There is debate among ethicists about whether humans are good or bad for the planet. Which, if we’re being honest, is pretty damning simply by being debatable.
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I’m not here to make the case for or against humanity. But I do want to explore something that comes up in the Christian lectionary at this time of year.
A man known as John the Baptizer, who is a kind of prophet, shows up telling people to change the direction of their lives. Ethically, morally, socially. Stop being selfish jerks, and focus on joining in with the work God is doing in the world.
Now, when some religious leaders come up to John to get baptized by him, he just unloads on them. He calls them a brood of vipers and tears into them about their hypocrisy.
And one of the things he says to them is this:
“Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have Abraham as our ancestor’; for I tell you, God is able from these stones to raise up children to Abraham.”
There are two things people need to recognize about this statement:
Being part of Abraham’s lineage is the biggest deal. And always has been.
John is essentially saying “Yeah, OK, but even humanity itself is replaceable.”
Irreplaceable
There are big theological implications in what John is saying, which I’ll save for a sermon. I’d rather focus here on the idea of our being replaceable.
We love to think of ourselves as the opposite. That we are irreplaceable. And we treat our relationships with each other and with our loved ones the same way. Each one is unique, so each one is irreplaceable.
This is why we think the very idea of ever being replaced for anything as a grave insult.
Much of it is inspired by the uniqueness and specialness of each relationship we have. We, like snowflakes, are all unique. Without us, things would be different.
This isn’t wrong. And it probably encourages our most moral behavior. But, of course, all of this is also hubris.
Which is why we need to be humbled, if slightly, by the reminder that we could be replaced. Even, as John suggests, by stones.
Replaceable
In my own life, I find myself too often being pushed toward thinking “only I can do this” thing that needs doing. Or if I miss this one blessed opportunity, an entire life is thrown into chaos because I messed up.
As a person ordained by the church to holy orders, this is particularly funny. Because in so many situations, I am, quite literally, replaceable by anybody who is so ordained.
And if I’m not up to the task God has for me, God will call somebody else.
Being replaceable is actually quite freeing! The world isn’t on my shoulders after all. It isn’t up to me alone to solve all of our problems.
Here’s the thing, though. We can say the same thing about being a parent, a friend, or a sibling. Not that these things aren’t essential, but that even these are replaceable. If your parents aren’t up to the job, you really can replace them with people who will love you. I’ve had so many grandparents just by going to church!
We like to imbue our bloodlines with a specialness that makes specific relationships impossible to replace. But anyone who has been loved by adopted parents can attest to the possibility. And likewise, anyone who has found unconditional love outside their biological family knows this is true.
The possibility that love is way more powerful than lineage, race, national identity puts a lie to all the ways these corruptable ideologies diminish us and prevent us from knowing true love.
I’ll cast my sails toward the winds of love every single time.
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Thanks for listening to Make Saints. Because (eternal) life is hard. And we could use all the help we can get.
I don’t like thank you cards. Giving or receiving them. I know this is an unpopular opinion. But hear me out.
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Jacques Derrida had this idea he called The Gift. We might think of it like this.
Imagine you see the perfect something for your friend. You buy it, wrap it, and take it to their house. You knock, they answer, and you hand it over.
What happens next?
In most cases, the person says “Oh, thank you! You shouldn’t have!” Often truly trying not to accept this unsolicited gift. But you insist.
Later, after you’ve gone, the person feels so funny about accepting this nice gift, that they feel obligated to do something nice for you.
Obligation destroys the beauty of the gift.
This is the central drama of the gift. We don’t expect to receive stuff for free. There’ve gotta be strings attached. Because we like to attach strings! Those strings might be a thank you. Or a thank you card. Or a reciprocal gift.
Which means we aren’t really gifting. We’re bartering: offering something in exchange for a payment of a thank you.
We think of this as simply “being polite” but it is often a social transaction.
When we receive a gift, we feel obliged to respond. So we are compelled to rid ourselves of that obligation. We must gift back to eliminate the gift debt. Usually needing to match them dollar-for-dollar.
Meanwhile, the giver wants to be recognized for giving. I am confident there are at least a few people cooking family dinners this time of year expecting to be thanked. Or, perhaps even more commonly, expecting to get mad at how they won’t be thanked.
Derrida contended that for something to truly be a gift, it would need to be given without expectation of receiving anything. You must want to give the gift. That’s it.
Giving in Secret
There’s a passage in the gospels that many Christians are familiar with. But we hear it at a different time of year. On Ash Wednesday, before we put ashes on our foreheads to remember that we are dust and to dust we shall return, we read a passage from Matthew 6.
It says that we should give alms in secret so that we aren’t recognized for our generosity.
When we hear this at the beginning of Lent, with a mind toward what to do with those ashes, we aren’t likely to be thinking about buying gifts for friends and family. But the implication is poignant here.
Jesus isn’t saying we must give to the poor in secret or don’t give at all. He’s saying *don’t do it to look good.* Don’t be generous to receive praise, thanks, popularity, or recognition.
But instead, give anonymously, generously, and secretly, *to avoid all of that.* And therefore not gain status and be raised up before all of the people.
In other words, we ought to give gifts for the sake of giving gifts. And we should receive gifts with the gratitude that someone was so generous with us. And all of this expectation of recognition is all ego stuff that gets us into trouble.
Giving is Good
I do recognize the need to recognize others. Love Languages and all of that. And I’m no different. I love being noticed. And it feels good! But I also know it’s not about me. It’s not about the receiving, but the giving. And that includes being thankful.
I’d rather focus on doing something that is worth being thanked for. And NOT being dependent on the thanks.
So as we gather around tables with family and friends, let us enjoy each other’s company. Focusing on our thankfulness, gratitude, and love. And may we offer an antidote to expectations, freedom to be ourselves, and thankful that we actually are not in charge of someone else’s gratitude.
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Thanks for listening to Make Saints. Because (eternal) life is hard. And we could use all the help we can get.
As holy days go, All Saints is hard. It compels us to see ourselves in relationship to all those blessed before us.
For Sunday All Saints’ Day + All Souls’ Day
Collect
Almighty God, you have knit together your elect in one communion and fellowship in the mystical body of your Son Christ our Lord: Give us grace so to follow your blessed saints in all virtuous and godly living, that we may come to those ineffable joys that you have prepared for those who truly love you; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns, one God, in glory everlasting.
This week we are celebrating the Feast for All the Saints. While the church’s normal pattern is to celebrate saints individually throughout the year, we mark November 1st as the day we celebrate them all together. It’s like this one day we’re honoring the whole team, not just each player.
And what makes a saint has been defined and redefined frequently throughout history. All of the official apostles are saints. Many martyrs have been made saints. Similarly major figures in history and remarkable people of the recent past have been included.
Ultimately, how one becomes a saint is dependent on the living. We don’t get to call ourselves saints. But others get to determine the circumstances for whether people regard us as such.
Our church is named St. Stephen’s because someone over 180 years ago, decided that a saint named Stephen would be our patron. And so we, as a congregation, look to that particular saint for inspiration.
We also tend to look at the people around us for inspiration. We observe their behavior, their words, and particularly their devotion, caring, hope, and commitment. The people who inspire us to be better people, we often regard as reflecting a kind of personal sainthood.
The challenge of blessing
The gospel for this feast day invites us into a fascinating challenge. It starts out with a deeply troubling style: “Blessed are you who are poor,” which is hard to imagine that Jesus is really serious about that.
And yet, by the time he’s done, summarizing with the teaching we know as the Golden Rule, we find the main idea intuitive and obvious.
It is almost like we think the secret to being a good person is complicated or hard. Like there’s a grand mystery we need to unlock. Or it takes a radical transformation of our personal character to embody it. When Jesus really is saying “just do good.”
The reality that the sainthood Jesus seems to be about is so accessible and not even in the least bit special is probably the biggest misconception of faith. Gurus on mountaintops aren’t more special than the volunteers at the soup kitchen.
What does separate the saintly in their saintliness from you and I in our normal lives? It tends to be how willing they are to spend their time blessing other people. And how eager we are to be blessed in the here and now.
So a life of faith isn’t that complicated. It isn’t about playing for keeps. But instead, playing for the love of the game.
I was supposed to be done. Then I sent a half-formed tweet. Welcome to part 5 of a 3-part series.
The Public / Private reality of Twitter
As part of the masses without a blue checkmark, offering a podcast to, what may charitably be dozens of listeners, I use twitter like most people who are actively trying to limit their social media exposure do.
I either scroll for a couple minutes when I’m bored or I log on to tweet something I’ve been thinking about.
Last week, I did the latter.
We all tend to forget something true about Twitter: it actually functions like private table conversations in a big public room. You really do spend most of your time talking to the people at your own table.
But…
Sometimes someone walks by and joins the conversation.
And just as much as we know this is such a public place AND we do treat it like anyone could walk by, we also get used to the fact that so often no one actually does. So we tailor our communication to the people in our orbit.
So here’s what happened.
I wrote a tweet based on the conversation I was having in my own head. It was something about which millions of hot takes are made by millions of people on a daily basis.
Then I hit send.
When I checked back later, replies were flying in, so I went back to the original to see why. I playfully responded by naming my mistake with the snarky ribbing I’m used to using and receiving on Twitter. And before long, it was bonkers.
The Reason
The reason for the strong response was quite obvious. My words, in their most obvious, literal, and decontextualized readings would clearly indicate that people shouldn’t love something they do.
In other words, a pretty classic case of miscommunication. Lots of people heard what I didn’t attempt to communicate.
When this happens with friends, the response is really quite simple: you sit down and hash it out. You talk with them about it. Sometimes this includes a process that looks a lot like reconciliation: mutual confession, absolution, restoration.
Social media scrambles the whole thing up and puts us in a whole new place.
So, as the final episode (for now) about the challenges to communication, I want to share how the three challenges I’ve been talking about fit into a social media world.
All social media is essentially asynchronous, meaning none of us is making any real-time connection. And worse, our whole sense of time gets scrambled.
I write a tweet while getting my kid ready for school. I shut it down and leave to drop him off. I make breakfast and check back into twitter to 20+ notifications.
Then, over the next 8 hours, I find myself checking and reading and sometimes responding. Then I check out for 24 hours to get some clarity. But the weight of it is still there. And stays with me.
Over the weekend, I still get notifications. Some from people still discovering it. A few calling me stupid or dismissing me for pronouns in my bio.
All of this is happening in our chronological sense of time, but none of its participants is in concert with that real time. None is there for it all. And none of us is talking. All of us are writing. And we’re writing missives back and forth on different threads about different things.
None of this is synchronous. And none of it actually makes sense. And worse, it breeds greater contempt from everyone involved.
Asynchronous modes of communication are great for passing information along, but are terrible for conversation. And this is one of the mistakes I always make. That’s why it’s #1.
Challenge #2: Mistaking broadcast for communication
As I said at the top, Twitter has a particular way of encouraging asynchronous dialogue. And just as much as I forget that a lot of people don’t use Twitter that way: making it all statement, clap-back, end: a lot of people use the reply to, themselves, broadcast. So we can understand that there is a kind of two-way character to Twitter, but in-practice, many of us reinforce a vision of communication that is only broadcast, ignoring that our reply is to another person who would benefit from a dialogue rather than a teaching or a scolding.
To put it plainly: Some dude wrote something I don’t like. I’ll quote him and say something myself.
That we’re all craving connection and genuine dialogue with one another, the temptation to see all communication as an individual broadcasting out to the ether doesn’t just hinder our social media connections, but it hinders our ability to connect with others in general.
Because what happens on social media does feel real. Which ensures that it is real.
That one was everywhere here. Expectations of what I said, who I am as a priest, as an Episcopalian, as a Christian. Who they are, replying, quoting, responding. Tone. Language.
Lots of people felt that I dismissed them.
And I felt dismissed.
And strangely, because of the original tweet, I felt utterly unheard because I wanted to fix it. Change it. Get in there and make things right with actual people. But there isn’t a way to do that.
With social media, the whole thing isn’t centered on two persons and their relationship. It is centered outside the body. On a tweet, a post, a meme, or a video.
And there can be no reconciliation, because there is neither synchronous engagement, nor a capacity to truly utilize that tweet to retrace it to the very beginning.
We’re outsourcing responsibility
This is the flaw at the heart of how social media works and how we endeavor to engage with it.
When we outsource the problem in a relationship from the relationship or from the individuals in the relationship, and from what each of us can do to genuinely repair it, none of us is actually on the hook for any of it.
We used to blame this on the anonymity of the internet. But it continues to happen with real people. Because these three factors all play up within social media and impoverish our ability to truly connect.
Expect more from social media companies, who are financially incentivized to encourage outrage and miscommunication.
And expect more from ourselves. This includes learning how to de-escalate and refrain from joining into new opportunities to confront others.
Limit time and attention on social media or curate your feed to avoid the negativity.
More than anything, understanding how social media scrambles our thinking, our ability to communicate, and even how we express our core values is essential.
Because refraining from using it is good for you. But knowing why it does that to you can do even more to improve all of our modes of communication.
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Thanks for listening to Make Saints. Because (eternal) life is hard. And we could use all the help we can get.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve covered three challenges to the way we communicate. Today I want to cover three things we can do to improve communication.
Challenge #1: Time
In the first communication episode, we talked about time. As we talk about communication, we tend to ignore the role time plays. Or, if we do consider it, it is only ever to speed up time or it’s about our expectations for how timely others should respond to our message.
This is what separates synchronous and asynchronous communication. Synchronous communication is real-time talking between two or more parties. So often: at the same place at the same time.
Asynchronous is not that. It refers to communication that happens at different moments. Written or recorded communication is asynchronous because there is always a gap between when it is made and when it is received.
Use both forms more effectively.
Recognize the benefits of both synchronous and asynchronous methods and use them to our greater advantage.
Here are two examples.
Use the phone to make arrangements
I’m a baby Xer, so I prefer texting to calling 99% of the time, but there is nothing I hate more than making arrangements by text or email (both are asynchronous forms). Why? Because I will inevitably spend hours or days, and in some cases weeks trading texts and emails before settling on a time to get together.
What doesn’t take hours or weeks? Picking up the phone and talking for five minutes.
Make use of what synchronous communication does well: simultaneous connection.
Passing along information
Similarly, passing along information is what asynchronous communication does best. If I have two or three quick things I want you to know about, I don’t need you picking up your phone and chatting. I can deliver that info to you. And you can get it when you get it.
This can also save a ton of time at our synchronous meetings if we’ve already taken the time to think about things before the meeting.
Challenge #2: Mistaking broadcast for communication
Communication is not onlyone person telling another something. It isn’t only one-way information sharing. Communication is two-way communication between people and between teams.
This can be a challenge for organizations or groups that are hierarchical or rely on leaders to share with the team what is going on. These ways of being often have a disempowering side effect for team members who become passive receivers of information shared with them.
To break out of this arrangement, we need to encourage more dialogue.
More Two-Way Communication.
Ultimately, it is not the leader’s job to make sure that others listen to them. We can optimize our communication strategies to be more engaging but we can’t physically control another person’s ability to hear. Nor can we read their minds and intuit what it is they really want.
We often label lack of connection as a communication problem. But if I have to call you 27 times before you answer the phone, why would we say “well, I guess we gotta improve our communication around here!”? That’s crazy. We actually do know what the problem is!
The onus is not only on the speaker to be heard. Listeners have a responsibility to listen. And respond. That’s how we get effective communication.
Challenge #3: Hidden (and Faulty) Expectations
Sometimes, the greatest challenge in communication has nothing to do with someone saying something. It’s the junk going on in someone else’s head.
I described this challenge in a previous episode with a person I called Elizabeth. Her complaints about communication hid her real struggles with loneliness, loss of connection and authority. She no longer felt powerful and important. Virtually all of her friends had died.
She blamed our broad, modern communication strategies for her loss of relationship. So it was never about what we did or could do. It was what she was avoiding.
Keep Sharing
When I realized what Elizabeth was doing, my instinct was to accept her narrative. To try and give her special attention. Or to figure out how to both/and this situation so we could all get to a win-win-win.
But my reaching out to her was not enough for her.
When confronted with hidden expectations, we often make the mistake of dealing directly with the spoken arguments. So, we might reconsider putting so much emphasis on the website or social media. Even when we know that these tools are essential.
This, obviously, is the wrong strategy in the abstract. But when relationships are involved, we just don’t want to feel like the bad guy.
In cases of hidden expectations, we need to keep sharing. Because we want open communication to be the norm. And not assumptions and hidden expectations. Being open, and expecting others to be open, too, makes for healthier, and in the end, more effective communication.
Recap
So the three ways to improve communication right now are
Use both synchronous and asynchronous communication more effectively.
Meetings are good for decisions, not planning
Emails & texts are good for sharing bits of information.
Reinforce two-way communication.
Remind people to speak and listen to each other.
Each of us has responsibility to our organizations.
Keep sharing.
Be mindful of the stuff really going on with people.
Avoid the trap of addressing stated problems that won’t fix their problem.
Of course, all of this is easier said than done. Communication is an art that takes time to master. And many master communicators have been flummoxed by our present technological change. Not to mention the massive transformation of media in the last decade.
Focusing on these three things: taking advantage of forms of communication, building up the capacity to communicate, and persisting in open communication: are the skills all of us need right now.
Also check out the previous episodes in the series
She’d come up to me and tell me she didn’t know what’s going on. Probably every six weeks or so. She blamed me; and our church communication.
She was angry and frustrated. And every one of these interactions made me angry and frustrated.
Until I figured out what was going on. And realized it really didn’t have anything to do with me.
Trouble communicating
In the last two episodes of the podcast, I’ve outlined the two biggest problems with communicating. Which is really that we use this one word (communication) to mean very different things.
So we use the word communication to refer to conversing that is happening synchronously—you and I in the same room at the same time. And asynchronously—you and I, not in the same room and not at the same time. And the trouble for us is that we want asynchronous to be instantaneous. In other words, more synchronous. And it isn’t.
The other problem with communication is that we often mistake the idea of communicating for broadcasting. We sometimes think of communication as only a person at the top of the pyramid talking at other people and not a dialogue between people.
I have found both of these problems everywhere and cause so many headaches for everyone.
But if we were to get just a little more clarity about what we’re doing when we’re communicating and get on the same page about expectations for our communication, we can eliminate almost all of our frustration.
I say that, and believe it. But there is one more piece hiding in the shadows. And this one is really deceptive.
Elizabeth
Let’s turn the clock back a few years. I was serving a church we’ll call St. Gertrude’s. And one person, let’s call her Elizabeth, was exceedingly skeptical of me.
She didn’t trust the diocese or the circumstances of my coming there. She also didn’t like that she didn’t know that much about me. And the fact that she didn’t ask me about myself should be seen as a clue, here.
During my time, it is fair to say that I heard from Elizabeth (or her daughter) no less frequently than every six weeks or so. She’d say that she never knows what’s going on. And she doesn’t “do the internet,” because, in her words, “she’s old” (she was in her early ‘80s, so consider that alongside her self-assessment).
This is all quite reasonable, I should think, right?
And I would lay out for her what I had control over.
I pointed out that everything would go to the website, Facebook page, Twitter, and our weekly email. Of course, I don’t expect her to get those things and we had stopped weekly mailings over cost.
But, I said, all of that same information was in the bulletin each week AND I made verbal announcements of all the interesting things each week. AND I almost always announced things for a good three weeks before they would occur. SO, she certainly wouldn’t need to be online if she were in church regularly.
This, of course, was a big part of the problem. She didn’t come every week. She didn’t come every other week. It was maybe every three weeks.
None of this was good enough, of course.
And yet, I offered, what could I do? We were already making tons of announcements on all of the channels. And if she isn’t in church to hear, why would she expect to know what’s going on?
And that’s the question of the hour. I finally landed on it.
I was so focused on the illogic of wanting the impossible, I forgot to examine why she would even expect it.
She wasn’t asking for the possible: she was demanding the impossible. Because her problem wasn’t me: it was her.
If someone doesn’t look for information, doesn’t show up to our regular gatherings, and never came to anything outside our regular gatherings, what is she actually looking for?
That’s what drove me the battiest anyway! She wasn’t going to do anything with any of this knowledge! Not once did I see her at something that wasn’t on Sunday morning! Why does she even want to know what’s going on?
Because knowledge is power.
Elizabeth didn’t want to know what’s going on to participate in it. She wanted to know because that’s where power is. And she was no stranger to power.
Elizabeth was a woman of some means. I don’t suspect great means, but she would tell us how she used to live in the wealthiest suburb in the state. So she wanted to communicate that she could choose to help or hurt the church at any time.
So the power that knowledge offers fits in two places in our world: social influence and political influence.
This aging woman felt ostracized from her influence. Because she seemed to have zero influence over me and no more over the church.
Which reminded me of the social part of this.
She didn’t have any friends.
And I don’t say this to be mean or condescending. A lot of us struggle with relationships. But it was easy to see that she presently had few friends in the church. People to encourage her, make her laugh, bring her to events. Even call her to let her know about them.
Because if she did, I suspect she would have a better sense of what was going on.
Disappearing
As we age, and more of our peers disappear from our lives, it can be striking to wake up one day and realize we’re all alone. No spouse. Few friends. None local, anyway. Happiest times are in the past. Body turning against us.
For as miserable as Elizabeth tried to make my life, and she did try, I developed a lot of sympathy for her.
And the hardest part—she would never accept my sympathy. She kept demanding the impossible.
I know that we all get that sometimes the thing isn’t really the thing. We say it’s the thing, because we don’t want to face the real thing. We do this with trauma or to protect our egos.
We get that often the problem someone has isn’t really about us.
And yet, sometimes we struggle with the idea that there must be something we can do anyway. There must be a way to get through.
Elizabeth’s problem wasn’t a communication problem for the church. She put no effort in gathering the information she claimed to want.
She didn’t have friends who called her and invited her to things. And to be brutally honest, none of us wanted to.
But we didn’t want to exclude her, either. And we racked our brains for months trying to solve the problem. By focusing where she wanted us to look. Which is where?
She wanted us to kill our online presence.
Turn back time, recreate phone trees, stop evangelizing in the community, and while we’re at it, hold a seance to bring her friends back. Maybe cajole my predecessor to move back to town so he could come fix all this bad stuff I was doing.
We took her words at face value, even as they made little sense to our situation. The problem had nothing to do with what we were or weren’t doing.
Like inherited wealth, she wanted the influence to drop in her lap because she was owed it.
It was easy for me to tune out Elizabeth.
And it was easy to get stuck on what she was saying.
But it was hard to find what Elizabeth was actually communicating.
For me, the value in this experience was in making Elizabeth an avatar for communication.
She isn’t who I podcast for, obviously. But she is who I remember when people have unreasonable expectations.
When people say “I don’t know what’s going on!” I see her face.
And when they complain about not knowing things we’ve clearly advertised, I think about what’s going on with them. Not what’s going on with our newsletter.
Most importantly, though, it helps me set the limits for my own mind of what communication even is. Of course I know that I can’t reach everyone. And yes, I try really hard to communicate effectively. But some are never satisfied. Some are never happy. Ever. Never ever. It is irrational for me to put that on me!
Instead, setting clear boundaries, expectations, and encouraging dialogue are essential to healthy, meaningful communication. Anything else is just noise.
Episode 39 of the Make Saints podcast: “The Second Biggest Challenge to Communication”
the episode script
“I don’t know what’s going on!”
That phrase is both heartbreaking and infuriating. And it’s incredibly common.
Sometimes we say it because of all the things: the world is confusing. And it can be all too much. And we really don’tknow what’s going on.
Sometimes we say it because we feel like we’ve missed something. Something we should have known.
“I don’t know what’s going on!” is a kind of call for help. And how we receive that call is to assume that there is a communication problem somewhere.
There is. It’s just not at all like we think.
The Second Biggest Challenge to Communication
I started this conversation about communication last week. You should check that one out, too.
The biggest challenge we have with communicating with one another right now isn’t the pandemic or technology specifically. It’s that we misunderstand the nature of communication, apply the wrong kinds of communication to a situation, and develop unrealistic expectations for one another.
These conditions didn’t start in March 2020, nor do they stem from Facebook. They start with the written word and universal literacy.
The biggest challenge of communication today is that we have both synchronous and asynchronous communication and act like they are the same.
So people treat texts, Slack, and social media like they are active tools for communication rather than passive. As if both parties are there at the same time.
That’s the biggest challenge. Now here’s the second biggest challenge.
Communication is like the tango. It takes two.
I think we all get this at the highest level. It’s just, by the time it gets down to us, where we live, in our situation, we’ve lost the understanding entirely. Because we act like it is something people do to us.
Communication isn’t anything if there isn’t at least a speaker and a hearer. That’s the minimum.
And make note that there are at least those two jobs: someone speaking and someone hearing. That’s going to be important later.
There are also two general types of communication.
Macro
Micro
Another way to think about these two types is
Broadcast
Dialogue
Macro-communication is most often mass communication. Because we are trying to speak to as many people as possible. So, without a huge buildout in infrastructure, this means we broadcast our message. Think: advertising. Billboards, commercials, targeted mailings, newsletters, podcasts.
These are situations in which a person has something to say and hopes to reach as many people as they can.
And how do we react to mass communication?
If it is something we want, like a favorite show, we sit down and watch it. But most often, we treat everything else like a commercial.
And what does that mean?
We ignore it.
Have you ever heard the old saying that you have to say something seven times before people start to remember it? You may have also heard that the number is now up to twenty.
They aren’t saying that listeners are stupid. They’re saying we have filters. When we hear mass communication, broadcasting, we hear it all like its advertisers trying to sell us something. It all goes into the proverbial Spam Folder.
In essence, we’ve all developed special techniques to not listen to people.
Now, keep that in mind when we venture into the other kind of communication: micro.
Unlike communication on the macro-level, communication on the micro-level is fundamentally different.
Micro-communication is peer-to-peer.
It’s dialogue. It isn’t one person broadcasting to the world which has developed incredible filters to avoid listening to 99% of what comes in. It is one-on-one, two-way communication.
This can also happen in small groups in which communication is always back and forth.
Now, in a classroom, a lecture is like a broadcast. It is all one-way communication. But when the lecturer opens things up for questions or dialogue, it becomes a whole other beast. A fundamentally different thing.
Or think of church. The standard sermon is a broadcast. Until the preacher invites dialogue. Or the preacher talks to people one-on-one afterward about what they’ve said. Then, the macro becomes the micro.
Miscommunication
See how we use this one word: communication: to mean one person blathering on and also people talking? At the most basic level, these are total opposite concepts which are often utterly incompatible. And yet we call them both: communication.
Now remember when I said earlier that there are essentially two jobs in communication: speaking and hearing? Here’s where this is important.
If we mistake communication for broadcasting, then one person’s job is only to speak and another’s is to hear.
Or, to put it another way, if we think of any kind of communication as macro-communication, then there is only ever a speaker and a bunch of hearers.
The father talks and the rest of the house listens. That’s it.
It means that the rest of the family has no voice. And more importantly, no place. So we can only be in the know when another speaks. But we also have no way of making them speak. We are, then, only passive receivers of another’s communication to us.
And yet that is almost never true about the organizations we are in. Or what we want the organization to look like.
This is our biggest mistake!
We act like our organizations have designated speakers and we are the designated hearers. And because we use the macro-communication framework, we utilize our sophisticated means of filtering to avoid listening to them anyway.
In organizations like churches, Girl Scouts, or your family, a person you care about shouldn’t have to say something to you twenty times before you stop filtering them out.
Imagine telling a story to your spouse nineteen times and then the twentieth time, they finally listen? Does any of that feel good? Do we feel like we’re in a loving relationship with someone when, between the time you both get home from work, they have to remind you to pick up the groceries every 20 minutes before going to bed before you say “I’ll put that in my phone for tomorrow”?
I’m calling this the second biggest challenge to communication, but I think it is just as significant. Because when we treat all communication like a broadcast, it means none of us is ever responsible for actually listening to the person next to us.
And nine times out of ten, when people say there’s a problem with communication, it is when a person has designated themselves as a hearer and then didn’t hear about a thing. And, of course, they never tried to ask about it or engage with it earlier.
This is a podcast.
One-way-communication. I’m not really inviting dialogue. I’m offering insight out into the ether and hoping someone hears me. This is totally a broadcast example.
So take that with a grain of salt.
And I am also not throwing people under the bus for not being good listeners. That is not at all what I’m saying. I’m trying to say the opposite.
I’m saying people treat themselves like listeners when they are supposed to be dialogue partners. And not knowing what is going on is often the result of that.
As a podcaster, I’m trying to be heard by a bunch of people. But when we get to know each other: on Twitter or in real life: we can communicate more effectively with each other.
At the micro-level, communication is never just broadcasting. It is the land of dialogue and back-and-forth. This is essential!
Think of the impact on your family or on the church: all members are already in! I’m not selling you on being a part of this or Jesus! Communication with insiders isn’t marketing. So we should more naturally assume a posture of dialogue and peer-to-peer communication.
Because communication doesn’t just require two people. It requires us all to utilize both speaking and listening skills. And we have a habit of pretending we don’t need to use them both.
Episode 38 of the Make Saints podcast: “The Biggest Challenge to Communication”
the episode script
The last few years have provided some real obstacles for our communities, neighborhoods, and families.
And one obstacle that I have heard a lot, perhaps more often than any other, has been communication.
The simple fact that in March 2020, we suddenly couldn’t be in the same room with each other felt devastating to us. Humans are social creatures. And we couldn’t sit at a table and share conversation over coffee. No proverbial water coolers to talk at.
And we all knew email wasn’t going to hack it.
As much as we adapted and tried new ways of connecting with one another, for many, it didn’t feel like enough. And in that way, it is easy to blame the pandemic itself, or the lack of face-to-face opportunities.
“It’s just not as good” we often say.
And yet, even as many of us got more and more face-to-face time, I would still hear about communication. Here we are! We fixed the problem, didn’t we? We’re meeting in the same room. We’re gathering face-to-face. So why didn’t the problem go away?
The problem isn’t a lack of communication. Or bad communication. It’s that we don’t understand communication.
Two Ways
There are two ways we communicate. Synchronous and asynchronous.
Synchronous means “existing or occurring at the same time”. So synchronous communication is the sort that happens all at once.
Being in the same room with another person, which many of us value for the nonverbal communication cues we get, is the epitome of synchronous communication. Because we’re all there together, experiencing the thing together.
Another example of this is a phone call, facetime, or zoom meeting. We are on the call at the same time.
Asynchronous is the opposite: not at the same time. Examples of this include letters, email, and text messages. Essentially, anything written or recorded means you have done it and someone else will receive it later than that.
The beauty of Asynchronous communication is that we can take our time to craft a message. While Synchronous benefits from spontaneity and timing, Asynchronous offers more specificity and planning.
Asynchronous communication also affords us brevity. If I take 30 minutes to craft a note or record a short video that will take someone else 5 minutes to read or watch, I’ve saved them twenty minutes of pleasantries and about 15 minutes of trying to explain the concept.
The difference between these two is paramount.
And there is genuine benefit to both. One is no better than the other. It’s just that one can be more valuable for certain situations than others.
For instance, we all prefer face-to-face, synchronous communication for bad news. We all publically mock the idea of breaking up via text. But there are times when you really do hope nobody picks up the phone so you can leave a 90 second message. I don’t need to talk to you, I just need to pass this info along! Similarly, I don’t want to interrupt you, but let you know that I need a Synchronous conversation at some point.
Voice mail is an example of Asynchronous communication using a medium that was designed to be Synchronous. See how this can mix us up?
So this is where it gets more complicated. Because the difference between Synchronous and Asynchronous is time.
One is at the same time and the other is not.
Which means the time when Synchronous communication happens is fixed and Asynchronous communication is fluid. It is simply not now. Asynchronous time is undefined.
Voicemail is Asynchronous because I can’t determine when you will listen to it. Same with instant messaging and texting. We can have a conversation, but it is never truly synchronous because it is never happening at once. It is only ever an exchange. And one that can occur over the course of a minute or a lifetime.
The challenge for Asynchronous communication is that its timing is completely unpredictable.
I can send you a text and expect you to see it, but that doesn’t mean you will. And it is my expectation that is faulty. I am not justified in getting mad at you for not responding to a text right away.
If the person sitting next to you doesn’t bother to listen, you are rightly angry. This violates the nature of Synchronous communication. But we can’t expect other people to respond to email and texts like they are in the room with us.
Asynchronous communication also offers us the faulty assumption that we’ve completed our work of communication by sending the message. I put “talk to Steve” on my to-do list, type up an email, hit send, and cross it off my list. Done!
Except that I have no assurance that Steve actually got the message. Or understands it.
But remember,
Synchronous is not better.
It is entirely different. It is expensive. People have to be in the same room, schedule time and other resources. They must be willing to small talk and connect and use our “soft skills”.
It requires a different kind of planning and has the challenge of happening live, so there is no edit button. You don’t get to take back what was said. Or a poor reaction. And often, you don’t get to plan every second of the moment. Because we’re dependent on others for what they offer.
But most importantly, it is genuinely different.
“That meeting should have been an email.”
I’m sure you’re familiar with the phrase: that should have been an email. The meeting was boring, one-sided, and really kind of useless. The kind of thing that took us 25 minutes to get to, only to have someone drone on for 30-45 minutes, and you walked out with notes that simply read:
“Get the mailing done by Friday.”
We also know the reverse. Any email exchange that requires a reply to the sender’s reply should have been a phone call.
I hate hate hate setting up appointments by email.
For one, I maybe check it once a day. So, if you’re trying to plan some junk out, it better be at least a week away if you’re using email. Because you’re going to send an email about availability and then I’ll get you some times and best case scenario, you’ll say OK.
But more often than not, we’re going to send no fewer than 6 emails to settle on something we could’ve solved with a five minute phone call.
You are wasting my time if you expect me to check my email a second time today. It is Asynchronous communication. If you want an answer, make time to get the answer.
This is the biggest challenge to communication right now:
We aren’t thoughtfully familiar with the difference between Synchronous and Asynchronous communication.
Communication tools like Slack and texting give us the feeling that we can have instant results from an Asynchronous tool. That we can do our part and then the other will do theirs.
Or we are demanding Synchronous for everything, making everything into a face-to-face meeting, even when Asynchronous tools are far more effective. And far less disruptive.
So the simplest way to improve our communication with one another right now is to get better at two things:
Identifying the difference between Synchronous and Asynchronous communication, remembering that
Synchronous are face-to-face meetings and phone calls and
Asynchronous is everything else: email, text, slack, social media and
Deploying the strategy that is more useful to the situation.
Doing those two things could dramatically improve your communication and the communication within any organization.
If you want to dive into the weeds on this idea, read Cal Newport’s A World Without Email.
But of course, this isn’t the only challenge to communication. And I’ll share the second biggest challenge to communication next week.
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