John Wallen delves into the intricacies of communicating and understanding emotions in this video. Highlighting the challenges of accurately expressing feelings, Wallen introduces the concept of the “interpersonal gap.” This gap arises as individuals encode and decode emotions, leading to potential misinterpretations. The video emphasizes the ambiguity of emotional expressions and the importance of naming feelings for effective communication. Wallen suggests using perception checks to bridge the interpersonal gap, facilitating a deeper understanding of others’ emotions. Overall, the video underscores the significance of describing emotions, not just expressing them, for building genuine relationships and navigating interpersonal dynamics.
Transcript
Description of feelings. This is a crucial communication skill laid out by John Wallen as part of his series. Why are emotions so difficult? This will help explain it. The problem with the challenge is to communicate our own feelings accurately, or to understand the feelings, the emotions of another person. This is very, very difficult. Why is it so hard? Well, here’s why. As Wallen says in his model, the interpersonal gap, the sender over here sends a message, encodes some kind of message in the world, and there’s an infinite number of possible feelings and emotions, or combinations of emotions, that might be going on inside this person over here. Then there’s the receiver over there who sees this and decodes it, and there’s an infinite number of nuances in terms of the emotions and the feelings. It might be a part of their interpretation of this. So there’s always some kind of emotion, even if it’s just a teeny emotion. And in both people, and boy, when they don’t match up, things can get really, really ugly. So here we go. Let’s take this for example. Let’s take blushing. Let’s say a person is blushing. They haven’t said anything; they’re just blushing. So there’s some emotion being expressed in a way made manifest in their body. Well, how many feelings could it mean when someone is blushing? Expressions of emotions can take many different forms. For instance, bodily changes like blushing or muscle tension, or your heart rate or something like that.
This is what happens when an emotion is present. The body is, in a sense, manifesting it. There’s stuff going on in our bodies, maybe even without our awareness, that is connected with that emotion. Actions. We can yell, gesture, slam a door, or walk in and throw down a report on somebody’s desk. You haven’t said anything, but those actions are an expression of some kind of emotion in us. Or we can use our words: “I’m really ticked off,” or “I really love you,” or “I really appreciate that report,” or “I like that you do things on time.” You can name it. Okay, use your words. As we used to say to our kids, “Use your words.” Any specific expression of emotions can come from very different feelings. The blush could come from feeling pleased, proud, angry, embarrassed, or uneasy. So the same expression of emotion is essentially ambiguous. When we’re expressing an emotion like smiling, it can be ambiguous. It can be covering up something. It can be not quite accurate in terms of what it is we’re trying to say. So, the interpersonal gap, which is the core of all of this, says that you have a sender over here who encodes some kind of inner state, which is their emotion. They encode it into an action that is public.
The receiver over here sees the action, decodes it, has an interpretation, and then they have some kind of emotional response, which is also private. This is the interpersonal gap that John Wallen describes, and it’s especially present in emotions. When we’re using our words to describe ideas, those are relatively easy to do. But describing our feelings, our emotions, is much more difficult and much less likely. Describing our ideas is a whole lot easier than describing our feelings. How many times in the last 24 hours have you named an emotion? I bet you haven’t. Yet, at the same time, all day long, your emotions, my emotions, are constantly expressing themselves. Why? Because emotions are simply energy in motion with a label attached. Okay, that’s it. Something’s happening in the body, and we attach a label to it. Describing feelings, now that’s a whole different deal. You name it: “I feel angry,” “I feel confused.” You can use a simile: “It’s like this.” A simile says something is like this. You can say, “I feel like a small fish in a big ocean of sharks.” That communicates an emotion. Or you can name an urge: “I’d like to,” “I feel like breaking something.” I remember when I was writing my book, after sitting there for hours and hours, I felt like jumping up, turning on some rock and roll music, or throwing a chair out the window or something like that.
That’s an expression of an emotion. Here’s a pop quiz. Let’s see how well you do. Are these descriptions of a feeling, or are they an expression of a feeling? Okay, someone becomes silent in a meeting. Someone says, “She’s a wonderful person,” “Be quiet,” “You shouldn’t have,” “It’s way too expensive a gift for you to get for me.” Are these descriptions of a feeling or expressions of a feeling? Are they ambiguous or specific? Every one of these is an expression of a feeling. They’re ambiguous. You don’t know for sure what the feeling of the person is. You’re guessing. You’re having to guess. How about this one? “I feel embarrassed,” “We won and I feel excited,” “I enjoy her writing skill,” “I like the slides in your presentation.” These are all descriptions. They actually name the emotion, so there’s no ambiguity in what’s being said. Why is this distinction important? Because a real relationship, even at work, includes emotions—things like loyalty, trust, and respect. And those are all things that must be present in a high-performing team in the workplace. Those are emotions, folks. Those are feelings. Secondly, negative emotions in a relationship can reveal we have some work to do. Like if you find yourself having negative emotions about someone, that means there’s something that needs to happen in the relationship to address it.
Your relationship and our own emotional reactions may reveal truth or a mistaken interpretation. So when someone is interacting with you and an emotion comes up in you, that can be a clue that you might need to check it out and see if your interpretation is accurate. When you’re expressing your emotions, it actually invites—indeed, it requires—interpretation, which means that it invites misinterpretation. So here we go. The interpersonal gap. This person over here puts an action out into the world. It’s inferred. The interpersonal gap occurs. How are you going to bridge the gap? You use a perception check. I wish Wallen had called it an emotion check because that’s what it is. You say, “I want to understand your feelings, basically. Is this the way you feel?” and then you name the feeling: “Are you upset with me?” “Are you happy?” “I get the impression you’re angry about something, is it about the report being late?” Great perception check. This is how you bridge the interpersonal gap and bridge the gap that occurs when people are expressing emotions, and you’re not sure. You want to check out for sure that the impact of what they said had on you matches where they were coming from. It’s a very important skill to learn to describe your emotions and not just express them.
