Further Exploring Communication Roadblocks
by Kain Ramsay , Achology - Academy of Modern Applied Psychology.
One main reason for lack of healthy conversation is that, without realizing it, many people typically inject communication barriers into their discussions. Communication barriers are often emotionally led responses whose impact on the health of a conversation is usually adverse in some way.
These 'common communication spoilers' are especially likely to be destructive when one or more people in an interaction are doing so under stress of another. When our brains are under pressure we can have a hard time distinguishing between our own emotional state, and the emotional states of others.
Common unhelpful responses that we can all be guilty of include:
1) Judgment & Assumptions
a. Criticizing | Making a negative evaluation of another person's actions or attitudes. For example: “You brought it on yourself you’ve got nobody else to blame for the mess you are in.”
b. Name Calling | 'Putting down' or stereotyping another person. For example: "You're an idiot!" "Just like a woman." "Knob-jockey!" "You squaddies are all alike." "You're just a typical male!"
c. Diagnosing | Playing the amateur psychiatrist and assuming that you know the truth about why a person is behaving in a certain way. For example: “I can read you like a book." “You are so easy to read." “Your motives are disgusting to me.” “Just because you are reading about communication roadblock, you think you're better than me!”
d. Praising Evaluatively | Making a favourable judgment of another person's actions, behaviours or attitudes. For example: “You are such a nice person. I know you'll help me with the home chores.” (This is a favourite method that parents use to manipulate their children!)
2) Sending Solutions (often compounds a problem or creates new ones without resolving the original dilemma).
a. Ordering | Commanding another person to do what you want them to do in an authoritarian fashion. For example: “Do your homework right now.” “Why?!” “Because I said so. . .”
b. Threatening | Attempting to control another's actions by warning of resultant punishments that you will instigate. For example: “You’ll do what I want you to do or else . . .” “Stop treating me like this, or I will remove something that I know you like.”
c. Moralising | telling another person what they should or shouldn't do. (Commonly happens in religious groups). For example: “You shouldn’t get a divorce; God will be angry with you!” “You should start apologising to all of those people who you've conversationally 'roadblocked' in the last two weeks.”
d. Excessive/Inappropriate Questioning | Closed questions are common barriers that prevent a healthy conversation from happening. Closed questions are those that can usually be answered in a few words or less (often with mere yes or no). For example: “When did it happen?” “Are you sorry that you did it?”
e. Advising | Giving another person a version of your proposed solution to his or her life's problems. For example: “If I were you, I’d sure tell her where to go .....” “That’s an easy issue to resolve. First, you do this ... then you do that ....”
3) Avoiding Another Persons Concerns (steering a conversation off-track).
a. Diverting | Pushing another person’s problems aside through distraction. For example: “Don’t dwell on it, Frank and let’s talk about something more positive instead". Or, “You think you’ve got it bad? Let me tell you what happened to me last week .... which was (incidentally) ten times worse than what's just happened to you!”
b. Logical Argument | Attempting to convince another person that they are 'wrong' and we are 'right' with an appeal to information based facts or logic. A logical argument has little (or no) consideration of the emotional factors involved in peoples dilemmas. For example: “There is no degree of truth in the world other than what I've read in my philosophical and scientific textbooks.”
c. Reassuring | Attempting to prevent another person from feeling the negative emotions they are doing by suggesting that "everything is OK" “Don’t worry, it is always darkest before dawn. Everything always works out OK in the end.”
4) Additional Common Roadblocks
Telling other people that they are sending roadblocks is a MASSIVE roadblock to effective communication: When people are first introduced to these conversational barriers, a typical reaction is, “That’s just what my wife (boyfriend, girlfriend, mother, etc.) has been doing for all these years. Wait till I tell him (him) about all of these conversational roadblocks that they've been sending me.”
Or, “My manager uses all these conversational roadblocks. The next time he does it, I’m going to tell him all about the error of his ways and point out how he is roadblocking me.” (This type of roadblock belongs in the judgment category btw).
If you want to improve the quality of your communications, pointing the finger of judgment at other people is never a helpful place to begin.
Summary
Specific ways of verbalising carry a high risk of putting a dampener on a conversation, which can resultingly become harmful to the trust in a relationship, triggering feelings of inadequacy, anger, or even dependency on another person.
These common barriers to a healthy conversation can often diminish other people’s self esteem and undermine their motivation to improve in any way. As you learn to listen, resolve conflict, and solve interpersonal problems more efficiently, your use of the roadblocks will inevitably diminish.
One of the most common road blocks to empowered communication is the assumption that other people view the world in the same way that we do and that all of our communication styles are exactly the same. Wrong, this is very seldom the case!
All people have a unique understanding and set of expectations with regards to how they (and others) should behave and communicate. When we develop a clear understanding of how to interact in a way that'll be better received by others, we can increase cohesion and connectedness in our relationships and achieve far greater communication clarity.
Questions for Self-Reflection:
Question 1) Self-awareness and reflection allows us to better appreciate different communication styles. Which of the above roadblocks might you have consciously (or unconsciously) fallen victim to?
Question 2) How might you change how you communicate with others to enhance communication and build credibility and approachability to create positive outcomes?
Question 3) How might you use this the information in this article to change your own patterns of communication?
