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What if I cannot name my communication problem yet

By Natraj Thapa

Not being able to name it is not a disqualification. It is the most ordinary starting point there is.

You know something is wrong. You have known for a while. But every time you try to say what it is you end up with something vague and slightly embarrassing, like I am just not good at this, or I come across badly, and none of it is specific enough to do anything with. You have read the list of symptoms and half of them sound a bit like you and none of them sound exactly like you.

Not being able to name it is not a disqualification, and it does not mean your problem is unusually deep or unusually vague. It means you have been looking at the result rather than the cause, and that is curable.

Here is why naming it is so hard from the inside. What you experience is the outcome, the meeting that went badly, the sentence that came out wrong, the feeling afterwards. What actually broke happened earlier and lower down, in one of five places, and by the time you feel it the evidence has already been swept up into a general sense of having failed. You cannot diagnose from the feeling, because the feeling is identical no matter which of the five dimensions gave way. That is the whole reason this is a diagnostic practice rather than a course.

The five are simple enough to hold in your head. Intent is what you wanted the moment to do. Message is what you said and what you left out. Delivery is how the words left you. Presence is what you were saying before you spoke. Connection is whether any of it reached the person in front of you. Every communication problem is one of those, and most people who feel generally bad at communicating are actually excellent at four of them.

That last part is worth sitting with, because it changes what you should expect. The usual assumption is that being bad at communicating is a broad condition requiring broad improvement, so people sign up for something general and work on all of it at once, evenly, for months. What almost always turns out to be true is that four dimensions are fine and one is failing, and the four you are strong in have been quietly compensating so well that the failure never surfaced clearly enough to name.

One more thing, because it stops people from picking up the phone. There is a widespread assumption that you ought to arrive with the problem already articulated, as though naming it were the entry requirement rather than the service itself. It is not. Turning up unable to explain what is wrong is the ordinary case rather than the awkward one, and a vague account of three bad meetings is far more diagnostic than a confident self assessment, because the self assessment is usually a description of whichever symptom you happened to notice.

So the drill, if you want one before we speak, is to stop describing the feeling and start collecting the moments. For one week write down every exchange that went badly, one line each, no analysis, just what happened and where. A message misread. A meeting where you went quiet. A conversation that died. At the end of the week read the list in one sitting and look for the repeated thing. Most people find it, and are surprised it was so consistent, and slightly annoyed that it was visible all along.

Then the useful thing is not to keep guessing. That is what The First Call is for, and this article is the reason it exists. Fifteen minutes, free, and you do not need to arrive with a diagnosis or a description or anything prepared at all. You talk about what has been going wrong, in whatever vague words you have, and I listen for which of the five is giving way. You talk and I listen, and by the end we both know whether this is work worth doing. Not fixed, named, which is the thing you have been unable to do on your own and the thing everything else depends on.

One door: saswatlife.com. Be heard. Be remembered.

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