Communicating With Honesty ($)

Understanding thoughts and emotions in relationships.

“A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on.”
— Winston Churchill

Speaking and Feeling

What if you spoke to yourself and yourself answered in a different language?

Feelings and intellect are different ways of engaging with the world and we poorly translate between them. Everyone knows this, yet hardly anyone works to reconcile the differences. Perhaps we don’t understand the differences ourselves.

Our solution is to celebrate the intellect and denigrate our emotions. We keep our emotions in check and we tell ourselves they’re under control. It is starting to be recognized that this is a fallacy and that our intellect rides on our emotions. The intellect keeps emotions out of the front office, but your emotions have a key to the back door.

We like to think that we have reasonable mastery over our behavior, and we pretend this means our behavior is reasonable. But reason is a foot soldier to our emotions, and emotions are higher up the chain of command. The same emotions we dismiss as crass and brutish guide our thoughts more than they’re guided by our thoughts.

We communicate in words and profess commitment to our presentations. Yet, so often, people’s actions do not live up to our expectations and, to be fair, we don’t live up to other people’s. We write this off to miscommunication, evasion, and sometimes dishonesty. What we don’t recognize is that we communicate in two languages, one verbal and the other nonverbal, and we communicate two intentions, one intellectual and the other emotional.

If we’re really skilled, honest, and maybe lucky, our intellectual and emotional intentions coincide. When this happens we’ll give the same verbal and nonverbal messages. But when they don’t align our verbal message is dominated by our intellect while our nonverbal message is emotional.