Communication: A Picture Paints a Thousand Words

As humans, when it comes to communication, we’re very interesting beings. In our minds, we think in pictures, but we can’t speak pictures, so any time we’re looking to communicate externally, we do it with words.

A little communication exercise

This of course allows for a great deal of interpretation. For example, in workshops I ask attendees to draw something for me. Actually, let’s do it right now. You don’t need to draw anything, but I’d like you to think of a cat wearing a top hat. Picture in your mind a cat wearing a top hat. Close your eyes and what do you see?

In all my years training, there are two drawings that are presented – one is with the cat standing side on with the head and top hat on one side (generally the right hand side) and of course the tail on the other side. The other is with the cat sitting, facing front with two paws at the bottom of the body on the ground, two paws half way up the body, eyes, nose, mouth, whiskers and a top hat with the ears poking out the side. I would guess your picture was one of these two… am I right?

This little exercise provides two points.

The first is that just because you describe the picture in your head, it does not mean the other person gets the same picture. The picture created by the other person from your description will ALWAYS be different from yours.

Secondly, my sentences had to be rather long and detailed to describe with enough information what the two cat pictures looked like. If we did this with all of our communication, it would take 20 minutes to tell someone about our last meal!

This process our brain undertakes is known as “deletion”. It is a requirement for us to be able to live in our world. If someone says they’ve just purchased a new car, we know it’s a vehicle with four wheels, an engine, doors, etc. etc. We provide the assumptions to fill in the missing information. But if you are interested in cars, you’ll ask for what you consider “important” information not provided like make, model and year of manufacture.

How can this affect our life?

We’ve discussed scenarios of providing information to another person, but let’s apply it to ourselves now, let’s flip it on it’s head.

As we have grown, we’ve had many years of our brain deciding what is important information and should be given attention to, and what is insignificant or irrelevant in ensuring our safe existence. Every day, thousands of unconscious decisions have been made about what to take notice of, and what to ignore.

In our adult lives, we are having to deal with these billions of decisions of what is important and what isn’t. How does that effect us?

Well, how good is your knowledge of managing finances? What about looking after our bodies? What information is insignificant (unconsciously) to us about relationships, motivation, spiritual health, politics, cooking, fashion, grocery shopping, car buying, pet health, communication with family and friends?

Here’s the rub… we have to delete to survive, all of us. One of the things that makes us unique is what we learnt growing up about what was important to focus on and what wasn’t. We’ve all deleted information and understanding about different topics that were never a part of our lives, or at least played a minimal role. And unless there was something very specific about our parents we consciously decided we wanted to be very different about, what was important to them became a focus for us (at least until our teenage years when we gained some independence).

So, what does this mean for us?

There are a few things we can do to ensure stronger communication and stronger presence when it comes to deletion…

1. If you require someone to have specific understanding of your information, ask and check their interpretation, their understanding of the information you have given them.
2. If you share experiences, you can use this commonality to help describe your information. For instance, if you both play basketball, you can use this experience you have shared in your description knowing roughly how they will interpret it.
3. Know that we can change who we are by changing our focus, by consciously becoming aware of what we’re deleting and to really start taking notice. This literally changes lives.
4. What we accept as absolute truths,  are absolute truths with billions of pieces of information deleted. What we believe is reality, is in fact very, very far from the full truth.

If you’d like to read some more about this, I wrote a post a while back entitled “Blow Your Beliefs Out of This World“.

I’d love to know your thoughts. Please comment below, or join our Facebook Group and leave a message there. There’s lots of great discussion and information in the group. And if there’s someone you think will benefit from this post, please share and invite them to the page. There are sharing links below.

Now you know about “Deletions” in communication, it’s impossible to ‘un-know’ it. Take the time to recognise deletions in your communication and deletions in your thinking so that you may…

Live Your Ultimate Life.