What's one of the first 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.
On the Rebound: Watch Out for the Boomerang Effect
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. In social psychology, the boomerang effect describes what happens when your words or actions have the opposite effect to what you intended.
Phub it Out! Don’t Let Your Phone Ruin Your Relationships
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.
Listen Up! Take Note of Body Language and Tone as Well as the Words
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.
How Acronyms Can Hide Meaning and Really Get Your GOAT
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.
How to Make Friends Without Using a Spreadsheet
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?
High and Low Context: How to Find Out What People Really Mean
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.
How to Deal with Success Stories
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?
‘Making’ Memories
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.
How to talk about your personal boundaries
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?
Try a little tenderness to put so-called social ‘vampires’ into perspective
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.
How The Words You Use Can Harm Your Wellbeing
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?