David J. Parnell’s Professional Series on Sensory Acuity | Part 1 of 3.

Literally, the most difficult challenge in communication is in ACCURATELY representing the concept or feeling that you are. Without extensive analysis and research, the average person is completely unaware of how INACCURATELY they are communicating their thoughts.

Thanks to evolved processes such as heuristics, metaphoric and analogical, stereotypes and predictive categorization that occur during experiential and language processing, we are still able to make functional sense of each other’s communication.

Suffice it to say though, that when you are describing a night out with the girls… The visual, auditory and somatic/kinesthetic representations that your mother is having are NOT the same as yours.

Much of the information we have been learning in my posts has been moving toward helping us to more ACCURATELY convey the content of our thoughts. An incredibly important part of communication though is in working within the attentional process of your recipient to ensure that they are receiving the information.

It is INCREDIBLY important that you understand what is going on mentally in your communication partner’s head WHILE you are talking to them.

Dynamically and interactively, there are a million different things happening from one second to the next. Foundationally and fundamentally there are some things going on that you can be certain of, and as a result should be worked within to effectively communicate.

It is safe to assume 3 things are going on while you are talking to someone:

1. They are going to do what is in their best interest; this will be their goal in any communication.
2. To achieve this, people will filter and process only certain types of information during your discourse.
3. Most of their brain power will be used to construct their OWN attempts to persuade you.

Let’s talk a little bit about why this happens…

Imagine your having a difficult day… You lost a deal at work, your boss yelled at you, maybe your spouse picked a fight… What ever it is, when these things happen a few times you might get angry, depressed or even sad. Their affect on your mood, your actions and your overall efficacy is substantial.

Now imagine you wake up under some logs placed against a tree for shelter. You slept in the dirt, have no food and no stores to go get it. You need to hunt and forage today if you are going to eat. You have to carry a stick or a sharp rock with you for protection from predators. There are no laws and no other people to protect you.

You may starve or be killed or freeze to death at any moment… Do you think you might be depressed from this?

Well this is how life was for our ancestors… Because of this reality that they faced, we have been evolutionarily blessed with processes that go a long way toward keeping us mentally stable. Unfortunately, these very processes can have adverse affects on our ability to fully comprehend someone’s communication.

Tomorrow we will talk about some of the specific processes that we battle to gain brain share with someone we are communicating to and then we will follow that up with specific examples of what we can do to monitor someone’s attentional processing to further our own effective communication.