Date: Wed, 9 Dec 1998 18:00:16 +0100

To: ken-wilber-l@listserv.azstarnet.com

From: Thomas Jordan <Thomas.Jordan@redcap.econ.gu.se

Subject: Communication

Hello all of you,

Nice to see how many have showed more of themselves the last week, and amazing that it takes such frictions to attain this level of group energy. I couldn't join in because I've been travelling, and have to spend a lot of time with about 1300 pages of examination tests from my students.

On the train I reread a very good book on communication, by Friedemann Schulz von Thun, a sympathetic German. He uses a very pedagogical model for discussing communication. He says that messages, even if only a sentence, usually have four aspects simultaneously:

1. Factual content (I give you some information)

2. Relationship (The way I give you information, and the words I choose implies what opinion I have of you, and what kind of relationship I think you and I have [or ought to have] to each other)

3. Self-revelation (I reveal something about what is going on in me, e.g. my feelings, interpretations, values, etc.)

4. Exhortation (I want my message to have some kind of effect on you)

Our messages may be more or less coherent in terms of these four aspects. Some parts of our message are usually implicit/indirect, because we don't don't want to be too explicit, or because we are simply not aware that we are sending certain messages to the other. Not seldom the message is incongruent, we say one thing explicitly, but convey a very different tone implicitly.

The receiver of the message usually listens more with one of his/her four ears than with the others. E.g. I want to give you a factual information, but you listen with your relationship ear and interprets my message as a statement of me wanting to be a teacher, and wanting you to be my pupil. Or: I say something mainly to attain a certain effect in terms of our relationship, but you listen only to what I reveal about myself. Being aware of these four ears facilitates choosing what ear to pay most attention to. This can be helpful :-).

I find the model very powerful as an instrument of self-examination, both when sending and receiving.

I don't think the book has been translated to English.

Thomas