Importance of filtering out thoughts before speaking.
By: Rituraj Kumar
Tags: Thinking, Communication, Speaking

"Speak the way you think", an accepted idea of communication by many but there are aspects which need to be discussed aloud in this argument. It says to speak the way "we think", Now, let’s see how and what do we think. Our thoughts are so transient that one moment we might be thinking about space, moon and the black hole, and next moment we might drop to think about busting the pimple on our cheek, we might be very angry at someone at 11th second and turn sympathetic at the 12th second.

This is a trouble now, when our thoughts are deviating at such a fast pace, the thought which we speak out at any moment, can it be termed as something which we really think or approve of? because as we speak, the very next moment our thoughts might have changed completely and contradictory to what we have uttered just now. The catch lies in determining what our actual thoughts are, filtered from the momentary cloud of thoughts. So, for the first part, we have reached up to conclude that, "Speak the way you think, but first figure out what you actually think".

So far so, it has been only about ourselves, what we think, what we speak, but is expression of thoughts and feelings, a one-way bridge? certainly not. Our utterances have no meaning if there isn’t any audience to it. It has to be seen as a frame with both the parties in it. The thoughts originate from the speaker’s mind while the final destination being the listener’s interpretation. The value of our thoughts lies in how well it is being received and understood by others. It is well known to us that people who are close to us and know us well, understand our words and emotion behind them better. A slang might be offensive for someone unknown but it’s just an expression of affection within our friend circle. Therefore, filtering lies both at the speaker’s and while being interpreted at the listener’s.

In the face of the fight against Covid-19 pandemic, something that came to the forefront was widespread use of masks. Their effectiveness is explained by the graphics below.

Why did I bring this into the picture while the talk was about filtering our thoughts?

We’ll get to know that but for now, let’s assume the person on the left is one of us and on the right, it’s the listener.

In the first case, the thoughts were filtered neither before being spoken nor the listener filters it out to derive actual feelings from words, the risk of miscommunication, therefore, shoots up to very high.

Moving to the second one, where we don’t care about filtering anything before uttering but on the other side we have someone who knows our intentions and always tries to extract the real emotions. The extent of miscommunication drops to moderate here.

In the third case, we carefully filter out our thoughts before speaking such that the words serve their actual purpose while on the other side we have someone who picks the words as they are, interpreting them literally. The interesting aspect that comes out is that miscommunication chances are very low, the reason being that we have taken the onus of communicating our thoughts in a better way to ourself, irrespective of who the listener is.

In the last case, we have an ideal scenario where filtering happens at both ends. I call this a blessed case, where the two are mindful enough to carter the word to emotion transmission needs of each other. This is what we have as the best possibility.

Now, let’s look the entire picture at once, it is the last case which looks most promising but as you must be observing now while you step out that even if there exist chances of catching something as dangerous as covid, you won’t find everyone masked up, neither can you rely upon others for your own safety. On similar lines, you just can not depend on the person on the other side to interpret your words well and extract the intent that lies therein. It is for you to take the onus on yourself to sieve out the noisy elements of your thoughts and then pass them on to the other person, it is what I term as the realistic best case.

To complete our conclusion where we have left earlier, we can add to it :