning process we are able to think, analyse, draw conclusions and then form a view that might be worth listening to. For as long as we are talking, we are not listening or learning.
The other form of communication is ‘Silence’. I know that listening and silence may be confused in this context however, what I am talking about here is the callous silence when we hear and see something that is worth doing something about and we choose to remain silent for our own selfish or self-preservation reasons. This is when we see evil, or wrong-doing, or an attempt to corrupt the truth but, we choose to do and say nothing about it, lest we are judged, ostracized or even punished. Our silence in this case is communicating a loud message of tacit approval to the perpetrator.
To conclude, here is a thought which you may or may not agree with: If ‘listening’ is the noblest form of communication, then ‘silence’ is the lowest.
So, my advice to you is to listen more often and when necessary, be loud about it.
