Personal Development Author

What’s one of the things we ask about a person we meet for the first time? More often than not, we want to know what their job is. It’s an automatic question and it sounds harmless. However, the easy use of the question can be misleading. It isn’t simply a question about how a person occupies their working hours.

The answer prompts us to consider, consciously or otherwise, details about the person’s level of income, education, social status, interests, future prospects. All this from a simple ‘I’m a…’ When it comes down to it, we haven’t come that far from the era of Jane Austen. Only the details differ, and sometimes even they are the same

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You know what a boomerang is. It’s a curved piece of wood which, when thrown, returns to the thrower. It is strongly associated with Australia. Used in a variety of contexts, these days mainly recreational, the boomerang has found a place in our collective consciousness and its handiness as a metaphor can be seen in a range of expressions in everyday use.

Our ready use of the word and our general understanding that the ‘boomerang effect’ describes something that rebounds and can flatten and mask the impact of the phrase. The appealing artefact, a smooth and pleasingly tactile homing device, can’t have too much of a negative impact, right?

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The digital age, or just life, as Young Persons of tender years call it, has generated a new vocabulary of expressions, phrases, acronyms, invented and portmanteau words. Much of our spoken and written communication would be unintelligible to previous generations (as indeed it can be to ourselves).

Language has bent and adapted to meet new needs in ways which at best are clever, lively, entertaining, and at worst are ugly,clumsy and misleading. Particularly problematic are expressions which mask the reality of what they are describing by seeming to legitimise and endorse behaviour, which, well let’s say, isn’t great.

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Good listening is all about the other person. It requires us to give full attention to what they are saying, not only to the actual words but also to their body language and tone of voice. We need to be sensitive to the personal and physical context of the conversation; we need to be alert to shifts and nuances as the talk develops.

Whether you’re listening to a friend or family member, a student, a client, a social acquaintance, your boss, a colleague, they need to feel they have been given the appropriate degree of attention and a satisfying level of response.

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My, how we love our acronyms, or — to be more precise — how we love our acronyms and initialisms. An acronym is an abbreviation formed from a series of initial letters which can be pronounced as a word, like NASA, for example. An initialism is when the initials don’t make a pronounceable word, as in DNA.

No need to be picky, though. Acronym will do just fine as we explore some of the delights and pitfalls of using this oh-so-handy communicative tool.

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Apparently, there are six levels of friendship which describe the closeness of our relationships. We have pre-acquaintances, a term which does bring to mind those motivational posters which tell you that a stranger is just a friend you haven’t met yet, and we have higher-level acquaintances, and then there are pre-friends, and… that’s enough. You get the idea.

If you like this system you could adopt it wholesale, or even add your own calibrations. Many happy hours await you, drawing a pyramid diagram, perhaps, with colour coding, or how about a spreadsheet? What better way to acknowledge and celebrate the people in our lives than to rank them in order according to their importance?

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Who would have thought that a concept which is generally applied to enable successful international business situations would be equally helpful to communicating successfully with our friends and families? We’re talking about an idea developed by anthropologist Edward T Hall in 1976 to describe cultural differences in communication styles.

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We love success stories, particularly when success is hard won. Tales of triumph over adversity warm our hearts. Stories which confirm or strengthen our belief in the capacity of the human spirit to overcome setbacks can bring comfort and hope. This is particularly so when the adverse circumstances are undeniably severe. In less intense contexts, we are pleased to celebrate others’ achievements and successes in their personal and professional lives. Everyone loves a winner, right?

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My, don’t we love alliterative phrases. The pleasing power of alliteration has been harnessed, for good or for ill, by poets, dramatists, novelists, politicians, marketing and advertising industries and the rest since the year dot.

When it comes to the words we use to frame and communicate our own personal and internal world, the catchy resonance of an expression which has entered into general usage can lead to an automatic assumption that it has some kind of truth and authority. But it can be a bad idea to let a cute alliterative phrase become a guiding principle just because it trips off the tongue.

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Boundaries — well now, hasn’t that become a fashionable word? Who would have thought that a word that references separation and lines of demarcation would so handily describe our efforts to define and communicate to others the whole range of our needs and wishes?

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We’ve all experienced them at some point, probably — people whose company leaves us feeling emotionally depleted and drained of energy. You might be familiar with the term ‘drains and radiators’, which contrasts the effect this behaviour has on us with the lovely warmth we experience from the company of those whose presence is uplifting and delightful. We can use the expression with a light touch. Its meaning is clear, and the plumbing reference acts as a buffer against hurtfulness.

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Most of us are probably not aware that we use poetic language as a matter of course. Similes, metaphors, images, all that stuff is what playwrights and literary types come up with to convey and illuminate meaning and emotion. Nothing to do with the way ordinary people talk, right?

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