The Meaning of a Communication is the Response You Get

I'm a bit skeptical of organizations that tout how comprehensively benevolent their agenda is for humankind...Neuro-linguistic Programming, or NLP...which sounds super-scientific, doesn't it...is an example.  You can look them up if you'd like...I'm not interested.  But I did indirectly pick up one of this self-help group's precepts...through Tony Robbins...which is very profound and true when it comes to interpersonal relationships: The meaning of a communication is the response you get...

If a mother or father tells their child to do something, it may not be enough to just say it and walk away.  Instead, asking the child to repeat what was said and to say whether they understood completes the communication while imparting a sense of personal responsibility to the child.  Likewise, I have personally discovered in my workplace that expressed expectations of employees need to be accompanied with their acknowledgement of those expectations.  Yet when it came to my own experiences throughout the elementary and high school years, nothing of the sort ever happened between any of my teachers and myself...

The responsibility for seeing that a communication is effective is on the communicator to be proactive in seeking a response from the party receiving it...and it needs to be done on an individual basis, not just in a large group setting.  In a classroom setting, the tendency from my own experiences in school was for the teacher to hand out "learning activity packages"...i.e. enhanced syllabi...and speak to the students as a collective body from the front of the class, if at all.  To be sure, students were accorded time to meet with teachers and ask questions if they took the initiative to do so, but NOT ONCE in my twelve years from the first grade in 1962 to graduation in 1974 did any teacher approach me one-to-one to establish that I knew what the class was about and what was expected of me.  Furthermore, NOT ONCE in those twelve years did any teacher ever approach me as an individual human being to encourage me or tactfully ask if I had any difficulties I wanted to share with them.  I DID experience, on a number of occasions sprinkled throughout those years, teachers angrily coming to me and chastising me about something or another...often with me being totally innocent while in the process humiliating me in front of classmates...but even then they weren't interested in my point of view: my role apparently was to keep my mouth shut and stay out of their attention range...

Once I saw a Twilight Zone episode titled Changing of the Guard that featured an elderly teacher forced into retirement.  He had spent his entire adult life teaching his pupils and remembered every one and their idiosyncrasies.  In despair he feared he had wasted his life to no effect, but his old students from years back returned one day and assembled...from the "twilight zone"...each telling him what a difference he had made in their lives.  I wonder about all of the teachers I had...and whether they could even get a row of students to speak for them, much less a full classroom.  If I sound bitter, I am: I think that there were crucial periods in my childhood when a positive, encouraging word from a teacher would have made all the difference and have changed my life...but it never came.  Yet I'll bet each and every one of the teachers I had were confident that THEY were doing their job well as it pertained to me, who was to them merely a name attached to a face that I doubt hardly any of them remembered (or cared to) only a few years later.  To them I say: if you think you taught me something but never knew me as a distinct person with my own identity and personality...and viewpoint...then you have failed at your job.  I sincerely hope that my readers' school experiences with their teachers were different from mine...maybe you had some of those great interactive teachers like in those NEA television ads...

So direct interactions would be more effective if the speaker asked for pertinent feedback from the one spoken to.  But what about writing?  After all, I am communicating here and that's true whether or not the reader agrees with me.  Obviously, people can choose whether or not to read what I write...but if they do, then wouldn't it seem appropriate to offer at least some perfunctory acknowledgment that they had done so?  I post links to this blog on Facebook, which offers this sort of feedback system to postings.  And while I tend to skip over others' posts that may contain interesting content but are merely copy-and-paste exercises on their part, when I read something that is original and relatively coherent...and I believe to be directed either at me or the general reader...I have a tendency to click on "like" and sometimes even volunteer a comment.   Some of my articles are likewise directed at certain folks I have "befriended" on Facebook.  Now many don't read my writings but for those who do, wouldn't it be an act of constructive friendship to at least acknowledge me...or better yet...write your own reactions in a comment? 

Speaking of blog comments, there are two ways to accomplish this: one is if you are getting it through my Facebook link...just use this site's comments feature as you would any other post.  But you can also bypass Facebook and submit a comment directly to this blog by clicking on the "Number of Comments"  or "Post a Comment" links after the end of the individual article.  It won't be printed until I have read it...you can even request it remain unprinted or even write anonymously...and would finally appear on the blogsite right after the article.  A little more of a roundabout way, but it gives you more flexibility and enables those not on my Facebook page to communicate as well...