Thanks  for stopping by! All That Communication has moved to:

Peaceful Planet–Conscious Communication for Changing Your World

Please do visit! I apologize for any inconvenience, but it’s a great remodel, and I think you’ll enjoy the new look and new focus.

Have an awesome, inspiring day.

~

We’ve moved! Be sure to visit Peaceful Planet.

I’ve never been a really serious road rager but I’ve come pretty darn close. There were times that I was so close to ramming someone in the rear end that I could feel it. Taste it. Would have loved to do it. Was gritting my teeth to do it.

On other occasions, I’d spit out my favorite curses and hope the person heard it. Or I’d flip a finger long and hard and shake my head and curl a lip, all with the intention of showing someone what I thought of him or her, and—understatement—it wasn’t nice.

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We’ve moved! Be sure to visit Peaceful Planet.

If you listen and watch, children will tell you things you might not want to know, and they’ll tell things you wish they wouldn’t tell, though they might not say a word.

I learned this early on, in the third grade. Little “Theresa” sat two seats up from me, in the next row over. One day, her skirt had become scrunched up to the top of her bare legs. As the teacher droned on, I stared at her leg as the meaning of the long, red stripes and dark bruises on her thigh and calf slowly became apparent to me. She had probably been beaten by one of her parents, probably with a belt. I couldn’t be sure, of course, but her tear-swollen eyes, blank stare, and hunched over shoulders told me I was probably right.

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We’ve moved! Be sure to visit Peaceful Planet.

I’ve been blogging casually in my spare time for almost 5 years now, and I’ve slowly been learning the ins and outs of using various themes in WordPress, SEO skills like keyword density, a little about advertising with Google Adsense (I earned a whopping total of $1.19 on my first WordPress blog that was up for a year), and….

Well, to be honest, I’m having a hard time coming up with what I learned on my own, before I started following the likes of Darren Rowse of Problogger. Jonathan Fields of Awake at the Wheel. Daniel Scocco of Daily Blog Tips. Mary Jaksch of Good Life Zen and Write to Done. And, of course, Leo Babauta of Zen Habits.

This is the outstanding line-up of pro-blogger presenters for the upcoming A-List Blogging Bootcamp, which starts on May 16.

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Have you ever noticed how some people complain a lot?

I don’t mean the friends or relatives who always seem to have some health issue or money problem to gripe about, though that’s part of it. I mean the people who seem to find the negative in anything, no matter what it is, and they’ll talk your ear off if you give them a chance.

No matter what you say, they’ll argue it or find fault with it. No matter what’s going on in the news, they’ll send you the link for the bad side of things, no matter what it is.

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Have you ever had an odd feeling about someone? A weird vibe? Maybe you thought, “This guy is full of shit.” Maybe there’s something about a certain woman that gives you the creeps. Or maybe you just didn’t want to give that salesperson the business even though you wanted the product. And sometimes you’re just not sure whether you should trust someone or not.

A lot of body language registers at an unconscious level, and sometimes we don’t trust people because there’s a disparity between their words and their body language.

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If you realize too late that you’ve made a typo or a grammar error (or even two or three) on a blog comment, don’t worry about it.

As I make my blog rounds and read through the comments—and maybe make one or two of my own—I occasionally see a frantic-sounding second comment from someone who made an error of some sort.

OMG, sorry about the grammar mistakes! Such-and-such was supposed to be yada-yada and the other one should have been like this. Guess I should have run spell check! Sorry. I wish there was an editing function.

That’s a paraphrase of a comment I saw yesterday. I just shook my head with a twitch of a smile and moved on. But I looked it over again today, and I had to scan three times to find the errors he cited.

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In a discussion forum I like to visit, we usually talk about marriage, relationships, and general news or what’s going on in our lives. Sometimes we post jokes or news headlines that are outrageous or silly or just interesting. It’s fun and sort of like a virtual water cooler or coffee maker to chat around without getting up from our desks.

This morning someone posted the following:

Toilet paper shortage: Good raw material being wiped out

A shortage of high-quality paper for recycling could mean scratchy toilet tissue. To keep consumers happy and avoid any chafed rear ends, companies are now on a quest to find new paper supplies, according to an article in the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN).

The problem: Consumers once could fill up large bins with their recycled newspapers, magazines and print paper. But as electronic communication surges, these sources of recycled paper are becoming scarce….

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While looking for some information on communication in marriage a few days ago, an article in Psychology Today came up in my search: “Marriage Problems: How Communication Techniques Can Make Them Worse.” My interest was piqued, and I skimmed over it and bookmarked it so I could take a better look today.

As it turns out, the article deplores “communication techniques” and “bullet lists on how to improve your marriage through better communication.” Since I’ve written a few of those, like this one, I wondered if I could learn something.

Here’s an excerpt that sums up the main point:

It’s not that communication tips are inherently bad….they’re unhelpful because they seem to be based on the assumption that marriage causes brain damage. When couples describe the early part of their relationships, they invariably report that they communicated very well. (Not many newlyweds mouth the great marriage lament: “We just can’t communicate!”) The prevalence of communication tips in the media implies that something about marriage degrades the neurons that embed communication skills.

I’m guessing that “brain damage” and some other vague expressions in the article are just an attempt at casual speech that your average reader will understand and not meant literally, so I’m focusing on meaning here rather than word choices.

Here’s what I’m understanding:

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How are your listening skills?

I admit—mine are pretty bad at times. It’s not that I don’t listen—I do. It’s just that in casual conversation I have a tendency to get carried away with enthusiasm and talk a lot more than I’d like to. For every ten words someone delivers, I’m liable to respond with twice that–unless the person is as energetic as I am, in which case I listen a lot more. And if there’s a pause, I sometimes figure the person is done and insert my comment at that particular moment. The pause might be a mere fraction of a second, however, and the person actually has more to say.

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