- Today, we're talking about face-to-face communication,
and all of it's rich complexity.
That is our topic today.
So let's get into the details.
(futuristic music)
Hello there, and welcome back.
I'm Alex Lyon,
and this channel is all about your professional development,
especially around issues of leadership and communication.
And I'd like to paraphrase the great Karl Weick.
He once wrote that face-to-face communication
is the standard form of communication
against which all other forms are measured.
So, are phones cool?
Yes.
Are movies awesome?
Of course.
Is social media totally fascinating?
Again, yes.
You may prefer other types of communication,
but none of that changes the fact
that face-to-face communication
is the most well-rounded, complete form of communication.
I want to be really clear, face-to-face communication
is the king, and the queen, on the chessboard.
It's the original.
It hits all the senses.
There's so much to pay attention to.
So much can go wrong or right.
There's no other type of communication
that even comes close.
And that's why it's so challenging for so many people.
In fact, this video is the first
in a short, two-part series on this topic.
And in the next video,
I'll compare and contrast face-to-face,
versus online communication in head-to-head fashion,
to see which one you might want to use more, or less,
depending upon the situation.
But for the moment,
we're going to look at, first, the types of communication
that we are going to count as face-to-face,
and then look at the specific variables,
or ingredients that make face-to-face communication so full.
So first, in terms of what it includes,
one of things that pops in mind immediately,
is that one-to-one face-to-face communication
or interaction.
We call this interpersonal communication.
That's talking to a friend, or a co-worker,
communication between a parent, or a child.
These are dyads, that's one-on-one.
But another type is group communication.
If it's in person, that's face-to-face.
It has its own complexities, but it's face-to-face.
And even public speaking, in a way, is face-to-face.
Like, I presented to as few as four people,
and in that kind of situation, it's face-to-face.
Now public speaking to a big audience changes a lot,
but I think for our purposes today,
we're just gonna focus mainly on the one-to-one,
face-to-face interaction,
interpersonal communication, to keep it simple.
So what are the elements,
or the variables of face-to-face communication
that it involves?
We'll hit just six of them, but there are others.
And the key here is that each variable adds a layer
of complexity.
So these are not just pieces of a pie.
I see them in, as layers of a cake,
that add to the conversation with each layer.
So, as we look at these,
pick the variable that seems most challenging to you,
so that you can relate.
So the first variable is visual.
When we're face-to-face,
you're looking at people.
And it's a real 3D experience.
If you've ever had someone look over your shoulder
at somebody else in the room,
or they look around the room like they're distracted,
then you know what it's like to experience that 3D dynamic.
There's a lot to block out face-to-face, visually.
There's a lot of depth in your line of sight,
sure things that you can notice.
And you're also noticing people's nonverbal cues,
and their body language that they're giving off,
their appearance, how they dress, how they move.
And that's just when we're listening.
When we are the one talking,
we're giving off all of these visual cues ourselves.
And we may not even realize how we're coming across
in that way.
For example, one really hot summer day,
I showed up to teach college in a shirt with one pattern,
and shorts with another clashing pattern.
And a student later told me that she had to focus on my face
because my clothes looked so bad together.
So nobody focused the camera for her, on my face.
She had to put in that effort.
That's part of the visual aspect of communication.
And yes, that was not a highlight of my day,
but I mostly have gotten over that.
But there's a lot to consider visually,
when we're face-to-face.
Audio, or sound, is the next layer.
And this can be 3D too.
When you're talking to a person, for example,
you're listening to them, but there might be music on too.
There might be other people talking in the room.
You might hear a dog barking,
or a sound of a car pulling up,
or a phone ringing,
and you have to select what you're listening to,
and filter out the rest the best you can.
That can be a very challenging experience for some people.
Nobody has edited the audio in the room for us.
You have to do that hard work.
Another part of our audio experience
is listening for tone, the attitude,
and all those colors in the sound of the person's voice
can communicate quite a lot.
And when we're face-to-face,
you can't really ignore tone
the same way that you can ignore tone,
for example, if you're just reading a book, right?
You hear it live, and in the moment.
Another layer to the cake is space and touch.
So when you're face-to-face,
that means that you're close enough
to potentially touch the other person.
So you might notice how close or far
you're sitting or standing from the other people involved.
In general, standing closer or sitting closer, voluntarily,
means that you have a more of a connection, or a bond.
You could be making physical contact even,
like shaking hands.
Maybe not, but it's at least possible
when you're face-to-face
for that physical contact to happen.
People, in fact,
can sometimes be too close to us for our own comfort,
and we have to manage that personal space face-to-face.
And in the United States, by the way,
usually a little more than an arm's distance away
is a bare minimum for most Americans,
close enough to potentially shake hands, but not too close.
Another layer to the cake
is the real time and dynamic features
of face-to-face communication.
It's happening live, in the moment.
It's unfolding right there.
And this raises the stakes to them.
If you miss something, you can't really rewind.
You can ask them to repeat it,
but that changes the flow of the conversation.
And when you're talking,
you usually don't have time to carefully choose your words
like you would if you were revising a text
for like 10 minutes before you send it.
So this makes face-to-face communication really dynamic.
People are involved constantly,
and adjusting what they say, and how they act,
based upon what just happened.
So you take turns.
You pause.
You potentially overlap your words with the other person,
or finish their sentence.
And walking away, for example,
in mid-sentence, would be really awkward.
There's a commitment that you have when you're face-to-face,
a connection.
You may have both agreed to show up and spend time together.
And being face-to-face signals that that conversation
is a priority.
And so you work it out.
You adjust to each other as you go,
in a dynamic back-and-forth.
Another really important layer to face-to-face communication
is that it's constitutive in nature.
Back-and-forth communication really creates
our social reality.
It has a constitutive, or generative nature.
For example, you say something, and it gives me an idea,
and I build on that.
And it's like co-writing a song.
Together, our communication makes something,
makes some meaning that didn't exist before,
an agreement, a compliment, a joke, a relationship.
So communication, especially face-to-face,
creates, or constitutes, our whole social reality.
Now we can clearly do this through writing, of course.
And some of the other elements we've talked about, however,
really increase the importance of face-to-face communication
in this creative, generative way.
So context also matters.
That's another layer.
Your environment shapes the way
you understand your interaction.
So it adds a bit of unpredictability, for example,
to face-to-face communication.
You could get interrupted.
A fire alarm could go off.
If you're at work,
you may know that you have to see this person later,
so you're going to shape the way you act now.
Time of day matters.
What happened right before the conversation,
or what might be coming right after,
those all matter.
For example, you could make a funny comment
over drinks after work,
and people hear it in a certain way
because that's an informal context.
But if you made that same comment,
let's say, in the Monday morning meeting with everybody,
it would come across very differently,
because it's a different context.
So, context matters.
So I combine some of these related elements
so there are just six in this list of ingredients,
or layers of the cake.
And there are certainly plenty of others out there,
like we could additionally talk about issues of perception,
and psychological filters, and interpretation,
but maybe in another video.
Now the big take away from this video
is that when you put them together,
no other form of communication comes close
to the fullness of face-to-face interaction.
All other types of communication, whether it's social media,
texting, email, those are all partial representations
that use face-to-face communication as the starting point.
And that's why face-to-face communication is,
and always will be,
the standard against which all others are measured.
So we'll compare and contrast face-to-face
versus online communication in the next video,
in this short, two-part series.
So, question of the day,
what aspect of face-to-face communication
do you find most interesting, or perhaps, challenging?
I would love to hear your comments to that
in the section below the video.
So, thanks, God bless,
and I'll see you in the next video
that compares and contrasts the two.
Take care.