(
Originally published, May 16, 2013)
My nephew knows only three words: “
No,” “
OK,” and “
That,” and yet I find communication with him easier and less stressful than with most adults.
Why is that?
Three words come to mind.
Honesty. Simplicity. Immediacy.
I could say more about each of those things but it feels wrong. The words themselves say everything they need when I stop and listen. To add more would make things muddier not clearer.
Maybe my question is the problem.
Maybe the question isn’t “why is it so easy to communicate with my nephew?” Maybe the question is: “Why do I find communicating with others so hard?”
Or even better: “Under what circumstances do I communicate well?”
Now we’re getting somewhere.
* * *
A number of years ago, I volunteered at a phone-in crisis center covering everything from suicide to domestic violence to addictions to relationship problems. Over time, I noticed something remarkable.
Almost everything I said--regardless of the actual words or type of sentence I used--fell into one of a very small set of categories.
I was either a) soliciting information or b) affirming what I had heard c) providing education d) building hope or e) focusing the caller. Even out of those five categories, eighty to ninety percent of my time was spent in the first two. Furthermore, anything I said that DIDN’T fall into one of those categories usually ended up derailing or knotting up the call unnecessarily.
The categories themselves don’t matter. What’s important is I knew the intention behind everything I said.
Most of life isn’t like that. There are a lot of reasons we might say something. To share information. To ask for help. To make ourselves or others feel more comfortable. To prove ourselves right or to convince ourselves our choices are justified. Or sometimes just to pass the time with another person.
There’s nothing wrong with any of these intentions. But I have noticed sometimes we speak before we know what our own intentions are.
We state facts when we’re really asking for help. We ask for information when we want reassurance. We defend ourselves before we even consciously realize we feel attacked. We say we want input from others when the only advice we really want to hear is that it’s okay to do the thing we’ve already secretly decided we want to do.
Or sometimes we intend more than one thing at the same time. Sometimes we don’t intend anything--we’re just uncomfortable with silence. And sometimes we know exactly what our intentions are…but we believe we have to hide them because we don’t believe people will ever willingly give us what we need from them.
It’s hard sometimes to make our way through the thicket of our own intentions, let alone figure out someone else’s.
But on the Distress Line, the intention was always clear. To listen.
We weren’t there to solve anybody‘s problems. Our role wasn’t to offer advice. The wisdom behind the Distress Line was that people are experts on their own lives, and given a listening ear, they could sort things out themselves. We didn’t have to lead them out of the dark. All we needed to do was hold up a candle for them and let them find their own way.
I loved it. I worked hard at it. I tracked every call and kept notes for myself on every shift, and I came to a strange conclusion: The less I said, the better. Callers knew what they wanted and needed. The ripples on the surface of their lives settled just fine on their own; there was no need to stir things up again by sticking my oar in the water.
I became relentless about paring down my calls, trying not to utter a word more than necessary.
When I did speak, I discovered timing mattered more than the words themselves, staying in the flow of the caller’s own rhythm, minimizing my intrusion into their world while helping them see parts of that world from new angles. If I did my job right, I felt, they shouldn’t even know I was there.
Essentially, I was doing what my nephew does now--pointing at things and asking, “That? That?”
Some people say crisis line workers do nothing. In a sense, they’re right. I believe the better a crisis line listener gets, the less she does, but the better she gets at doing those things.
Maybe that’s the secret: Say less things better.
It‘s simple. It‘s elegant. Yet what made it so amazing is there were so many ways to do it well.
Other volunteers routinely amazed me with the things they said, with the questions they thought to ask. My journal was filled with ideas I overheard from others, things I would never have come up with on my own. As we grew in experience, each of us developed our own style, a way of relating to callers that was uniquely our own.
A crisis call is all about the caller, not the listener. Yet somehow, each of us found our own style. It wasn‘t about us, yet we still made it our own, turning something most people see as passive and static into something dynamic and beautiful, our own invisible form of personal expression.
We learned countless ways to do nothing.
To me, that’s beautiful.
* * *
Comedy isn’t like the Distress Line. In comedy, specific words matter.
Unfortunately, as those of us who do it regularly have learned, we don’t know what those words are until we say them out loud in a room full of people.
You can write and rewrite jokes to your hearts content. You can edit them and pare them down, or spice them up with details and new ideas. You can spend hours, days, weeks, months, years trying to craft the perfect joke.
But until it comes out of your mouth in front of a crowd, you have no idea what you have.
Most of the time, it isn’t so bad. I’ve written a few jokes that I’ve been uncomfortable performing. I’ll look at the joke and think: This isn’t the joke I wanted to write
.
Yet it’s the joke I have. So the question becomes: Am I willing to say these words in public and see what happens?
Sometimes I am and sometimes I’m not. Often, that’s not the hard part.
The hard part is what happens on stage between the jokes. Something happens. Instead of bursting into laughter, the audience just stares. A heckler pipes up. A bachelorette party gets loud enough to disrupt the show. The microphone fails or the lights go out. A woman leaps on stage, runs over, and hugs me. These things have all happened.
No matter how tightly planned the set or how rehearsed you are, things arise and the audience waits to see how you react.
One of the most honest places in the world is the stage at a stand-up comedy show. You aren’t always truthful, but it’s impossible to lie. A performer’s level of confidence, commitment, and preparedness always shines through. Your personality is never more open and on display. Both literally and psychologically, there is no place to hide.
In such cases, there is only one thing you can really do: open your mouth and trust whatever comes out.
There isn’t time to think of the right thing to say. There isn’t time to even think of the funniest thing to say.
You just have to let go and see what happens.
Often what happens isn’t funny. Sometimes things come out that don’t make sense, make the situation worse, or turn a crowd off.
But the more you do it, the better at it you get. In fact, the ONLY way to get good at it is to do it and to keep doing it, even in the face of missteps. You learn to let the words come out. You aren’t trying to shape them. You aren’t trying to be funny or not funny. You just say what you say, notice the reaction, and learn from it. Eventually you get to the point where even if you say the wrong thing, you can open your mouth again and whatever comes out next will lead you back on track.
I don’t know how this improvement happens. I’ve seen it a hundred times in myself and other comics, and I still can’t explain it. But it DOES happen.
And the first and only step is to get eliminate the filter between your brain and mouth.
Easy, right?
No?
No. Not for me either.
* * *
Where did that filter come from?
I‘ll tell you where it came from in my case. It came from me being sick and tired of hurting people with the things I say.
I’ve never done it on purpose. I just have an unfortunate tendency to say the worst thing in the worst words at the worst possible time.
I’ve been hauled into offices by supervisors for things I don’t even remember saying. I’ve started fights between boyfriends and girlfriends with an offhand comment. There are half a dozen moments in my life I cringe just thinking about. Yes, people are responsible for their own feelings and their own reactions, but…
Dan, why did you have to be such an asshole?
After a number of such incidents over the years, I learned to stop trusting myself. I learned to not speak. I did more than put in a filter. I built up a wall.
I spent a lot of time in silence. Unless I knew the exact right thing to say, I said nothing.
Then I started stand-up comedy and had to learn to take that wall down all over again.
The scariest thing about removing the filter was worrying if I could ever get it up again. Could I be one person on stage and then go back to my job, family, or friends, and not end up staying stupid or hurtful things again?
As it turned out, I couldn’t.
Instead, I learned something better.
I learned about paying attention.
It wasn’t about going back to censoring myself. It wasn’t about blocking my speech. It was about being aware of the specific situation I was in and adapting my honest response accordingly. It was about noticing where I was and taking in the facial expressions of the folks around me and monitoring my own tone, volume, and words.
The Distress Line taught me that when speaking, simplicity and purposefulness matters. Comedy taught me that when speaking, honesty and immediacy matters. The lesson I learned bringing this back into my everyday life was that context matters.
And that’s where it finally dawned on me:
Right speech doesn’t come from knowing how to talk. Right speech comes from learning how to listen.
I still don’t know how to talk to people. There are times I don’t trust myself or believe that others will respond positively to what I say and that lack of trust distorts the way I express myself. Not big distortions. Little ones. But little things can become big things sooner than you‘d expect.I’ve come to accept that, and realize that I can talk to people anyways.
I still don’t know the right things to say. What I’m discovering instead is that there is no right thing to say. There are millions of things, and sometimes the right thing is what happens to be there when you trust yourself, let go, and make wanting the best for people your focus.
I still spend a lot of time in silence. But instead of being quiet because I don’t know what needs to be said, I’m silent because I’m starting to understand that often nothing needs to be said.
It’s a work in progress. My rule of thumb these days is to look for discomfort and move towards it. If the quiet is making me uncomfortable, I stay silent. If I feel anxious at the idea of speaking up, then I know it’s probably time for me to say something.
Except with my nephew. Somehow around him, communication seems to happen just fine.
