Communicating across our differences is difficult, but necessary, in today’s highly polarized environment. I share real life examples, and advice from a language expert, as encouragement for talking to someone you disagree with.
Communicating with people that we disagree with has never been easy, but today I’m arguing it’s pretty necessary. So I’m going to share some ideas and inspiration and yeah, some examples, of what it’s like to communicate across significant differences.
Hi everybody. This is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication, ranked number 20 in the Top 100 Podcasts in Social Sciences. Giving you inspiration and strategies to improve engagement, experience, and satisfaction since 2017. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, a researcher, consultant, and educator with expertise in communication and education. I’m here to dig into some of what we might take for granted about communication in our professional lives. If you want to strengthen the work you can do in your professional sphere, this is a place for you because communication touches everything. We’re here to learn, get inspired, and most importantly, make the difference we got into our jobs to make. If you value this show, the stories and inspiration and research, I’ve got good news: I can help your organization. Visit healthcommunicationpartners.com, click on contact, or you can connect with me on LinkedIn.
So talking about communication in today’s times is tough. The more divisive I feel like the rhetoric becomes, the more important it is for us to connect, and reject those ideas of division. This is hard work in our communication. I read a quote recently from an article I’ll share, and the author said, “In our own small sphere of moments, we are a force for promoting a more compassionate and humanized world.”
And so in today’s episode, I want to share a couple examples of folks who are doing the hard work of talking across difference, in case it can give you some ideas and some inspiration for the next time you have to have a difficult conversation. Whether it’s someone at home, someone at work, or someone when you’re just out there, living your life.
First I want to share some podcast love with a newer show called “Why Should I Trust You?” This series drops weekly but I want to draw your attention to two episodes I’m going to go ahead and link in the show notes, that are conversations between MAHA grassroots folks and public health leaders. So there’s two episodes Part 1 and Part 2. I’m going to go ahead and link to both of those in the notes.
Another example I want to share is a show that wrapped several years ago, in pre -COVID times, but it was very, I think it was fun then, but it’s very relevant now, and it’s called “Conversations with People Who Hate Me.” From the website: “Don’t be fooled by the title. It’s actually a loving show that fosters unlikely connections in an age of increasing digital isolation.” And again, I think it bears repeating now in today’s very divided world.
And now I wanna share something from a researcher and linguist that I reference quite a lot on this show: Jim Gee. I had read a passage from one of his books for an episode about two years ago that turned out to be a very popular episode. A listener had asked for a reflection to start a meeting, and that’s why I shared this passage from Gee. But in light of how things are now, I think it’s good for, it could be good for us to just read these words to ourselves. And maybe get encouraged, maybe reframe things a little bit, and take hope. Here’s that passage.
Alright now I’m reading this out of an actual book, so you’ll hear the paper. Here we go:
“Human communication, especially across social and cultural divides, is a very difficult matter. We humans are very good at finding meaning. We find it all over the place, even in the stars, with many people still believing in the medieval art of astrology. In fact, we are so good at finding meaning that we very often run off too quickly with interpretations of what other people mean that are based on our own social and cultural worlds, not theirs. Too often we are wrong in ways that are hurtful.
“When we sit back and reflect on what people have said and written—a luxury we have too little in life, but the basis of discourse analysis—we often discover better, deeper, and more humane interpretations. The small child whom the teacher assumed made no sense at sharing time looks a lot smarter after a little reflection…. A person from a different race, class, or culture looks, on reflection, if the reflection is based on any knowledge, to have made both a better point and a better impression on second thought than on first.
“We believe it is a matter of competence to re-read a good book or re-watch a great movie to get more out of it. But we rarely apply the same principle…to our fellow citizens…. Indeed, writing a second time—as in the case of this book—is just a way to be in dialog with ourselves, to think more deeply about what we mean and how others will interpret us. In a world in which people rush off to kill those who don’t agree with them and countries rush off to war, it may be a matter of survival that we learn to base our views and actions on second (and more) hearings and readings of others and second sayings and writings by ourselves.
“Even after we have re-heard or re-read, we may still disagree with people. And they may have had good or bad motives. But we humans, when it comes to using language to make sense, are very good indeed. Whether we are telling the truth or lying, we build intricate, complex, and highly patterned oral and written texts with which to accomplish our goals. We are creatures of language. Evolution has seen to that.
“Thus, we can say that there is an imbalance in human communication: each human being creates complex meanings in language, but each of us is so good at finding meanings that we are often too quick to attribute meanings to others that are rooted more in our own cultures, identities, and fears than they are on a close inspection of what the other person has said or written.
“So a second listening or a second reading is, in many cases, a matter of competence (what we need to do to be competent in our areas of work) and, in many cases, too, a matter of ethics (if we want to be fair)…. The task is this: to think more deeply about the meanings we give people’s words so as to make ourselves better, more humane people and the world a better, more humane place. While we still may disagree with others after reflection, we will, nonetheless, be in a position to be a much better critic, to represent what we believe in a much better way. But we may also sometimes change our own viewpoints to be more positively inclined toward others than we were initially. We will then, too, be better placed to cooperate with them in human endeavors, especially in a fast-changing, global, culturally diverse (and often dangerous) world.”
Thanks to Jim Gee for that. Now I have some questions for you to consider:
- Recall a time when you’ve given someone’s words a ‘second hearing.’ What did you notice on second thought that you missed the first time?
- Has anyone ever given your words a second hearing, that you know of? How did that impact you?
- Is there a situation in recent memory that you’d like to be able to go back to and give someone’s words a second hearing? Or has there ever been a time that you, as Gee said, ran “off too quickly with interpretation of what other people mean” that was based in your own social and cultural worlds, instead of theirs? What did you learn from this?
If you appreciate this approach to communication and reflection, you’ll love my course Foundations of Equitable Communication in Health. Learn more at healthcommunicationpartners.com. This has been “10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication” from Health Communication Partners. Audio engineering by Joe Liebel, music by Joe Liebel and Alexis R.