I greatly admire the honesty and irony expressed in the following quotations from Robert Bolton’s People Skills. His book has been a primary text and resource for scores of teachers, trainers, and others who facilitate development of interpersonal communication skills.
“Effective communication is not something that has come easily to me. I suppose that if I had been especially capable in interpersonal communication from my childhood on, I would never have studied it so tenaciously. It was because communication was a problem for me that I researched it, tried out what I learned, taught it, and wrote about it.
“One of the ironies of modern civilization is that, though mechanical means of communication have been developed beyond the wildest flight of the imagination, people often find it difficult to communicate face to face. In this age of technological marvels we can bounce messages off the moon and land space probes on Mars, but we find it difficult to relate to those we love.
“Nathan Miller caustically remarked that ‘conversation in the United States is a competitive exercise in which the first person to draw a breath is declared the listener.’”
Interpersonal communications is one of the richest and most interesting subjects to study. It is also essential to our physical, psychological, sociological, and societal health. While some may believe that space is the “last frontier” of human exploration, those of us engaged in the study of communication believe that our internal and relational regions are truly the least understood frontiers in need of more advanced human understanding. If we cannot learn to relate and communicate more effectively, we humans may not be around long enough to use our great technological progress on problems such as disease, poverty, and environmental degradation.
