Although this exercise was quite difficult, I really enjoyed it. At first it felt like such a pain because the phrases were so odd. Each tongue twister was laborious to say, and to encode an emotion on top of it, especially one that might contradict the saying, was a challenge in of itself. However, once I got past the difficulty of the task, it reinforced that I am not the best reader of emotions and surprised me that I was only ok at displaying emotions.
I’ve known for a long time that I can’t always figure out the whole message when someone is speaking accept for the over arching tone. I don’t know if it is that I’ve just no put much time into learning to decode beyond the basics or if I thought I didn’t need to care as long as I could get the gist of what is being said. Recently, I have learnt that this is not the case, through difficult situations at work and my personal life. Sometimes you do need to fine tune and really pick out the exact emotion some one is feeling to truly communicate with them on a meaningful level.
In a sense, I chalk this up to a greater learning experience, and the trial and error does not bother me because I feel like if I really mess a situation up, I am willing to bring up my failure, even if it means taking some harsh criticism. In the end, I would rather not make the same mistake twice. This is because there are so many different ways at approaching a conversation and experience will help you understand the full extent of the conversations you have.
However, I do like being pushed in the right direction in a zero risk environment like in this activity. The stakes are low, so you can really step out and not worry about being wrong, where if you are dealing with a depressed coworker or an angry friend, the stakes are high. I felt that the only way to get the most out of the exercise was to act as best you could and see what the group came up with, and pay careful attention when you were not speaking.
I do agree with Adam that in the professional atmosphere it has become important to decode/read the other person's emotions as much as to emote or probably more. As mentioned in my blog, I would like to emote less, however I would like to learn the art of decoding especially when people are getting smarter at hiding their real emotions while getting their message across. One of the key things in being in a marketing role is to understand the real request from a customer especially when things have gone wrong. Although to be professional, the customer might in fact be trying to be neutral in his dialogue delivery, it might help to be able to decode the real emotion to understand the urgency of a request or our stand as a service provider with the customer himself.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Adam about the differences in how different cultures express emotions. In some cultures it's not polite to express negative emotions. The classic example is the American company who performed a focus group in Japan, and after receiving mildly positive reviews of a product, launched it. It failed spectacularly. What happened? Negative opinions in the US focus groups were expressed, but in the focus groups in Japan were considered not polite, so never verbalized.
ReplyDeleteAdding to the confusion of emotions in words are body languate and gestures. Which can be confusing when the same gesture or action means opposite things in different cultures. Sucking air through your teeth can be complimentary in parts of Asia, but means contempt or distain in Central America. The thumbs-up gesture is positive in the US but means the less kind version of "screw you" in Australia.
Communication is sometimes difficult enough when you are on the same side of an issue, it's worse when, as is often true in business, you are on the opposide sides.
Even with friends from another culture, how you communicate emotion varies. I tend to be very direct, and while I try not to be mean, sometimes honest and direct means expressing less than positive or polite comments. I tend to think of being direct as being efficient, but sometimes hitting someone with a brick to make your point isn't the best way to make your message understood and palatable.