When communicating to others,
just must
pay close attention to and consider
your intended audience;
for successful communications, your message
alone constructed independent of your
audience will, in practice, often give
some bad reactions and, thus,
is usually not good enough.<p>If don't pay close attention to your audience,
then you risk offending, confusing, or losing
your audience and creating emotional upset,
rational misunderstanding, and
maybe even hostility.<p>In paying attention to your audience, often
have to <i>put yourself in the state, i.e., position,
of your audience</i>. That is, from paying attention
to your audience, you have to try to understand
their backgrounds, thinking, and emotions,
anticipate (that is, guess in advance)
what their reactions will be, and, then,
revise your message for them, say, to
get your real message across and avoid
misunderstandings, terrible emotional
reactions, etc. This advice is especially
important in romantic and/or family communications.
Right, this extra step means that
in communicating you have to think about
two things, not just one, that is,
think about both the core content you
are trying to communicate and also
what your audience might be getting.<p>Especially good in one on one communications, one,
good, sometimes crucial,
general technique is <i>reflective listening</i>, that
is, asking the other person to summarize and repeat
back their understanding of what you communicated.
Or, in terms of electronic engineering,
write, read back, and then compare
what tried to write with what
read back! A big reason here is that
emotions, unstated assumptions,
various fears, etc. can
get seriously in the way of
even simple messages.<p>In particular, for a large fraction
of human females, often their first
reaction to any communications from
a man is to be afraid of various
things -- or just be afraid even without
knowing why. For some 101 level
lessons, maybe have a nervous kitty
cat (some are quite nervous, are
<i>scaredy cats</i>) and learn how to
detect when they are scared and
how to respond and, then, how over
time to make them much less scared.
Then for human females, slowly work
your way up from this 101 level lesson to
a graduate course!