The Reason You Don’t Get Heard
Communication remains one of the most effective ways to connect with anyone. And I mean, anyone plus yourself. It is a skill worthy to be cultivated to make relationships work out.
Communication (both healthy and unhealthy) comes in 4 major ways. How you communicate determines how you are perceived and heard. Namely: assertiveness, passiveness, passive-aggressive and aggressive.
Nick Wignall explained it better with explaining these methods of communicating when he said that assertiveness is when you communicate your thoughts and feelings clearly and honestly with respect for both yourself and the other person. Passive communication is when you relay your thoughts and feelings to the other with more respect for them against being honest and respectful of yourself. Where aggressive mode of communication is when you lay out your thoughts and feelings in ways that connote disrespect to the listener, passive-aggressive means communicating with zero respect to both yourself and the listener.
I will forever be grateful for this simplified version of understanding how different people can communicate.
But why am I pointing in this direction?
That’s because communication whether by words, action, written, or gestures all speak the same language. They all aim to get people or somebody in particular to listen to you.
The intention is where the difference and purpose lies.
To be heard, you can talk. But to be listened to, you’d need to communicate.
I realized that most times we only talk to hear ourselves out without knowing it. We think we are letting others to listen or hear us out, that’s always the intention, but our execution of that purpose proves abortive each time we succumb to the act of “talking” instead of communicating.
There are several reasons this is so. I mean, why would you continuously stress over being understood and yet end up unheard?
The main reason is that you are too conceited.
Other reasons include:
- Secondly is how bogus the words are
- Thirdly is the talking pace
- Last but not least explains the unnecessary gestures implored while talking (or communicating).
A conceited person is always living in their heads. They’re too opinionated that their voice is the only one they hear. The only voice that constantly resounds in their heads while feeding them with more dopamine hit from thinking they’re being understood or are making sense — whereas it’s the direct opposite. This positive feedback mechanism is the reason their mind is clouded by their voice from recognizing who’s hearing/ understanding them.
Conceitedness comes in form of feeling like you’re too good, too great a person to be seen and heard. You have something called over-confidence. Where you believe all you show and say are seen and understood respectively.
And while it’s not a bad thing to believe in yourself so much or what you have inside of you to showcase, you must understand that it takes two to relate. And if you must relate then you need to climb down from the high horse and speak in a manner that other people would understand you.
One of the shades of conceitedness comes from being too carried away with your accent, dialect, the texture of your voice, the sound of your voice, or the “smooth” gestures you show while implementing these techniques. Basically, everything to do with you. These skills are great in some areas but utterly irrelevant when it comes to communicating effectively.
Another thing to put into perspective, that mars good communication is speaking with bogus words or lots of ambiguity. This creates room for confusion and a need for either Google or dictionary to come to the rescue in fully understanding what is being said. Of which lack of these resources will end up with you only being heard as opposed to understood. Try to talk in simple terms and concisely too.
The third point is speaking too fast or too slow. This is usually done when somebody is nervous or anxious, perhaps during a presentation in front of the public. Be it as it may, speaking too fast makes it impossible to digest the words that you’re saying (incomprehensible) and hence leads to only being heard instead of understood. Lackluster on the other hand, gives the vibe you’re uninterested. So, try to breathe or take a break in between your sentences, also plan yourself ahead of time if you have to deliver a speech. And go at a good speed.
Lastly, the excessive use of gestures in buttressing your point can be very distracting. Distracting body gestures while talking makes it extremely hard for the other person to understand what you’re saying. Hence, they stick to just hearing you out.
In essence:
Effective communication comes from the intent to humble yourself before other people, put yourself in their shoes and relay your thoughts or feelings (or whatever tasks you have) in a way they’d get you. Or stand the risk of being the only one who hears and understands what you are saying alone.
If you cannot convey your thoughts well due to conceitedness then it’s fair to assume you’re only “using” the next person to articulate your thoughts. More like “using” them as a soundboard to articulate or summarize your thoughts as opposed to communicating.
That’s why you try so hard to get your partner to see reasons with you on something very important and they just never get it.
That’s why you explain things to people and constantly feel the reason to replay or redo it.
This is perhaps also the reason why you feel drained all the time you have to explain yourself and never get understood.
These outcomes lead to serious conflicts in relationships both with yourself and others.
Because you’re stuck in your head.
If only you could get out of your head more often, then you’d be clear enough upstairs to understand who you’re talking to, expressing to, communicating to, for them to either hear, empathize or understand respectively, where you’re coming from. Without the exasperation, draining, resentments that follows — and still being misunderstood after all.
It also helps you to figure out who deserves your time in the first place.
Common side effects of not being heard but constantly speaking include: lack of self-confidence, which can lead to lack of self- esteem, headaches from mental talk nonstop in the bid to be heard, burnout from it all and resentments toward the people whom you crave their indulgence.
In nutshell:
Unless you’re speaking to an empty room or space, perhaps to clear your head or mind, or pray, it’s unfair to put yourself and others through the torture of making them hear you out when they seriously need you to communicate to them or you sought them to understand you in your relationship.
Doing so demands that you respect both yourself and the other person (and their time too) while communicating. Which invariably means you should implore assertive ways of communicating.
Otherwise:
Conceitedness due to overconfidence with certain “endowments”, use of bogus words, speaking too fast or slow, and using unnecessary gestures to distract yourself is to blame for this lack in communication.
Which would ultimately lead to several derailing outcomes that’d tarnish the relationship(s) you’ve built.
