Arrested Communication
The smooth running of any organisation relies on effective communication between people. When messages become mixed or fuzzy, confusion steps in and people become unsure how to act. The more we understand about how people communicate and process information, the better we can be at communicating with them. This is true whether you are interacting with your team, your boss, your supplier, the general public or interviewing a crime suspect.
Do you believe what you say?
In this newsletter I want to focus on just one aspect of communication that tends to cause confusion – self-delusion, more commonly known as ‘telling lies’. To understand where I’m going with this, think about a time when you told someone a lie. It could be a blatant and direct lie, a little white lie, an exaggeration, a lie to avoid someone being hurt by the truth (no your bum doesn’t look big in that), or perhaps you weren’t actually lying you were withholding the truth through omission of facts. How did you feel inside as you were telling your lie? Whatever the feeling, your body has a way of saying to your mind ‘I don’t believe this’.
How good is your intuition?
Often you get an intuition that a person doesn’t believe what they are saying, but some people, particularly those that have made the act of deceit into an art form, may not be so easy to read. Yet what if you were able to read even the smallest signs? You might then recognise how a few more questions might help to cut through the confusion and bring extra clarity.
Deceit and delusion
Self-delusion can be caused by misquoting the facts, or saying words that mismatch our values. In either of these cases the unconscious part of your mind is saying ‘I don’t believe any of this’. So the conscious logical mind is attempting to deceive other people, whilst at the same time it is attempting to delude your own unconscious mind which knows the truth. The result of this attempted delusion is known as ‘incongruence’.
Arrested communication
You might think of incongruence as ‘arrested communication’, since your body language likes to be free to express the words you are saying, but when you do not believe what you are saying, it is as if your body is being restrained, or ‘arrested’ by your words. The body expresses itself differently when you disbelieve than when you believe in what you are saying. In addition to your body language, your tone of voice also expresses these two states differently.
Sensory Acuity
I expect there are more than a few occasions in the law enforcement business where it would be useful to recognise arrested communication. So how can you really tell when a person’s body language and voice tone is being expressed freely, and when it is being arrested by the words? The answer lies in developing your sensory acuity.
People tend to focus more on the words than on how they are being expressed – they focus on the content rather than on the delivery of the content. Exercises and practice in recognising behavioural changes such as skin colour, lip-size, eye movements, breathing and gestures, and voice characteristics is the answer. When you are skilled at noticing these cues you can test for opposite responses as in the following exercise.
Do this exercise with a partner. Ask your subject 2 or 3 questions to which there is a very high chance the answer is ‘yes’ such as:
Q – Do you know what the date is today?
A – It’s the 25th (high possibility of being an answer the speaker believes to be true)
Q – Are you sure it’s the 25th?
A – Yes, I’m sure – it’s the 25th (high possibility of being an answer the speaker believes to be true)
As you are asking these questions watch the face, eyes, hands and breathing. Also listen carefully to variations in the voice, including tone, speed, pitch, whether the ends of words are clipped, and any other distinctions you can make. This is called ‘calibration’ – you are calibrating how the person is expressing themselves when they believe in what they are saying.
Next ask a question where you know the answer is ‘no’, but instruct your partner to answer ‘yes’. As you listen to the answer calibrate the way the body and voice is expressing the words and look for something different than before. There will be a difference because it is extremely difficult to control these aspects of communication.
Most people, from time to time, will tell small lies, exaggerate or avoid the truth for various reasons. You could pursue the reasons why people do this, but wouldn’t you rather discover the real facts? When you are able to notice and challenge a person’s distorted version of the facts you make fewer mistakes. Recognising incongruence is one aspect of the web of communication. By mastering some linguistic tools you are able to use statements and questions in ways that reveal the hard facts behind any communication.
This has been a short piece on one aspect of communication, but it is one that can reveal so much more about the process of communication, and that once mastered will help you to cut through the smoke-screens and confusion and get to the real facts of a situation.
David Molden
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