Authentic Communication: Real, Good and Beautiful

Is there anything more satisfying than a long conversation with an intimate friend? Right, I thought you might object, but it ranks right up there anyways. Okay, so why is that? Most likely it is because you and your friend spend some time flattering one another, nudging one another kiddingly out of comfort zones, setting up straw people and knocking them down (e.g. we are like the great friends in history, except they could never have understood one another quite the way we do), and so on like that.

In 1986, my best friend since the sixth grade (best man in one another’s weddings) visited my wife, daughter and me, in our Garfield, New Jersey row-house apartment (I was working an I/O psychology internship for IBM in Franklin Lakes at the time) and the first night he was there, we laid awake talking until the sun was almost ready to rise. Our sentences were similar, the words we knew matched well, our memories were largely shared, both our dreams for the world had been co-produced by the other. And all these years later, when we see one another, our conversations resume right about where they left off, with the same intensity, as if we had not been apart. In fact, just after I married, when I was leaving for graduate school in Indiana, in parting we assured one another that our long conversation would never end; and it pretty much has not. I told him once that what made him so easy for me to talk to, was that I did not have to translate anything I thought, out of my head language into words, unlike the way it is when I talk to most other people.

And I know you have people like that in your life and I have had several others, but we all know, most of the communication we do is much harder than what I just described. We have to talk to strangers, people with power over us or people over whom we have power, people whose status is higher or lower than ours, people whose intelligence is higher or lower than ours, people whose experiences are different from ours, people older or younger, and some who do not even speak our language. The communication snag comes in the way they see the world versus the way we do.

Ken Wilbur, in his book, The Marriage of Sense and Soul (1998), argues persuasively that one of the reasons why communication among people is so difficult in the time of our lives, is the fragmentation of the good, the true and the beautiful. The three are naturally together, but we humans have adopted ways of talking about the world such that they are assumed to be independent one of the other. Scientists (all about the objective truth) have trouble talking to saints (all about the good) who have trouble talking to artists (all about the beautiful).

What are the implications of this fragmentation of the good, the true and the beautiful. Science says believe what you want but what is real is what objective science says is real (William Isaacs, 1999, Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together). Religion and philosophy tell us what is good and the arts, is where the beautiful is arbitrated. But if you pay close attention to pleasing conversations you have had, you will likely notice they invariably take on the rhythm of music, it will feel like you have found or made an honest search for truth and the good life will seem close at hand for the time being.

But nothing may be more of a cornerstone of the best conversations than the number of things you hear come out of your mouth you never have said, or even thought before. In some ways, this quality of conversation defines intimacy.

On the other hand, during the rest of our lives, indeed the majority of the time, when we talk to others, we are not actually looking for the real, the good or the beautiful, because we are not really ourselves. In the vast majority of our interactions with others we are playing a role and they are playing a role, which means despite our best efforts, the words exchanged might as well have been written by a playwright, and not a good playwright either but one prone to the use of stock phrases, hackneyed insights and clichés. Nothing new or surprising hardly ever comes out of our mouth when we are talking to our boss.

Not only are we (both people talking) speaking the lines of the role we are playing, we are representing a constituency. The subordinate plays the subordinate role with subordinates everywhere in mind, both as sympathetic figures and as models of how to do it, and the same goes for the person playing the role of superior.

Consider the table waitress. How authentic are her conversations with the people she serves? With repeat customers, the role playing may break down, but even then, the role may just switch from that of a person delivering food to a stranger, to a friend delivering food to friend. The function itself helps almost guarantee that the communication will not be authentic.

It could be argued that our entire lives are a search, often in vain, for authenticity in relationships. By authentic, I mean, the two (or more) people interacting have dispensed with roles and representation (of others who play that role) and gotten to the point of an integration between what is real, good and true. I say authentic communication brings the real, good and true together, not because you agree with the other person on all three, but because you have found a way to express yourself and they have too, because you have agreed to suspend judgment and replace it with a mutual search for the real, the good and the beautiful.

Imagine if you as a leader were able to figure out how to communicate in this authentic fashion more often than not? Consider how far you would have separated yourself from the majority of other leaders?