Communications in everyday life.
The overall communication interaction between Pat and Chris is ineffective. They both use control talk to convey their messages. As a result, they are not being mindful and cannot adopt each other’s perspective but instead, both Pat and Chris react inappropriately by conveying messages with unnecessary verbal and non-verbal displays such as violence and anger on his part and shouting and anger on hers. Communicating in such a fashion leads Pat and Chris to automatically defend their self-concepts. An effective means of communication could be sought through dialog talk whereby support is obtained and each others thoughts, feelings and ideas are respected. In order for them to have meaningful dialog they would have to take a humanistic approach where by they would treat each other as equal and be more empathetic. I will argue that dialog talk (which utilizes both straight talk and search talk) along with compromising to manage conflict are effective means of communication. Pat and Chris could have stimulating conversation with minimal conflict if they made a conscious choice to use dialog talk. Dialog talk is an effective means of communication because it encourages the use of descriptive language. In the case control talk is used which is ineffective because it causes both Pat and Chris personally to attack one another and this behavior causes the automatic response of defense of self-concept. For example, many inferences are made with respect to courses of action from their past behaviors that are not relevant to the conversation. In one instance, Pat attacks Chris for not knowing that he has a lot of work to do. Pat is actually high on the inference ladder because he automatically assumes that Chris should know what he feels and thinks about his overbearing workload. In essence, a more effective way that Pat could express his feelings would be to speak using “I” messages.