Communicating for Better Outcomes
This is neither a doctoral thesis nor the result of new research. There is plenty of information out there that has yet to be understood, integrated, and put to appropriate use. I hope to do a little bit of that here.
I am not going to deal with the differences in women and men’s communication styles. Deborah Tannen, Ph.D., in her book, You Just Don’t Understand <28), and John Gray, in his Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus oo), have done excellent jobs in this area.
I’m not going to deal with listening skills. “Listening skills” are critical to successful communication, but specific information is easily available. I did a Google search for the term and got millions of hits.
I am not going to defend what I write here. The information I’m using in this essay is mostly common knowledge. It is consistent, objectively researched, and well-documented in the books and articles I have read (noted in the bibliography).
I am not going to overwhelm you with “Too Much Information,” as my daughter says. I think this essay will be helpful if I can keep it simple, clear, and reasonably short.
I am not going to paint a dreadful picture of communicating and then make you wait until the end of this essay to tell you that there is hope. There is hope, and we will talk about it at the beginning of the discussion of our brains.
A note about structure. For simplicity, I have combined the bibliography and footnotes in the “Sources and Footnotes” section. In references (14, p 165), the first part is the source’s number. The second part is the page number.
And finally, what I simply cannot do-as much as I wish I could-is to fix everything and make everyone a great communicator immediately. All I can do is provide the pieces and parts. You have to put them together in a way that makes sense to you. I hope what I have provided in the appendices will help.