These days the world seems to thrive on how we communicate, and what is the most efficient type of communication. Communication is taught in the classroom. Being broken down into different types of courses emphasizes communication. Classes including online college degrees are now being developed to focus on interpersonal, intrapersonal, listening, gender, family, and organizational communication.
Recently though it has been recommended that we communicate in the workplace and at home as if the other party is a stranger. We believe that knowing someone makes communication easier. Instead it often makes us too comfortable and forces us to fail at being a proper communicator.
Dr. Samantha Smithstein of Psychology Today magazine said that we let comfort alter our expectations from a specific type of communication. Because we know who we are communicating with, we believe that we can predict behaviors, responses and various interactions before they happen. But we (humans) are not good at all at predicting the future nor predicting people. If we continue this interesting form of communication we might approach things with a better sense of unfamiliarity. We might be able to keep more of our conversations with people alive, and keep our relationships in line with an extra spark. This mindset might do us quite well.
Often we approach many things with a similar hesitance. If we approached our conversations with this thought, communication courses might be taught a little bit differently. Instead of how to speak to others, how to interpret ourselves, an additional class might be to how to constantly communicate the unexpected. Communication is obviously important and something that shouldn’t and cannot be screwed up. But at some point we have to be able to pull the rug out from under us and surprise our listeners. Communicate with a new heart in hopes of learning something new about someone else. It really is that easy.