Communication is the key to relationship success

The dangers of miscommunication

Relationships are critical for social development. In this post I will outline some of my thoughts on relationship management in specific. The key concept which in my opinion must be mastered in order to pursue and maintain a successful relationship is the ability to communicate well. In any relationship there must be a means for you to let the other side know what you want at any point in time and the other side must have a means of letting you know what their side wants at any point in time.

The levels of interaction

In some relationships both the level of communication and of interaction is on a higher level. What I mean by this is that many people think of themselves and others as "individualized" and this individualization is a very western concept. The truth is that while individual bodies do exist, the mind often is not like that. To go into more detail, the methods a person goes through to make a decision may include their support system (decision support system). This decision support system may include other humans who they rely on, who they go to for advice, who they trust, and this means something.

So to elaborate and connect the dots here, a relationship between two peers is not necessarily going to be limited to being an A and B relationship. The C component, is the influence of people A or B know, who they turn to for advice, and who they rely on to make difficult decisions.

Interpersonal relationships and the community

To put my previous ideas into a more concrete picture, imagine for a moment that you're in a village where you've found a partner who you want to marry. You are influenced by your friends, by your family, by your trusted peer group, who may be able to give you advice on whether to marry that person or not. That person is also likely influenced by their friends, their family, their trusted peer group which can give them advice on whether to marry you or not. Often these decisions are arrived at in group settings, in a sort of group mind, where all the most trusted advisers tell you that the person is a good match, that they are right for you, and that you really ought to marry them.

This does not mean of course that just because a person receives advice from trusted peers that they'll take the advice. The point is to highlight that there are levels of interaction. The level of interaction which I speak of here is the interaction between minds. You go to your team of expert advisers (your brain trust), and they go to their team of expert advisers (their brain trust), and from that both sides try to make the best decision they can. This is assuming that each side is fortunate enough to have a brain trust in the first place and that the power of their brain trusts is relatively equal (best case scenario).

The more people a person is in a position to support the bigger their brain trust could be. At the same time, a bigger brain trust does not mean a higher quality brain trust. A low quality brain trust could give low quality or even bad advice, and sabotage the individual person who must ultimately own the bad decision. This means while communication is key to relationship success there is also a lot of importance in having the right sort of people around.

In my previous post I highlight the importance of environment. If a person is not in a good environment they may not have anyone to turn to for advice and may make bad choices as their own means is trial and error. This post highlights the importance of communication but for a future post it will be necessary to go into more detail as to what a brain trust is and how decision support works as a social tool to create higher quality decisions. Altering the social environment is a major challenge as well and also will be left for future posts.

An approach to communication

• Agree on a language. If two people speak different languages then they might merely speak through or at each other without communicating what they really mean.

• Avoid unclear communications about important matters. If you like something you like something, if you don't like something you don't like something, but if you don't tell the other side what you like (and dislike) then the other side cannot negotiate with that knowledge.

• Connecting with another person requires sharing personal values. If a person does not know what you value, what you want, what your goals are, what you view as right or wrong, then it makes things difficult. So in an honest communication it would mean limiting ambiguity around certain things if possible.

• Communication is something to always be improving. It's never a situation where a person has perfected communication. New words, new languages, new ways of communicating by proxy, over new mediums, all can improve things. There is no end of the improvement.

• Some communication is non verbal, but some is verbal. Some is written, some isn't. Each person should choose a mode of communication which for them is "official speech" so that serious communication can take place, (contracts, promises, agreements, etc). For example we know that in history certain individuals had an official seal or stamp for official communication.

A lot of thoughts are missing here and I could not include every aspect of communication. In fact this is the first post among many. The major problem I see between people which generates the most conflict is miscommunication. In my life miscommunication seems to be behind the vast majority of fights, conflicts, etc. If miscommunication could be minimized then we could much easier manage relationships not just with persons, but between businesses, between empires.