Relating for communicating

kw: book reviews, nonfiction, communication, improvisation

An actor who is any good must become an expert at relating with an audience. This usually means inducing people to care about the character. The best actors may not win all the Oscars, but they are the ones people care about the most. This is distinct from the odd quality of being a "celebrity".

If people watching a play or movie empathize with the character, does that mean that the actor portraying that character also has a lot of empathy? Sometimes, maybe most of the time. Of course, some actors are totally faking empathy, having learned to induce sympathetic feelings in a cynical way, even a psychopathic way (psychopaths are frequently very charming, but it is surface only).

Alan Alda had learned to act what he feels, and became the host of Scientific American Frontiers and several other series because of his unparalleled ability to genuinely relate to the people in the episodes and to the audiences. In his book If I Understood You, Would I Have This Look on My Face?: My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating, Alda relates that it was not always so. Even after a successful career in improv, stage, and screen acting, when he first interviewed a scientist, he made at least five blunders that he never would have made had he made the connection between how an actor projects a character to an audience, and how an interviewer relates to the subject of the interview and to the audience who will watch it. (At 23 words, the book's title is one of the longest on record, and it has my personal "Bravo!" for projecting clarity in a title that long!) The book describes many of the tools, borrowed primarily from improvisational theater, and the "games" used by improv coaches, that Alda and his colleagues at his Center for Communicating Science (now at Stony Brook University) use to improve the communications skills of those least likely to have developed any: working scientists.

I was in drama club in high school, and acted in a repertory company my first two years of college, but I never learned improv. I was strictly a "by the script" actor. But as I read I gradually learned how to relate to the stories Alda tells, and the principles they embody.

For most of us, breakdown of communication has one source: FEAR. I once took a "Business Writing" class my company sponsored, and the pre-assignment was to "improve" a badly-written business letter. I turned in two versions. One was a re-write based on principles of business writing that I knew already. The second was much shorter: brief, to the point, and totally forthright; to it I attached a note, "Here is how we would write if we didn't fear one another."

The games Alda describes and the other methods he uses for breaking down barriers between any two people who want to communicate to one another, all drive out fears in one way or another. For example, one of the first "games", Mirroring, gradually shows the participants that they are not so different. The better the "follower" gets at following the actions of the "leader", even learning to anticipate and thus mirror without delay, the more both learn how similar they are. An advanced version, "leaderless mirroring", drives the point even deeper.

I am such a purist, I had a harder time than most will, to "get" what the author is sharing. Finally, though, the message on one significant point became clear to me: most "lecturing" is answering questions that have not been asked, just as most "help" is presented so as to help the helper (or how the helper imagines needing to be helped); rather, effective communication requires knowing, or learning, enough about the opposite party, so that we elicit the right questions, spoken or not, and then the other is ready to receive the "answers". This solidified a realization I had about the "Golden Rule", which grew into several steps of increasing value:

• The SILVER rule (attributed to Confucius and others): "Do not do to another anything that you don't want done to you."
• The GOLDEN rule (from the sayings of Jesus in the Bible): "Whatever you wish that others would do to you, do also to them."
• The PLATINUM rule: "Do unto others as they wish to have done to them."
• The DIAMOND rule: "Ask first".

Alda writes much about empathy and Theory of Mind, which allow us to, in part, "read" others' minds. If we know how to listen, though, nothing beats a well-crafted question.

Though I feel quite dull of senses, in an emotional sense at least, I got much from this book, so I think practically anyone can gain much.