A Messy Challenge

Communication can be a real mess. A complicated one, too. If you do not believe me, then look at the transactional model of communication, as first put forward in 1970 by communication scholar Dean Barnlund.. Barnlund suggested that communication is not a ping-pong match where first one person - the sender of the message - speaks and then the other person in the equation - the receiver of the message - responds.  In their interaction, the two, Barnlund suggested, actually are not even close to being as orderly as one might think. This is because the sender and receiver are communicating all the time during the course of their interacting even though only one at any given time may be speaking.


Much of their transaction revolves ever-evolving assessing and perceiving of the other each is doing. According to Barnlund,  this entails six what I call "trains of thought" that the two who are interacting are thinking about themselves and each other.  These include: who each thinks they are; who each thinks the other person is; who each thinks the other person thinks they are; who the other person thinks they themselves are; who the other thinks the person with whom they are interacting is; and who the other person thinks you think you are. (I applaud any one who reads that last passage and who does not up cross-eyed for a few seconds.)


Without question, this paints of portrait of two people engaged in conversation, who on the surface may be doing a lot of smiling, laughing, nodding, etc., but on the inside are doing even more analyzing and sizing-up of the other. It is akin to swimming in the ocean and not seeing all the complexity that is going on beneath the surface. No doubt, we are complex beings whose internal systems rarely, if ever, shut down. For the communicator, this requires constant vigilance in terms of being tuned into the one with whom they are talking. Such is the challenge all of us face in our daily acts of communication.