I believe that communication is to make people feel better.
Why do I say this? We were taught communication is to share information. That might have been true before technology, but now we can get information shared more efficiently without human communication. We can view the data directly and come to our own conclusions. This wasn’t possible in the past.
Now does this mean that we don’t need people to communicate with us? No just the opposite. We can know facts, but we need context and that is communicated when we seek to make people feel better. When we listen to others to make them feel understood and valued, only then do we understand how we can add value.
Too often in life I see smart people try to communicate facts, without having the foundation of trust from the listener. People don’t want to hear facts, they want to hear that they were right. That their point of view has value and is true. Which is true. Everyone’s point of view is true for them, but perhaps not helpful for them.
I’ll give you an example. Many people suffer from anxiety at work. They feel that they could lose their job any minute. That is true. What is also true is that most companies don’t have the bandwidth to interview and recover from most of their employees leaving. The fear of losing your job, is just as real as the fear of managers have of you leaving your job and them being unable to do the required work. Fear works for everyone.
So the way we move forward as a society is to listen to everyone and to respect their POV. We don’t have to agree with it, we don’t have to like it, but we do have to understand it. We have to be able to see that our positions have weaknesses, and the positions we don’t like have strengths. That is realistic and adult. Life doesn’t have to be adversarial. We can respect another persons differences and that is part of what makes life interesting and fun.
We have gone too far to one side of the spectrum of human behavior. Balance is the key to happiness. We find balance when we seek to understand first, and then be undersood.