(Your phone starts ringing; you need a second to recognize the name, but you know for sure: it’s your partner’s friend - you last talked with her at your wedding.)
“Hey! How is it going? I saw that the new BazaarCON is in your town this year. Can I crash at your place for it? It will be only one week.”
Has this person thrown etiquette out the window? Or maybe you just replied, “No. Thanks for calling!” and that was it.
Do I need to accept the role before playing it?
It might sound like a weird question, but we must be aware of the roles and actively decide which one to play. Of course, this is all part of becoming a better communicator. Already confused? Let me present a different angle, one more pragmatic, about what some of us might consider “cultural” differences.
For some, it’s obvious, while for the majority, it is fundamentally hard to see. I believe there are two core approaches people take to establishing trust in communication. I’m bad at names, so let’s call them “truth-seeking” and “community-seeking.” Most people seem to have a dominant social mode in which they constantly operate, to the extent that “what communication is for” doesn’t even register as a belief; it is more a background principle of the universe. Thus, when they see someone operating under the other model, it registers as that person is a lousy communicator or even a bad person.
