A Lost Art; Words

Using your words effectively

“You're such a good communicator.” I've heard that a number of times. When people used to tell me I had great oratory skills, I thought they were just using fancy words to call me talkative, until I understood better what that meant.

I appreciate these compliments a lot, because I haven’t always thought about myself as someone who communicates well. I still don’t believe it sometimes, but I guess hearing people affirm it somehow made me walk in it more consciously.

I used to read news in primary school and almost every week in secondary school ( a professional yapper). Most of my teachers wondered how I waltzed into the Sciences because they saw me as a potential journalist. Maybe I should’ve listened to them and explored that, then I wouldn’t be complaining about medical school at every given opportunity.

Anyway, I’m saying all this to say that I was apparently a good public communicator. I began to see it like a job, so I got better and better at it. At communicating my thoughts about surface level stuff in very clear and understandable words publicly.

I wish I did the same privately... In my personal relationships. I was never one to speak up when I was hurt because it felt like my words were not fashioned for that. I would just hide somewhere and cry, and “let it go”. It never really worked because resentment always festered. I don’t really like to use all these labels and stuff but at my core, I used to be an avoider. Even when there wasn't really conflict, I just seemed to have such a problem saying exactly how I felt concerning deep emotional things. Whenever the conversation veered away from surface level stuff, it felt like my emotional boundaries were being invaded and I would lose my words.

I never thought this was a problem until people I love started to point it out. I remember one time when my mom said to me, “How would I know how you feel if you don’t say anything?” Some of my friends said the same thing in different ways, and then I started to notice a pattern. I was always so hurt and feeling so alone, because I was absorbing everyone else’s feelings and pushing mine down because when I was asked how I felt, I would always pick the lazy answer—I don’t know. I thought it was true at the time, but I just didn’t want to do the work required to convert those feelings to words.

After noticing this pattern, I tried to change and the first step was eliminating ‘I don’t know’ from my feelings vocabulary. I intentionally tried to stop saying it. If I didn’t want to tell someone how I felt, I would use ‘I can’t say’ instead because ‘I don’t know’ had proven to be a lie.

If you value your relationships, you would want to communicate better. How I gauge relationships that I don't really take seriously is my reluctance to do the work to just talk things out.

You can’t tell person A that you don’t know how you feel, and go ahead to tell person B exactly how you feel, and that’s what I used to do a lot in the guise of venting to my safe spaces. There'll be a tendency for person B to gain my enemy, and that's not really fair.

Granted, not everyone deserves to hear how you feel, because some people genuinely don’t care but honesty is very important in communication, which is also key. ‘I don’t want to tell you’, ‘I can’t say’ or even ‘I can’t put it to words right now’ would always suffice.

This has helped me communicate better with myself and the people around me. I’m an adult, and I can no longer use silent treatment or other ineffective methods to communicate when I can just use words. Nobody is going to beat me (in Jesus name).

I’ve seen terrible communication patterns ruin a lot of relationships and as much as it's in my power, I don’t want that for myself anymore.

I love this quote from Francine Rivers’ The Scarlet Thread. Learn to have intelligent adult conversations guys. I posted this on Whatsapp a while ago, and I said the thing about conversations is that both parties need to be intelligent to have it. True! There are a lot of external factors that make or mar communication and you can’t control those.

The aim of this piece is to encourage you to focus on the internal factors you can control. The ones that have to do with you. Being an attentive listener, listening to understand and not just to respond, being respectful and using your words. You can control these ones, so yeah.

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Thank you for reading. Would love to read your thoughts on this too.

Enjoy your day. 🫶🏽