Communication, a Loaded Gun

“To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others”, Anthony Robbins, an advisor to leaders, once said. This statement proves evident in all our lives, but of course, being that I can only perceive the world from my own mind, I can only explain how this concept has shown itself in my own life. I believe that “nurture” plays a huge role in the way I have developed a sense of communication in writing, speaking, and reading. As age increases, I think the amount by which my level of communication changes becomes less and less. In other words, the changes we make to our guns and bullets total to smaller amounts than the changes we make at earlier ages. I’ll explain what I mean by “guns and bullets” later in my paper, but this means that the most critical time that my communication has been shaped was while I was young; nonetheless, a person can always change. The one thing we can’t forget though is that when we communicate with other people, it’s the combination of emotion, expression, language, posture, and any other way we can “read” each other that talks to people. Of course, most of the pieces to this huge spectrum of how we express thoughts and feelings to each other are lost during the tangible absence of who we speak or write to. Therefore, I find that when I talk to anyone on the internet or write to them, or even call them, I need to choose my voice inflection and words carefully because they have a bigger impact than people give them credit for. If this were all true though, that would mean that even by reading this, my readers are gaining an understanding of the kind of person I am or what message I’m trying to communicate based on experience that they have had when talking or reading other people in their past and present. This is why I love writing; I have more control over how my readers interpret me and my values due to my absence.

Writing starts the minute I picked up a pencil when I was maybe three or four years old. Of course, I didn’t really know how to make all the characters of the alphabet, but does that mean I couldn’t write yet? I have to imagine that someone, somewhere, would interpret whatever it is that I put down on paper. By this, I mean that with maturity and age, I began to be able to “write” better, or in other words, I could eventually get my thoughts into other peoples’ heads easier than when I was young. As a matter of fact, as I mature and grow in my writing, I gradually learned that I could disguise who I am by understanding and writing in a form that is patterned in a way different from the way I actually feel.

During elementary school, our teachers created a little program that all of the kids from my class were required to do called “Writer’s Workshop”. This was the time where we learned the basics to organization and expression of creativity in writing, including the standard of a five paragraph paper which had an introduction, body and conclusion. At such an early age, the way we learned to write was crucial because it would impact the way we write for the rest of our lives. This agrees, in a parallel way with the fact that people have an easier time learning a second language as a toddler or baby. We also practiced the pre-write, drafting, editing and finalizing steps to writing, but we would put up three sided folders when we worked creating some sort of cubicle. I feel that this may have suppressed the sharing of thoughts and bouncing of ideas with other students, but maybe it helped us focus on our work too. The real question lies not in purely how to organize a paper, but how we can find a balance between focusing on our own work at an early age, but at the same time allowing creativity and expression to flow freely amongst students.

Perhaps this is the problem many teachers present when teaching children how or what to write. These children and teenagers lose their sense of identity in their writing because it’s no longer their genuine voice that they’re using, voice being the concept of writing we learn in middle school of how a reader identifies with the text we write. I also noticed that the identity of our teachers reflect on the way we write, involving their gender. We read several articles for class discussing this occurrence, but a couple pieces of them stuck out to me. I found it interesting that males tend to speak out or write in class with confidence while girls tend to stay reserved in their thought when they feel as though the subject could be hostile in any way. After activities and discussions in class, I also realized that our teachers in high school taught us to write as if we knew that what we were writing about was fact. This proved to be a masculine form of writing because evidently, males tend to speak and write with less doubt or room to disagree with the points they make. This shows the aggressive trait we find in the majority of men, a characteristic that males pick up at a very young age.

People begin learning how to speak as soon as they hear words coming out of their parents’ mouths. Of course, they can’t form full or real sentences until they’re about three years old (in most cases). It’s amazing how we develop this ability to speak a language that was never truly taught to us at such a young age, let along one of the most complex languages in the world. The only thing that really increases in the ability to speak English as we grow beyond four or five years of age is simply our vocabulary or grammar. The basics of our language are learned purely through experience. This is why people have this undeniable necessity for community. According to the dictionary, the word community simply means “a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage”, but isn’t it so much more than that? Most people don’t realize that the people we’re surrounded by have the greatest impact of who we are and who we have yet to become. We use other people from generation to generation to seek an understanding for the world around us in order to fill in these gaps, so to speak, of the parts of our environment, language, and style of culture that is unknown to us.

In my CLA 1001 class, we recently created a journal entry that prompted us to compare the neighborhood in which we were raised to the neighborhood in which we are to volunteer in. Personally, I come from a big town outside of Chicago called Naperville. After this study, I found that my hometown filled the exact stereotype that people gave it; I was raised in “one of the greatest places to raise a child in the United States”, as most parents from Naperville would say. That being said, I realize that I naturally find comfort in conforming to the average type of person I would find from Naperville, someone who is white with a lot of money and an education. Of course, through maturity and gaining an education and broader perspective myself, I adapted to the environment in which I live now, which is more diverse as far as race and financial class go. Relating back to my main point, the location and community I was surrounded by had the greatest impact on the way I speak. Of course, time takes its course on my speech throughout my life.

People naturally tend to imitate other people that they feel holds a higher status than them. We feel that to appeal to our peers, we need to find what it is that maintains this attention that people of higher status receive. This does provide a shallow label for the average person, but unless we make this realization, there’s no getting beyond this concept of conformity. This “copy cat” behavior plays a big part in the way we interpret the world around us. When someone asks, “how did you learn to read?” I think this goes beyond looking at a book at soaking it in; the question asks how a specific person learned to interpret their environment. Perhaps this is why literacy means so much more than simply being able to read and write. The term read defines our perception and ability to adapt to the way we see, smell, hear, and smell things. Therefore, text isn’t all we read. We read emotions, expressions, voice inflection, gestures, postures, vocabulary, and a multitude of other forms of communication.

This why people need to realize how much of their actions portray a form of communication to others. As one of the authors to an article we read would put it, our writing, presence, and speech are like the ammunition to our mind, a loaded gun, and are fired upon targets we don’t necessarily aim for. The power of the gun is determined by the amount of people (targets) that listen or watch them. Thus, politicians and other leaders in society prove to be the guns with the most potential to damage a target, whether it’s beneficial or not is to be determined by both the target and the gun. In fact, being good at communicating is a staple to becoming a leader. The most powerful leaders in history knew how to manipulate people on a large scale in a certain persuasion. I believe that most of our communication includes pieces of persuasion simply to get a point across that we want a person or multiple people to know.

Our minds, guns so to speak, are obtained when we’re born, but the modifications we make to them and the ammunition we provide them with is within our control. I take comfort in knowing that no matter what kind of bullets in communication are fired upon me; in the end I decide the alterations they make, at least to me. As an aspiring leader, my advice to those with an influence and awareness of the perspectives of other people is to take aim and fire away.

“To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others”, Anthony Robbins, an advisor to leaders, once said. This statement proves evident in all our lives, but of course, being that I can only perceive the world from my own mind, I can only explain how this concept has shown itself in my own life. I believe that “nurture” plays a huge role in the way I have developed a sense of communication in writing, speaking, and reading. As age increases, I think the amount by which my level of communication changes becomes less and less. In other words, the changes we make to our guns and bullets total to smaller amounts than the changes we make at earlier ages. I’ll explain what I mean by “guns and bullets” later in my paper, but this means that the most critical time that my communication has been shaped was while I was young; nonetheless, a person can always change. The one thing we can’t forget though is that when we communicate with other people, it’s the combination of emotion, expression, language, posture, and any other way we can “read” each other that talks to people. Of course, most of the pieces to this huge spectrum of how we express thoughts and feelings to each other are lost during the tangible absence of who we speak or write to. Therefore, I find that when I talk to anyone on the internet or write to them, or even call them, I need to choose my voice inflection and words carefully because they have a bigger impact than people give them credit for. If this were all true though, that would mean that even by reading this, my readers are gaining an understanding of the kind of person I am or what message I’m trying to communicate based on experience that they have had when talking or reading other people in their past and present. This is why I love writing; I have more control over how my readers interpret me and my values due to my absence.

Writing starts the minute I picked up a pencil when I was maybe three or four years old. Of course, I didn’t really know how to make all the characters of the alphabet, but does that mean I couldn’t write yet? I have to imagine that someone, somewhere, would interpret whatever it is that I put down on paper. By this, I mean that with maturity and age, I began to be able to “write” better, or in other words, I could eventually get my thoughts into other peoples’ heads easier than when I was young. As a matter of fact, as I mature and grow in my writing, I gradually learned that I could disguise who I am by understanding and writing in a form that is patterned in a way different from the way I actually feel.

During elementary school, our teachers created a little program that all of the kids from my class were required to do called “Writer’s Workshop”. This was the time where we learned the basics to organization and expression of creativity in writing, including the standard of a five paragraph paper which had an introduction, body and conclusion. At such an early age, the way we learned to write was crucial because it would impact the way we write for the rest of our lives. This agrees, in a parallel way with the fact that people have an easier time learning a second language as a toddler or baby. We also practiced the pre-write, drafting, editing and finalizing steps to writing, but we would put up three sided folders when we worked creating some sort of cubicle. I feel that this may have suppressed the sharing of thoughts and bouncing of ideas with other students, but maybe it helped us focus on our work too. The real question lies not in purely how to organize a paper, but how we can find a balance between focusing on our own work at an early age, but at the same time allowing creativity and expression to flow freely amongst students.

Perhaps this is the problem many teachers present when teaching children how or what to write. These children and teenagers lose their sense of identity in their writing because it’s no longer their genuine voice that they’re using, voice being the concept of writing we learn in middle school of how a reader identifies with the text we write. I also noticed that the identity of our teachers reflect on the way we write, involving their gender. We read several articles for class discussing this occurrence, but a couple pieces of them stuck out to me. I found it interesting that males tend to speak out or write in class with confidence while girls tend to stay reserved in their thought when they feel as though the subject could be hostile in any way. After activities and discussions in class, I also realized that our teachers in high school taught us to write as if we knew that what we were writing about was fact. This proved to be a masculine form of writing because evidently, males tend to speak and write with less doubt or room to disagree with the points they make. This shows the aggressive trait we find in the majority of men, a characteristic that males pick up at a very young age.

People begin learning how to speak as soon as they hear words coming out of their parents’ mouths. Of course, they can’t form full or real sentences until they’re about three years old (in most cases). It’s amazing how we develop this ability to speak a language that was never truly taught to us at such a young age, let along one of the most complex languages in the world. The only thing that really increases in the ability to speak English as we grow beyond four or five years of age is simply our vocabulary or grammar. The basics of our language are learned purely through experience. This is why people have this undeniable necessity for community. According to the dictionary, the word community simply means “a social group of any size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often have a common cultural and historical heritage”, but isn’t it so much more than that? Most people don’t realize that the people we’re surrounded by have the greatest impact of who we are and who we have yet to become. We use other people from generation to generation to seek an understanding for the world around us in order to fill in these gaps, so to speak, of the parts of our environment, language, and style of culture that is unknown to us.

In my CLA 1001 class, we recently created a journal entry that prompted us to compare the neighborhood in which we were raised to the neighborhood in which we are to volunteer in. Personally, I come from a big town outside of Chicago called Naperville. After this study, I found that my hometown filled the exact stereotype that people gave it; I was raised in “one of the greatest places to raise a child in the United States”, as most parents from Naperville would say. That being said, I realize that I naturally find comfort in conforming to the average type of person I would find from Naperville, someone who is white with a lot of money and an education. Of course, through maturity and gaining an education and broader perspective myself, I adapted to the environment in which I live now, which is more diverse as far as race and financial class go. Relating back to my main point, the location and community I was surrounded by had the greatest impact on the way I speak. Of course, time takes its course on my speech throughout my life.

People naturally tend to imitate other people that they feel holds a higher status than them. We feel that to appeal to our peers, we need to find what it is that maintains this attention that people of higher status receive. This does provide a shallow label for the average person, but unless we make this realization, there’s no getting beyond this concept of conformity. This “copy cat” behavior plays a big part in the way we interpret the world around us. When someone asks, “how did you learn to read?” I think this goes beyond looking at a book at soaking it in; the question asks how a specific person learned to interpret their environment. Perhaps this is why literacy means so much more than simply being able to read and write. The term read defines our perception and ability to adapt to the way we see, smell, hear, and smell things. Therefore, text isn’t all we read. We read emotions, expressions, voice inflection, gestures, postures, vocabulary, and a multitude of other forms of communication.

This why people need to realize how much of their actions portray a form of communication to others. As one of the authors to an article we read would put it, our writing, presence, and speech are like the ammunition to our mind, a loaded gun, and are fired upon targets we don’t necessarily aim for. The power of the gun is determined by the amount of people (targets) that listen or watch them. Thus, politicians and other leaders in society prove to be the guns with the most potential to damage a target, whether it’s beneficial or not is to be determined by both the target and the gun. In fact, being good at communicating is a staple to becoming a leader. The most powerful leaders in history knew how to manipulate people on a large scale in a certain persuasion. I believe that most of our communication includes pieces of persuasion simply to get a point across that we want a person or multiple people to know.

Our minds, guns so to speak, are obtained when we’re born, but the modifications we make to them and the ammunition we provide them with is within our control. I take comfort in knowing that no matter what kind of bullets in communication are fired upon me; in the end I decide the alterations they make, at least to me. As an aspiring leader, my advice to those with an influence and awareness of the perspectives of other people is to take aim and fire away.