Rules of Speaking

[2018-06-04]

• Admit your faults, failures, and mistakes. Admit when you are wrong.
• Speak the truth, or at least don’t lie.
• Be precise
• Acknowledge the correctness and skill of the other speakers.
• Try to see the view of the other person. Learn where they come from.
• Believe that the other speaker know something you want, or need, to know.
• Speak with all of you, not just the words. Body and voice matters as much or more than the choice of words.

Speaking is difficult. There are a multitude of variables to consider. Among the top ones being the theme and subject of conversation. Not everyone is interested in the same things. Your car enthusiasm might be boring to me. And my horses might be a pain in your arse. Thus we need to adopt the mindset of openness to the fact that the other part of a conversation always know something you yourself don’t know.

Recognizing that body language and pitch of voice matters a whole lot. Some literature, [need reference here], suggests that body language is about 60% of the communication, and tone, pitch and volume of the voice consists of around 30% of the communication. This leaves about 7% of the communication to the words of choice. Considering this, text messages and chat becomes a seriously bad choice of communications medium. Personally I try to use the phone more, and take conversations in person. In my experience this makes for vastly better conversations.

As for the truth! Not disclosing the truth renders the other person unable to understand your position and persona fully. This creates a false image of you as the speaker, and a false perception and understanding with the other party. Ultimately the person you converse with might feel betrayed and leave you with a bad reputation walking into the future. As we all know “what goes around comes around”, so your untruthful speaking will bite you in the ass one day. I consider that a fact.

There needs to be a paragraph about speaking up. If you see an injustice in the world and you don’t speak up about it there will be bloodshed. The bloodshed being metaphorical. In a business setting not telling the truth can be counted as diminished value contributed to the world. We want to avoid this very much. For friends and close relatives we have an obligation, a responsibility to tell the truth. That is what we want for them. That is what they want from us. Want and need here is debatably the same in this context. We need to speak up for our close ones to help them stay on their optimal path, between order and chaos, to utopia.

A disclaimer is in order. I’m not the best to follow and fulfill the manifest/mantra described above. But I do try to follow it, rigorously. These are my words, they are a part of me and my integrity. Thus making it intrinsic to my way of Being.