Making Communication Easy

Communication is an active, dynamic process between two or more people. It is not something a single person does or does not do, it is something people do together.

Most people want communication to be easy. They want to exchange messages with each other quickly and efficiently. Most people want most things in their lives to be easy. A hard puzzle may be a fun recreational challenge, but when it comes to getting the day-to-day necessities of life accomplished, easy is almost invariably chosen over hard.

"Why is it," I asked a therapist once, "that sales people treat me poorly when I try to talk to them, but are just fine if I pass them a note card with a question written on it?"

"Because the cards make communication with you much easier for the sales people," the therapist answered. "Because people want communication to be easy."

That exchange made an impression on me; it caused me to re-inventory my tools for communication and begin thinking of communication in terms of how to make it easiest rather than how to make it look the most "normal."

But there is a balance point too--while I work very hard to make communication easy for others, others also bear an equal responsibility to make communication easy for me. Someone told me recently that they know a speech language pathologist who makes a person on the spectrum generate speech sounds, but has never taken the time to figure out what sort of communication the person actually uses--let alone attempted to make communication easy--and has no interest in doing so. Speech is not being used as communication. (Disclaimer: I am not coming down on SLPs in general here--my personal experiences with SLPs have been different.)

Yes, those of us who communicate in non-standard ways should make an effort to make communication easy for others--if only because it in turn will make the exchange easier for us since there will be less confusion and resistance from our communication partners. But also, others need to make that same (and sometimes a bit extra) effort for us. We like things to be easy too. And sometimes it's not even a question of ease--we may need others to make that extra effort to communicate with us on our own terms because otherwise we can't find our way to the common ground where communication can occur at all. Communication is a two way street.