Quotes About Communication

Another way to think about metamessages is that they frame a conversation, much as a picture frame provides a context for the images in the picture. Metamessages let you know how to interpret what someone is saying by identifying the activity that is going on: Is this an argument or a chat? Is it helping, advising, or scolding? At the same time, they let you know what position the speaker is assuming in the activity, and what position you are being assigned.

If I wrote, 'After delivering the acceptance speech, the candidate fainted,' you would know I was talking about a woman. Men do not faint; they pass out.

It is the interaction of the two styles - his withdrawal and her insistence that he tell her what she did wrong - that is devastating to both.

So there it is: Boys and girls grow up in different worlds, but we think we're in the same one, so we judge each other's behavior by the standards of our own.

Many women could learn from men to accept some conflict and difference without seeing it as a threat to intimacy, and many men could learn from women to accept interdependence without seeing it as a threat to their freedom.

One reason it's so difficult to decide what to say became immediately clear: comments and questions that some appreciated were not appreciated by others.

If my colleague's reaction is typical, imagine how often women who think they are displaying a positive quality—connection— are misjudged by men who perceive them as revealing a lack of independence, which the men regard as synonymous with incompetence and insecurity.

The danger of misinterpretation is greatest, of course, among speakers who actually speak different native tongues, or come from different cultural backgrounds, because cultural difference necessarily implies different assumptions about natural and obvious ways to be polite.

Linguist Robin Lakoff devised another set of rules that describe the motivations behind politeness—that is, how we adjust what we say to take into account its effects on others. Here they are as Lakoff presents them: 1. Don't impose; keep your distance. 2. Give options; let the other person have a say. 3. Be friendly; maintain camaraderie.

the platitude "If you love each other, you can work it out" is not necessarily true. Instead, the more you love each other, the more unrealistic your expectations of perfect understanding, and the more painful the metamessage of misunderstanding. And that, in turn, is why so many people, finding that they can't work it out, conclude that they don't—or even less logically, never did—love each other.

These are the signals that combine with what is said to make up the devices we use to show we're listening, interested, sympathetic, or teasing—and that we're the right sort of people.

This has been one of my biggest surprises in writing this book: the distinction beetween introverts and extraverts did not come up in any of my previous books about relationships, but it emerged early on a significant factor in this one.

Everything we say to each other echoes with meanings left over from our past experience— both our history talking to the person before us at this moment and our history talking to others. This is especially true in the family— and our history of family talk is like a prism through which all other conversations (and relationships) are refracted.

the metamessage yields heart meaning.

Thus conversational signals can get crossed when well-intentioned speakers have different habits and expectations about using pacing and pausing, loudness, and pitch to show their intentions through talk—

Our deepest wish is to be understood and approved of by our mothers and our daughters. We can get closer to that goal by listening to the ways we talk to each other, and by learning to talk to each other in new ways.

Smashing heads does not open minds.

A perfectly tuned conversation is a vision of sanity--a ratification of one's way of being human and one's way in the world.

The biggest mistake is believing there is one right way to listen, to talk, to have a conversation — or a relationship.

A woman will be inclined to repeat a request that doesn't get a response because she is convinced that her husband would do what she asks, if he only understood that she really wants him to do it. But a man who wants to avoid feeling that he is following orders may instinctively wait before doing what she asked, in order to imagine that he is doing it of his own free will.

At every age, the girls and women sit closer to each other and look at each other directly. At every age, the boys and men sit at angles to each other—in one case, almost parallel—and never look directly into each other's faces.

Both women and men could benefit from learning each other's styles. Many women could learn from men to accept some conflict and difference without seeing it as a threat to intimacy, and many men could learn from women to accept interdependence without seeing it as a threat to their freedom.

We all want, above all, to be heard. We want to be understood—heard for what we think we are saying, for what we know we meant.

Knowing that somewhere in the world there is someone who cares what you wore, an insignificant detail of your life that would seem unimportant to anyone else, makes you feel more connected to that person and less alone in the world.