A while back, when I was making Anki decks of the life concepts that I found most important, I wrote these two sentences:
“Communication is authentic when what we express externally corresponds to what’s going on internally.”
“Humans crave authentic communication.”
If you’re anything like me, you spend a big chunk of your waking hours talking to people. It’s important the time I spend communicating be fun, not unsatisfying. I don’t like it when I:
- find myself planning what I’m going to say next instead of listening to the other person (Note: There is a level of listening beyond just being able to remember the words the other person said. That’s the type I’m referring to here.)
- wonder whether the other person is really listening to me, or just being polite
- discover that I’m completely off in my head somewhere else entirely, maybe thinking about what I’m going to eat for dinner
- get the sense that the conversation is kind of dead, even if I couldn’t say why
Everything I listed above is a symptom of people not talking about what’s actually going on in their heads.
Continue reading “Five Questions that Let You Watch What’s Going on in People’s Heads”