Blogging About Communication

Communication in Your Life

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  • THE STORIES WE TELL

    Are you a storyteller? Whether you post to Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, or some other venue, what’s ends up being of most significance to others are the stories you tell about your life. The role of storyteller is one of the oldest in history. Episode by episode, we reveal our lives and connect with others.

    WE ALL HAVE STORIES

    Storycorps is an organization that collects the stories of ordinary people that the U.S. Library of Congress then archives. It is a treasure trove, an amazing collection of human voices representing the wisdom of humanity. Prompts such as “What was your proudest moment?” or “Can you tell me about someone who influenced your life?” guide the storyteller in relaying a life story that educates, clarifies, or inspires. The point is, we all have stories. Our job is to find our stories and tell them.

    AN ART AND A SKILL

    Storytelling is both an ancient art form and a valued communication skill. The stories we tell invite others into our world. They communicate who we are and what we stand for. Amid all the information clutter, the stories we tell stand out. In fact, according to Plato: “Those who tell the stories rule society.” The author John Barth adds: “The story of your life is not your life. It is your story.” The more personal and authentic your stories, the easier it becomes for others to identify with you. Through the stories you tell, others reflect on experiences designed to capture their hearts and minds, or as executive coaches Richard Maxell and Robert Dickman assert, “A story is a fact, wrapped in an emotion that compels us to take an action that transforms our world.”

    TAYLOR’S LESSONS

    Taila Lee, author of “The Taylor Swift Essentials: 13 Songs that Display Her Storytelling Prowess and Genre-Bouncing Genius,” demonstrates that Taylor Swift is well aware of this. The stories Swift tells with her songs reveal her vulnerability. Her personal narratives are relatable, featuring vivid descriptions, and imagery and metaphors that bring the stories she tells alive and connect her with her fans.  Talking about subjects such as grief and loss, social ostracism, feeling diminished, and emotional highs and lows, Swift’s stories display a number of storytelling lessons: (1) They have a structure—the narrative unfolds in a coherent order; (2) They have a setting—the story takes place in a specific space and time; (3) They have a unique style—Swift’s lyrics are revealing and empathetic; (4) They serve her fans—Swift’s stories make every performance a special night for them; and (5) They feature surprises and symbolism—colors and props help Swift share larger life reflections. Swift’s storytelling is so effective that a number of colleges and online platforms offer Taylor Swift courses to explore her brand of storytelling and its cultural impact.

    YOUR GAME PLAN

    Well delivered stories arouse emotions like anger, fear, concern, and happiness. You can use them to engage and inspire, shaping the reality you seek others to imagine. For example, if your goal were to convince your audience to take action against bullying, you might consider sharing with them the tragic story of two girls, ages 12 and 14, who were charged with a felony—aggravated stalking—for relentlessly bullying another 12-year-old girl with tragic results. Their target committed suicide by jumping off a tower.

    Try your hand at storytelling: Pick one of these story starters and tell a story from your experience that shares a lesson you learned: Once upon a time; I’ll never forget the first time; It was the scariest day of my life.

    The essence of sharing your life is telling a meaningful story.

  • ARE WE TOO FOCUSED ON NOT BEING “WOKE” TO BE CIVIL?

    Are you and your friends and colleagues able to disagree without coming off as disagreeable? Do you think we should be able to express displeasure without displaying rancor or offending others? Do you?

    IN THE NEWS

    Recently President Trump used the “R-Word” when referring to a number of people he disagreed with. Contrastingly, both Lizzo and Beyonce purposefully removed the word “spaz” from their song lyrics to avoid offending individuals living with disabilities.

    IT’S NO JOKE TO DEHUMANIZE OTHERS IN THE EFFORT NOT TO BE WOKE

    Although the extreme left used wokeness as a weapon against their own party, alienating themselves from much of American society, the extreme right used it as a rationalization to increase the use of vitriolic language. I believe that those of us in the middle believe that there’s nothing wrong with infusing civility into our word choices. We ought to be able to tell others what we think of them and their ideas without diminishing their personhood or dignity. The use of insults, vulgar expressions, name-calling, and in general, any speech that degrades and encourages hostile responses from others is not a sign of strength. Using pejorative words that stigmatize and demonstrate one’s contempt for others only serves to highlight the user’s inability to conduct themselves civilly.  

    THE COMPETENT COMMUNICATOR

    Competent communicators display civility when conversing with or about others. Rather than come off as confrontational, they invite input from others. Rather than put others on the defensive, they do their part to diffuse potential conflicts, opting not to be confrontational or condescending. Instead of constructing and responding to messages angrily, they rely on reasonable discourse and explore common interests.

    BACK TO BASICS

    The original meaning of the word “woke” signified awareness of racial and social injustice. At its core, it’s about being awake to potential prejudice. Only in the last few years was that meaning co-opted as a political insult for being “overly progressive” or “overly sensitive.”

    ACTION PLAN

    Decide if you think being called “woke” is a complement or an insult. Whether you view being woke as a badge of honor or a sign of excessive activism, keep in mind that what it means to be woke depends on who’s using the term and in what context. However, you feel about being woke, using uncivil language diminishes the user.

  • ARE YOU NEW CAREER READY?

    According to LinkedIn, many of the jobs we aspire to fill today have title descriptions that did not exist 25 years ago. Among these jobs are social media influencer, online content creator, knowledge architect, prompt engineer, story-teller, growth officer, and conversation designer. Many of these newer positions involve working with Artificial Intelligence.

    THE TRANSFORMATION IS UNDERWAY

    Can you predict the many ways that AI is going to transform your work future? Can you envision jobs related to AI that you would like to hold four to five years from now? According to The Wall Street Journal, there are four jobs that organizations will likely need qualified people to fill: They are The Explainer—persons able to explain how AI works;The Chooser—persons able to decide the technology or AI systems that is best suited for each specific task; The Auditor and Cleaner—persons able to resolve problems like bias and skewed outcomes attributable to AI; and The Trainer—persons able to instruct workers on how to use and get the most out of emerging technologies.

    WHAT’S NEXT?

    What other positions can you see being redefined or reshaped in the evolving workplace? To be sure, working and learning will merge. Being AI fluent will become a necessary skill for employment.

    ACTION PLAN

    Imagine a self-wanted ad written a few years from now that would be of interest to you. Here’s an idea: write your own dream help-wanted ad. Then ask AI to rewrite it. Did the technology change everything? Did it help you “rethink” how you see yourself working? Did it lead you to a career opportunity you had not yet considered? It’s time to intentionally prepare yourself to ask the right questions about the trajectory you’d like your career embody.

  • THE POWER OF WORDS

    Do words matter? Might changing the word school to learning community affect the behavior of students and educators? Might relabeling a population a community alter how members think about themselves? How do the words we use influence our attitudes toward one another? How might they influence our attitudes toward how we should approach our differences?

    THE SITUATION

    Due to political and legal pressures, feelings about the words Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) have changed. Many colleges and organizations have either ended or sidelined DEI offices and programs. To say the least, the DEI landscape is under flux and challenging to navigate. What are schools and businesses to do? Instead of being interpreted as creating a welcoming environment that values difference and ensures equitable access opportunities, some now perceive the practice of DEI to be discriminatory.

    SOME FAVOR REFRAMING DEI

    Might renaming diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts make it more palatable? What if the program was called Inclusion, Belonging, and Engagement (IBE) or Accessibility, Talent Development, and Opportunity instead (ATO)? Might the words used change people’s perception?

    SOME FAVOR SUBSTITUTING A DIFFERENT APPROACH

    Critics of DEI believe that Merit, Excellence and Intelligence (MEI) should be the priority, not DEI. They prefer prioritizing talent and achievement, skills and performance, over identity characteristics. The contention is that people should be treated as individuals rather than as group members.

    BLEND APPROACHES

    Some who believe that DEI ignored merit, call for a remix that balances DEI and MEI factors, giving consideration to both individual merit and diversity.

    YOUR GAME PLAN

    Look at your institution where you study or the organization where you work. Consider what needs to be done to foster a space where merit and diversity are not perceived of as at odds with each other? Might focusing on idea diversity in addition to identity diversity help? Demonstrating acceptance for demographic differences, as well as for a wide range of perspectives and life experiences, can avoid the creation of ideological echo-chambers that impede effective decision-making. Where viewpoint diversity exists, more robust discussions occur. Such discussions can help sharpen arguments—encouraging critical thinking, idea-testing and idea-refinement, and producing better outcomes. In settings where constructive disagreement is able to flourish, dialoguing succeeds in nurturing bridge-building—the discovery of ways to communicate constructively across differences. It’s not only DEI or MEI, but the ability to engage constructively with disagreement that ultimately will lead to better performing schools and organizations.

  • WHAT’S YOUR WORD OF THE YEAR?

    Dictionaries are known for identifying a word of the year. In 2023, different dictionaries identified as the word of the year “rizz””—short for charisma, and authentic.  In 2024, the words chosen were polarization and brain rot. For 2025, Oxford University Press has selected “rage bait” as its word of the year, underscoring the potential for online content to intentionally anger users. Contrastingly, Dictionary.com chose the slang expression “6-7” to connote uncertainty or signify that something is merely okay. Theoretically, these words were selected because of their ability to sum up and reflect the nation’s mood during a defined period of time. Interesting.

    How Words Interact

    Might the word choices people make become polarizing? Might polarization in addition to dividing us into opposing groups be causing people to experience brain rot, that is, mental exhaustion attributed to excessive online consumption? As they “chat-up” others, might users of these words be exposing our deep divisions as the echoes of their musings reverberate across online platforms?

    What Happens Online Doesn’t Stay Online

    Increasingly, online communities are participating in sharing and shaping our use of words. They are accelerating the creation and communication of new linguistic trends that reflect the shared experiences of different communities of users. Ultimately, a word’s users devise the hashtags that we then use to categorize and search for content. They also become powerful drivers of how we use new linguistic terms offline, influencing our communication in daily life.

    Action Plan

    Reflect on the past year. Consider three words used during 2025 that help to sum up your mood—your wishes and aspirations—or vision for the future. Then settle on one word, a linguistic snapshot, that you believe highlights and brings clarity to a significant shift or major issue in the public sphere. Create a vision board to illustrate how you hope to live your word in 2026.

  • WHAT KIND OF SELF-TALK PARTNER ARE YOU?

    When conversing with another person, we often think about what to say and how to say it. Do we do the same when we speak with ourselves? How much do you enjoy and profit from self-talk conversations? What kind of self-talk speaker and listener are you?

    WHAT SELF-TALK IS

    Self-talk is that inner voice that provides you with a running commentary on your thoughts, feelings, and actions. It is your speaking-self having a conversation with your listening-self. It is intrapersonal dialogue, helping you to process your feelings and interactions. Like all feedback, self-talk can be positive or critical, encouraging or demotivating, and because it narrates your experiences and reactions, it significantly affects your next thoughts and moves.

    MANAGING SELF-TALK

    Self-talk helps us process, monitor, and assess our relationships and the events occurring around us. Positive self-talk is known to improve mood, increase confidence, and improve performance. It also helps in combatting those negative thoughts and feelings that impede resiliency and the development of an optimistic outlook. Replacing negative self-talk with words that are encouraging and don’t dwell on failure, increases the likelihood of overcoming challenges. Telling yourself, “I got this,” “I can do this,” “I can fix this,” or “I’m learning” enables you to focus on stepping up and performing better.

    TALK TO YOURSELF OUTLOUD, TOO

    When your inner voice speaks to you, does it chatter away silently and in private or out-loud? Might there be a benefit to actually speaking your words aloud when you talk to yourself? What we say to ourselves out loud helps control the harshness of self-doubt that often accompanies self-criticism. Speaking out loud to yourself helps to tame your worst instincts, facilitating your reframing negative thoughts into a determination to put in greater effort to achieve a positive outcome. Speaking aloud to yourself improves focus and performance, helps you better organize your thoughts, consider different perspectives, and also calms your nerves.

    YOUR ACTION PLAN

    Never say to yourself what you wouldn’t say to someone else. Instead, be your own best friend. When you find yourself caught in a negative thought pattern, substitute a more realistic alternative, perhaps a positive affirmation such as, “I faced a setback, but I’m going to learn from this.”

  • IS Using Generative AI Cheating?

    The question of how to use generative AI ethically is being debated in workplaces and colleges.

    Here’s the Issue

    When business people, educators, and students make unauthorized use of content generated by AI, are they guilty of misconduct—even if the information AI generates for them contains creative output? Or, is the real problem that they can’t be expected to use AI ethically if they’re unaware of or not taught how to do so? It’s too new a technology for consultants, teachers, and mentors to possess that information fully, because AI’s implications are not yet fully realized.

    Partnering with AI has Implications

    AI is reshaping and recalibrating daily life in the workplace and in academe. How are executives and members of the academy responding to it? The truth is that many business professionals and college professors use AI themselves, seeking its assistance in drawing up their business plans or making their syllabi more informative, calling on it to write or augment their writing of reports or make their course content more engaging. What are we to do? Is the use of AI  improving business and education input and therefore the outcomes that executives and educators are able to achieve? Or is it dragging down personal initiative, creativity, and professionalism?

    Let Yourself Imagine the Future, but Approach It with a Healthy Skepticism

    If AI is the future as many predict, will it end up reshaping us, or is there still time for us to shape its ethical use? Although many do not consider using AI plagiarism because one is not stealing from another person but from a technology, the reality is that it is cheating, and it is passing off work that is not one’s own as one’s own. Business professionals, educators, and students need to be able to create with and without AI. It’s up to all of us to insure that’s the case.

    Your Action Plan

    We need to rethink our relationship with AI. We need to use it to augment our thinking not to replace our thinking. Once we outsource thinking, we actually may forget how to think, and thinking is part of what makes us human, and our reason for being. Of course, agreeing to forsake using AI to think on one’s own is a voluntary act. Will you be one of the volunteers?

  • THE WORD IS NOT THE THING

    The Department of Defense. The Department of War. The Department of Peace. Secretary of Defense. Secretary of War. Secretary of Peace. How do the changes in wording affect what the words represent? What do the changes in terminology signal?

    Implications of Changes in Terminology

    President Trump wanted to change the name of the Department of Defense to the Department of War. However, doing so would have required Congressional action. He decided instead to issue an executive order authorizing The Department of War as a secondary name in order to underscore the department’s military preparedness and strength rather than represent its defensive capabilities. The order also allows Pete Hegseth, the current Secretary of Defense, to refer to himself as the Secretary of War in public correspondence and communications.

    Words are Symbols, Nothing More, Nothing Less

    Words are symbols. We use them to represent or stand for things. By mutual consent, we can make any combination of letters stand for anything. The word is not the thing. Words are connected to things only through the thoughts they evoke in people. To the extent that our thoughts overlap, we are able to communicate. While “the thing” (in this case, the actual Department, remains unchanged, the thoughts people have about the Department may change depending on the words chosen to represent it. People, not words, make meaning.

    The Potential Significance of Rhetorical Shifts

    How are your thoughts about the Department and its leader affected as the words used to brand the Department morph from Defense, to War, to Peace? Each rebranding represents a rhetorical shift, contributing to adjustments in thoughts and potentially policies as well. If thinking makes it so, then perceiving the United States as on a war footing as opposed to a defensive or peace footing could cause the image people form of the U.S. military to be a more aggressive one, possibly threatening international stability.

    Action Plan

    Which of the three terms best represents “winning” in your mind: Department of Defense, Department of War, or Department of Peace? Are wars the only thing to be won? Can you not win the peace? Devise a plan for ensuring that shifts in branding or labeling don’t cause you to register an unconscious shift in your attitude. Make it your goal to focus not on the label, but on what the label really represents.

  • HOW DO YOU USE AI?

    You’re conducting research online for a project.  Maybe you’re writing an article. Maybe you’re going to issue a report. Or perhaps you’re creating a novel or screenplay. Whatever your subject and purpose, it’s common for an AI bot to respond to your search prompts with a narrative summary of the information it finds. You marvel at its work.

    What Do You Do with the Narrative the Bot Produced?

    Do you integrate it hook, line, and sinker into your work? Do you tweak it? Or do you dig deeper and consult a host of primary and secondary sources?  If you integrate the bot’s words into your work, are you crossing an ethical line? If you fail to credit the bot, are you guilty of misrepresentation? Would tweaking the bot’s words, adding your input to its narrative, make things better? Or should you use the bot’s narrative as you would other research, and continue probing, writing, revising as people did “in the good old days” before Bots?  The choice ultimately is yours.

    Responding to the Bot’s Temptation

    Plagiarism has always existed. Are Bots offering researchers “the apple” offered to Adam in the Garden of Eden? While we’re not suggesting that Bots are snakes and we should toss what they offer us aside, we are saying we need to carefully contemplate the limits (if any) that we place on our use of the information it presents. Bots have their strengths. Humans have their weaknesses. When you let a Bot put words in your mouth, you give it permission to replace you.

    Your Game Plan

    Make the effort to maintain control and not give in to temptation. Use the Bot to help you brainstorm, summarize, and eliminate clichéd thinking. Treat the Bot like your assistant, not your successor. Don’t outsource your brain.

  • THE COMMUNICATION MIX

    Is there a difference in how you process communication experiences in the physical world and online? This question leads to so many questions. We focus on five.

    FIVE BIG QUESTIONS

    Begin by asking yourself how you’re really doing when you move between the real world and the world of social networking. Take a few moments to think about how you change—how your identity changes—as you navigate back and forth. To help you, write down your answers to these questions:

    1, Which connections feel stronger—those you work on in the physical world or those you build online? Which domain do you devote more of your time to? (Actually, clock yourself)

                2. Which connections feel more authentic?

                3. Which connections contribute to your experiencing more FOMO?

    4. In which realm do you think those you connect with view you more accurately? More positively?

    5. Ask at least two individuals you interacted with in person this week to provide you with three adjectives they would use to describe their face-to-face interactions with you. Then ask two individuals you only engaged with online to do the same.

    DEBRIEF

    What do answers suggest about the nature of your connections in the physical world and the digital world?  What do they suggest about your satisfaction and the satisfaction of your communication partner in each realm?  Then ask yourself if you are you making the right communication choices. In other words, do you choose to text or engage someone on social media when it would be better to be in the same physical space? Do you meet in person when it might be wiser to maintain some distance? Communication is a delicate balance. Is yours in synch with your needs? Do you spend more time on social media than you should? Are you giving your face-to-face abilities sufficient exercise? Having the communication scale imbalanced in favor of social media can lead to experiencing more anxiety than is healthy. It also can impede development of social skills.

    YOUR GAME PLAN

    This week’s game plan is to focus on achieving better balance in your communication exchanges with others.  Pay attention to making more time to connect with people in person. Doing so will deepen the nature of your relationship. Being face-to-face facilitates more accurate interpretation of thoughts and feelings. It also allows for the creation of stronger bonds.