Being Heard

Hello Courageous Pals,

Here we are in the midpoint of the year – in the northern hemishpere where I live we’re approaching the year’s longest day. I live at a very northerly latitude and we really notice the long summer evenings – twilight lasts until nearly midnight and the pre-dawn light comes around 3 AM. In fact I was a little bit further north last week, helping to co-host an event in Tallinn, Estonia to teach policymakers from around the EU about how to be more innovative for their cultural and creative industries policies! Here I am literally shifting mindsets:

Courage Pie (to go): Being Heard 🎧

Psychologist Paul Watzlawick came up with his five axioms of communication in the 1960s, including the oft-repeated phrase that “the meaning of the communication is the response you get.” The idea here is that there is a social relation as well as the actual content of every message we send: until we communicate in the right way, the intended recipient may not be able or willing to hear what we’re trying to get across. Pychologist Alfred Adler believed that all psychological problems are interpersonal relationship problems – so it would seem to be paramount to get the communication thing right! Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga’s book The Courage to Be Disliked (info below) is one of my favourite explorations of Adler’s practical philosophies of living.

More recent research suggests that the process of sending and receiving in communication happens at a much faster pace than previously anticipated: both sender and recipient are influencing each other every few seconds through gesture, tone, micro-expression, and actual statements and questions. In other words, there isn’t a turn-taking process of conversational communication, as previously believed: rather, communication is constantly being co-created between conversation partners: we are always jointly responsible for what happens in a communication, whether we are the speaker or the listener. In fact, we’re both ‘speaking’ and ‘listening’ with all our senses all the time. This is something we were discussing in our storytelling session in the event for policymakers last week – but it applies equally in our personal communications, too.

Fancy some hearing and being heard on the move? Join us at 1 PM tomorrow, 10 June, outside the Populus Cafe at Leith Community Croft for a gentle walk (or wheel) around Leith Links. Sign up via Eventbrite to be notified of any last-minute changes! Can’t make it in person? Reach out to a courageous pal and use the Questions to Go below for a reflective walk of your own.

Questions to Go:

• What’s a communication you had recently that went off the rails, either as ‘speaker’ or as ‘listener’? How might you interact more usefully with that person the next time?
• When you feel communication is becoming hindered, how might you adjust? How could you invite the other person or people in the dialogue to notice their influence on the conversation, even if they’re ‘only’ listening?
• When communication is a bit of a struggle, what are some assumptions you’re making? How could you test those assumptions?
• What do you notice when communication is going well? Are there particular aspects of the pace, tone, words used, physical gestures, or facial expressions that give you a sense all is well? Are these present in all good communications or more noticable with some people than others?
• How does your internal dialogue influence your external communications? How might you like to change that?

Science Behind the Slice:

Godat, D., & Czerny, E. J. (2021). Communication Today: Were Watzlawick & Co. Wrong? Journal of Solution Focused Practices, 5(2), 10. https://doi.org/10.59874/001c.75050

Kishimi, I., & Koga, F. (2018). The courage to be disliked: The Japanese phenomenon that shows you how to change your life and achieve real happiness. Atria Books.

Watzlawick, Paul, and Don D. Jackson. “On human communication (1964).” Journal of Systemic Therapies 29.2 (2010): 53-68.

Coming up…

As usual, Courage Pie: to go happens the day after these newsletters go out – Wednesday 10 June! Sign up via Eventbrite so I don’t wander off without you.

We’ve got our Creative Roots, Open Wings (CROW) wellbeing series at the Corvidaeum on Thursday 11 June – we had to postpone last month’s Tuning In To Intuition event, so you get a second chance to practice your intuitive skills 🐦‍⬛📡

On Friday 12th join me and my University of Edinburgh colleagues at the Institute for Design Informatics research showcase, where I’ll be displaying digitised 3D versions of my previous project, Picture Your Poisons, a series of glass casts charting my cancer treatment journey and the origin stories behind the treatments I received. Come along and learn about that – and how hard it is to 3D scan glass!

If anything in this newsletter series has brought up a topic you’d like to work on one-on-one, here’s where you can find all the info about my coaching approach and current offers.

Very best,

Caitlin