Our communication skills are attained over time and honed with practice. There are many things we can do to sharpen our skills to help us become more communication competent. We want to consider the reason for our communication, what goals we have, understand our perspectives, own our thoughts and emotions, and precision in the language we choose. There are many reasons we communicate. To explain how this can help us to improve our verbal style, in this section we examine how we communicate to show gratitude and support, when we have to deliver bad news, and to clarify or avoid misunderstandings.
Show Gratitude
As humans we need validation and confirming messages. We should show this support often. The Gottman Institute gives many helpful tips and ideas on how to improve our relationships, and showing gratitude is at the top of the list. This includes nonverbal means such as sending thank-you cards and remembering birthdays to those who celebrate—but verbally expressing gratitude, telling someone they are appreciated, and showing gratitude when someone has taken an action, can be validating. Even when the actions our relational partners take are small, showing gratitude tells the person they are seen and appreciated. This improves relational satisfaction, is a relational maintenance strategy, and can improve overall life satisfaction. Daily gratitude messages accumulate and result in an increase in relational satisfaction (Chang, et al., 2021). If we take the time to express gratitude, it will improve our relationships. For example, if you took out the trash and never received acknowledgement, it could feel like a thankless job. When your roommate, spouse, or children says, “thank you for taking out the trash,” you know they noticed that you were doing something in part for them, and they showed gratitude to you. In that moment you would feel appreciated, and that would extend to how you feel about the person(s) showing you gratitude.
Send a Supportive Message
Supportive messages play many roles in improving our verbal communication. Emotionally supportive messages increase problem-solving (Kimbler, et al., 2012). Supportive messages even extend to the online realm. When online bystanders offer supportive messages to targets of cyberbullying, these messages moderate the mental and emotional damage experienced as a result (High & Young, 2018). Repetitive supportive messages have been shown to lower the dropout rates in high school students (Strom & Boster, 2011). In our relationships, emotional support can lower the “perceptions of stress, anger, and dejection” (Pederson & Mclaren, 2017, p. 804). Validating messages can increase relational satisfaction and help improve our relationships overall. Take for instance, a time when you were feeling low, and had a friend send a message of support. How did that change your outlook on your situation and the relationship you had with that person? We can be our biggest critics and our support systems help us to moderate this. Therefore, these supportive messages improve our communication and our relationships.
Deliver Bad News and Condolence
At times we are tasked with difficult but necessary communication, such as delivering bad news or portraying our condolences. We have been in positions where we have had to tell a friend or loved one something that would hurt them. During the pandemic, many people dealt with getting COVID-19, and telling others they were exposed—and many unfortunate people had to tell others that the worst had happened, and death had occurred. So how do we do this in a communication competent way? We start with empathy. It is important to be empathetic, but also to show our empathy to others. We do so by verbally expressing our gratitude, showing support, and being there to listen and engage in perspective-taking. We do not need to have gone through what someone else has to be empathetic. One of our authors shares this example: "When my father passed away, two things happened: many people stayed silent while others did not know what to say, but still reached out." Empathy can take many forms, but listening is a primary action we can take. This also means giving others space to heal when they want privacy. Empathy is perspective-taking, meaning that you consider what you would want if you were in their situation.
Avoid Misunderstandings
We have all experienced a time when we were misunderstood—perhaps even in a setting where clarity was paramount, such as a professional setting. There are ways to attempt to avoid misunderstandings, and there are things we can do when inevitable misunderstandings occur.
We do our best to be clear and articulate in our language, but what if we do not speak the same language or have cultural differences? We can use nonverbal communication in conjunction with our language. Although our understanding of nonverbals may be different, when nonverbals are paired with language it can increase our ability to be understood.
Once a misunderstanding occurs, what is the severity of the misunderstanding? If the misunderstanding could cost your company money, that would be severe. In that case, we can follow the steps to a “good apology” from Dr. Randy Pausch. Start by stating remorse, then take personal responsibility and then ask what you can do to help make it right. If the misunderstanding is less severe—perhaps you misspoke and your relational partner does not understand what you are asking from them—then clarity is key. We often find ourselves restating requests with different terms to avoid misunderstandings. Language is subjective and relates to our lived experience, so different terms can mean different things. Restating your request using different phrases can help with clarity.
Avoiding Common Errors
There are many tools and tips we can utilize in a general sense. The first is to visualize the impact on the audience. There are three “errors” we can avoid to help: the shared knowledge error (when we assume everyone knows what we know), the shared opinion error (when we assume everyone agrees with what we are saying), and the monopolization error (when we dominate the conversation and do not allow others to engage in the conversation. When we are aware of these errors, we can avoid committing them.
Take a Dual Perspective
We want to avoid ethnocentrism. In that same context, we strive to see things from others’ perspectives. Empathy, perspective taking, or “dual perspective” relates to how we want to walk in another person’s shoes when communicating. When we try to see that there are more perspectives than just our own, we open ourselves to dual perspectives. When we fail to see that there is more than just our perspective, we may alienate our communication partners. Therefore, using this dual perspective or empathy, we can become communication competent.
Figure \(\PageIndex{1}\): Older man with cane and older women walking their dog. Older People Care, Pixy
Use the Language of Responsibility
As we discussed earlier, we should use the language of responsibility (using the pronoun I to accept responsibility for our thoughts and ideas), while avoiding gendered terms, “you” statements, and anything that assigns blame. This choice of language helps us to accept ownership of our emotions and perspectives while avoiding blame or alienating our communication partners. The language of responsibility can be slowly integrated into our communication patterns until we do not have to think about it consciously. For instance, we know that the term guys is not directed exclusively toward males, but it is an exclusionary term. One of our authors shares this example: "When I started teaching, I slowly integrated the term y’all into my speech. Although I get asked a lot where I am from, this small change helps to make sure I do not alienate students from the conversation." Teachers also tend to use the inclusive language term we, as in "Our papers are due Sunday, please make sure we turn them in on time." This way we avoid blaming language and instead use an inclusive language.
Strive for Clarity and Accuracy
The abstraction ladder relates to the specific or equivocal language we use when communicating. Equivocation is when we use ambiguous or abstract language rather than concrete and specific language. For example, consider asking a housemate to take out the garbage. Specific language would be “Please take out the trash” whereas abstract language would be “the kitchen is flooded with trash.” In general an abstract message could be something like “education.” As a term this is abstract and could be interpreted differently depending on the context and the lived experience of the interpreter. However, stating someone has earned a PhD is more concrete because there are more rules that govern what this designation means.
Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\) shows examples of how we move from the abstract to the concrete. While in many relationships we create a shorthand language and can be ambiguous and still clear in our messages, most of our communication requires that we be specific in our language, which is called concrete language. When we lack clarity or use language that is culturally bound or ambiguous, that is considered abstract language. The abstraction ladder shows how we can move from the specific (concrete) to the abstract. At the bottom are "more concrete" statements, beginning with "We need to put the trash cans on the curb before the garbage collector gets here tomorrow morning," then moving up to "Tuesday night we should remember to put the trash cans out," and to "It is Tuesday, so we should move the trash cans." Near the top of the ladder, we see "We should remember to put out the trash cans this week," and finally, at the top of the "more abstract range," "Our trash cans are full."
Figure \(\PageIndex{2}\): Abstraction Ladder by Tiffany Ruggeri
