Now we're going to move on to look at the agents of miscommunication. These are stumbling blocks in the way, and they do not help. Again, by becoming aware of them, you can do something about them. Agents is another acronym. I have a terrible memory. So I love acronyms.

And I hope they're useful for you. We'll go into each of these in turn in a little bit of detail so you can understand how they play out. So let's start with assumptions. The agents assumptions are quite dangerous things when they're under the surface when they're implicit. And we don't realize we're making assumptions. You know, when I turn on a switch on a wall, I assume electricity is going to work in some way, shape or form.

I don't understand. I'm not a physicist. I don't think even physicists necessarily understand everything about electricity but it will work and the light will come on. I have that And one that's pretty harmless as assumptions go and it's normally correct. However, we may make assumptions about human behavior, what goes on inside of other people's heads is particularly an assumption we tend to make. And they can be pretty dangerous.

And the most obvious one I've already mentioned to you Is everybody listens to like I do. That's not true. And it's a commonly held assumption. Let me give you an example of how this plays out. In a scenario. Let's say somebody is walking into a hotel, and the bell person comes up and says, Let me help you with that bag.

Now, I'll give you two different people walking into the hotel. The first person has had a tough life and has formed the assumption because of being criticized maybe by one of those judgmental people, parent or somebody like that. People think I'm weak and useless. So the inference Let me help you is I'm being patronized and the response is going to be a resentful response. No, thank you. I'm perfectly okay.

To carry my own bag, the other person hasn't had that background, their experience has been that people are nice and kind. So the inference they're going to get from that offer is I'm being cared for the emotion will be gratitude and with love. That's very kind. Thank you very much. Now this happens, you know, the same input to people with different assumptions about what's going on behind that offer. And two completely different responses to the same communication.

That happens a great deal. And it's really important to become aware of the assumptions that are actually driving the way you communicate with other people where you receive them, and the way you send back to them. The G of agents is generalizations. I love this quote from Agatha Christie, which of course is a generalization. It's an ironic self knowing quote, but generalizing extrapolating from quite often one data point, something goes wrong Be a terrible day today, we'll come on to words, which don't help the always the maximizing words always negative never, and so forth. generalizing can be very destructive in communication, and it's to be challenged.

Sometimes it may be useful. Other times it can be extraordinarily confrontational and destructive. So, let's ask what assumptions and generalizations are affecting your speaking. Now, that's not something that you can sit down and write immediately you'll need to think about it and it's probably best thought of as a door opening into an inquiry, assumptions and generalizations are things that very often live underneath our conscious awareness. And it's just a good question to be asking yourself all the time, what are the assumptions I'm making? And am I generalizing about anything?

Extrapolating from a single data point? Let's move on to consider the future. of agents. That's emotions. I think there's a strong case, to suggest that emotion and listening upset and listening at least are very inversely related. If you want to reduce somebody's upset, somebody is talking to you, the best way to do that is to listen to them.

And conversely, if you're upset yourself, it becomes harder to listen to somebody else. So that is, I think, definitely true. On the other hand, there's a positive correlation between listening and good emotion. And the more you listen to somebody, the happier, they will tend to feel because they'll feel heard and understood. And those are very important in relationship. When you're upset, it tends to be because you've got some sort of a complaint.

And this is where it's very important to remember that my definition of listening is making meaning from sound. So if somebody says something that you find upsetting, you could try to disentangle these two things. There's what happened and there's what I made it me Two different things. The what happened is a fact that what I made it mean is a story. And it's really useful to uncollapse those two things and to remember that you have the ability to make up any story you like about things. So there's what happens.

And then there's the question is what I made it mean useful is that the best thing I could make it mean? Could I make it mean something else that's more useful in my life, perhaps less upsetting, less damaging, less debilitating or stopping in what I want to achieve. So that's a very good practice to uncollapse those two things and to remain always on top of the fact that you're making stuff mean stuff all the time and you're listening. And now the end of agents, which is noise, if you have to work or communicate in a noisy environment, I recommend you take an MBA. The M stands for move. And that is to say, as I've said before, just move on.

To a different place, you can always do that or almost always do that. And it's amazing how rarely people do do that if you can't move for whatever reason, and you're fixed in a certain place, this is to your desk and you have to sit there, then your next strategy would be to block the sound, that's going to be headphones. And this is the beneficial use of headphones, where we can put headphones on with useful sound that's less distracting than other people's conversation, or to ringing phones or whatever is around you, and is getting in the way of what you're trying to do. Obviously block doesn't work very well for communication. Putting on headphones isn't the best way to communicate with somebody else. It is pretty useful if you're trying to talk to yourself in your head.

Listen to the little voice in your head that you need to listen to when you're writing or doing mathematics or whatever. And if you can't move and you can't block. The only strategy left is to accept the sound which is to say let go of the upset the not the anger of it. standards, how am I supposed to work in this place? You just let go of that say, Okay, I decided to be here, this is where I am, I'm going to do my best and then just get on with it in some sort of serene acceptance of what's going on around you. It often is the upset itself, which gets in the way of your working productivity.

Now, sounds to us if you're going to block on headphones. Let me give you three suggestions. If you can guess what these letters stand for. Here's our good old friend nature sound wind watering birds in moderation, very good sounds. They've been around on this planet forever, much longer than we have anyway. And it's very easy for most people to work to those and they can get you away from that distracting sound around you.

If you put these through headphones, you can work very effectively and you won't be so distracted. Another alternative I can recommend is an app that we developed from the sound agency some years ago. It's available on the app store's and it's free. It's called study. And it's a 45 minute piece of sound. That's very good for working too.

It was designed really, with children who have to work at home in noisy kitchens or whatever in mind. But it works Absolutely. anywhere that you have to work surrounded by noise, pop the headphones on, you study, and it will also remind you in 45 minutes is up. So it's healthy to take a break at that point. Okay, on to the T of agents, and that is time listening and communicating take time. And it is really difficult if we don't make time for it to have effective communication.

If we're trying to do two or three things at the same time. It doesn't work. I really agree with this quote from Scott Peck. I think it's absolutely true. And I also think, tragically, there are probably billions of people on this planet. I mean, literally billions who've never had experience of being really listened to.

Because we're so time poor now. It's such a rare thing to put everything down and give 100% of our attention to another human being. It's a wonderful gift. It's an enormously generous thing to do. And it's something we get out of the habit of doing. So we kind of part listen all the time.

Let me give you a great exercise to do here. really listen to somebody today, tonight, after this course, whoever you come into contact with, put everything down and really listen to them. We'll we'll look at some exercises, which will improve your ability to do this very effectively in the next section. However, right now, I think it's enough just to ask you to put everything aside and really listen and you'll be amazed. I think by the response you get the best of agents is semantics. This is a funny little cartoon that always makes me laugh.

Semantics are about meaning. So here's what it really is all about. You have a context for what's being said, obviously, that's your experience or the experience of the other person, everything you've done. Everything you've remembered, can color, a particular word. And it could make it a word that you hate a word you love, a word that's got particular meanings to you your filters. In other words, denotation is at the center of semantics.

Denotation is the essential central meaning of the word. So think of the word a word like dog. So denotation of dog is a four legged mammal with a tail and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, we will know what dog kind of looks like and look like lots of different things that we know what a dog is. However, connotation is then the implications and emotional associations have that there was an advertising campaign some years ago in the UK by a phone manufacturer Whether strapline was be more dog, we know what they mean by that, they mean more happy and joyful and exuberant and tail wacky, and all that kind of stuff. So that's the connotation of the word dog that they were using. And then as I've said, there's the context for you, for me, for anybody listening to this, which may have different connotations.

So denotation connotation and context are very important to understand all the time. People don't listen the way you do. And each conversation may have a different context. And the word may have a different connotation, in that context with those people. So that's the agents of miscommunication. I hope that's been useful to you.