No real conversation

I have been looking at this webpage (blog) writing task today wondering if I’m not turning into a generational reject.  Coming back to these words, and splashing thoughts on the white screen is like an effort to mental masturbate.  The whole thing is like an explosion of misdirected creativity.  Who is impregnated by our heedless banter?  What senseless, soulless, drivel is going to pour out of my twisted mind?  Hell if I know.

What I do know is that we need each other.  In our breathless effort to father some original thought, we are sucked into the vortex of other’s words, works, and ideals.  We stick some tiny little innocuous teeth into a movie, a script, a photo, and album of sound, tracking some source of brilliance that erupted in ecstasy eons ago.  But the creative God never rests, he is pumped always, spilling his seed in the minds of those seeking to enjoy the strokes of creative bliss, over and over.

The leftovers of other geniuses, really paint a picture dripping with color that amazes us, sometime inspiring us to dip our own brushes in to splatter our own attempts of expression.

Without an audience, without a stage, without a readership, we suffer in the world of little closed minds, who do not even sing with the music, dance with the beat, or dare to lick drama off the spoon of life.  The world grinds onward filled with their fear and cowardice.  They are the types to bag Napoleon’s manhood.  We must not succumb to their vile ways or develop their vices, we must fight the darkness of empty minds and souls; we must think and believe.

This blog has received over two hundred thousand reads, but most of those reads are only looks.  I not that readers check out this blog from 300 plus countries too, but after all this time, I have yet to have a real conversation with anyone.  How is it that we pour over articles, blogs, news and facebook sputtering, and never stop and converse with anyone.

I think I need to strap on a nice straight jacket.  Or maybe I should watch Iron Maiden youtube videos. Try one.

Will the true meaning of what you said, please stand up?

Metamessages

I’ve been reading a book lately that discusses linguistics and how people communicate what they mean. The problem is that people learn to communicate so differently that people often don’t say what they mean. They mean something different, and they expect you to pick up on what they are saying. Of course what makes communication even worse is when people start thinking they know what you mean, and they have misread entirely your meaning, mainly because they are communicating with a style that is different from you. The importance of the book is that it helps us learn to understand how people come into a relationship with a different communication game plan, style and technique. This is especially true when men and women are paired together in something like a marriage. You may wonder why people develop such differences. Well, the first thought that comes to mind is that men and women grow up differently. Studies show that boys make a lot of noises when they play, acting out imaginary stories with their toys. Girls are more often conversing. So at the get go, the communication differences are forming. The differences between men and women continue changing, placing the sexes is alternative forms of expressing themselves. The problem, or at least a most significant one, is the development of reading and interpreting the underlining or “metamessage” of communications. The meta message can be described as possibly the emotional message of what is stated. When this message is spoken, it can easily be misread. Take for instance something that occurs when a man who doesn’t think in metamessages states something practical like “I’m going to kitchen to get something to eat.” Now for a woman his not asking the woman whether or not she would like something, send the metamessage, “you aren’t important.” What furthers the situation is if she goes into the kitchen and finds him sitting by himself about the sandwich. He might say then “Are you hungry?” She might say “yes.” But when offered the sandwich he just made, she might say, “No, I don’t want your sandwich,” and proceed to tell the guy he doesn’t care about her, else he would have made her a sandwich at the get go, because he is concerned for her feelings. Have you had similar experiences in communicating? I certainly have. I just think we need to relearn how we communicate, and for people to ask for clarification if they can’t understand that they are miss communicating and so the metamessages read are accurate. Additional Reading: That’s Not What I Meant Metamessages – Lower Intelligence

Listening to Teenagers

Do you know how to listen?  Can you really hear someone?  Do you even have enough empathy to care to listen?  These are the questions that divide men from monsters, women from serpents.

If you want to rock the world of teenagers, you need to learn to listen to them.

First you have to understand how we all communicate, and how we can stop that process from happening.    The main reason we do not have effective communication is that we really aren’t putting enough into the process.  Not caring, not listening, prejudging and being too busy for others makes you less than the human God created you to be.

A lot of people will approach a person with a complaint or who wants to be heard with the attitude of either (1) I need to put them in their place (authority), (2) I need to teach them a lesson (educational), or (3) I need to get rid of them (abusive).

Primary to these anti- communication techniques is self-centered and prideful  personal attitudes.  Check those ideas at the door if you want to build up your relationships with your teen at home.

Especially important to parents is the way they communicate with their children.  There seems to be a time when the kids get to a place in their development that they want independence, regardless of how much they still depend on their parents.    The parents also feel it is time for the kids to start becoming responsible and mature enough to be trusted.  The parents want s out of the overload of work in taking care of their kids; picking up after them, getting them to do chores and homework, buying them clothes and skateboards and Xbox.  The career adjustment period usually hits dads during this time period too.

So let us open up our hard heads and take in a hard message.  It’s not all about you and what you know and what you’ve experienced.    You have within you a thinking paradigm that has you as center of the world.  We all do.  Shift your attention outside of your subjective view to a more objective view.

In Steven Covey’s book, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, you find an extremely clearly state example of how listening doesn’t work:

A father once told me, “I can’t understand my kid. He just won’t listen to me at all.”

“Let me restate what you just said,” I replied. “You don’t understand your son because he won’t listen to you?”

“That’s right,” he replied.

“Let me try again,” I said. “You don’t understand your son because he won’t listen to you?”

“That’s what I said,” he impatiently replied.

“I thought that to understand another person, you needed to listen to him,” I suggested.

“OH!” he said. There was a long pause. “Oh!” he said again, as the light began to dawn. “Oh, yeah! But I do understand him. I know what he’s going through. I went through the same thing myself. I guess what I don’t understand is why he won’t listen to me.”

As Covey explained, we want to be understood but we really don’t have that level of understanding of others to listen properly.  You see the problem is with us not them.

If we really want to get the kids to take on responsibility as the grow into teenagers then we need to raise them that their autonomy is linked directly to their behavior.  If they are responsible,  then they deserve as much freedom as they ask for – within agreed upon limits, of course.  But if we don’t hold them accountable for the things we agreed upon, then we are failing them.  See it is our acting responsible that teaches them how to be responsible.  If we tell them to be in bed by 9 and don’t enforce it with clearly expressed consequences, than we have failed to live up to our end of the order.

When it comes to conversation, if we don’t try to understand them, why should we even consider that they should listen to us?