Texting : How it's affecting personal and professional relationships...

Texting is one of the most successful and most adopted modes of communication over the last 10 years and is considered to be the most convenient,effective and efficient mode for conducting business as well.

Everyone from technology to real estate, from large to small business has adopted the mode of texting for internal and external communications .

For a lot of people (including myself) expressing themselves becomes easier while they write, plus, while you have to disclose something unpleasant, texting works like a charm. You can just hit send and be done with it. We do it at some point or the other, everyone does.

But there are a lot of things that we experience and feel just because things are communicated through text, in the form of whatsapp messages from a friend or Slack or any IM from our colleague or manager.

Here are 5 things and a bonus point about the experiences we have, and things we fail to acknowledge most of the time while communicating nonverbally, especially through an informal mode of communication i.e. TEXTs:

1. Balance

2. The voice of feedbacks

3. Understanding that they might be busy or unaware

4. Over communicate

5. Empathy

Bonus Point

Balance : No matter the space(friendly or professional) or person, everyone should understand the value of balance between how much information needs to be delivered through a message. A lot of time we have things or information that needs to be passed on, but we fail to decide on the right way to communicate it. It is crucial that we judge if the whole information should be supplied over the message, or a real conversation over a call or meeting is needed to pass the information properly.

The voice of feedbacks : Feedback is not something that is only given in a professional setting. We are always giving feedback to our family and friends in different ways, and their informality will not stop them from being called feedback. It is scientifically proven that when we are reading a text from someone we know, while reading their text we can hear their voice in our heads. Positive feedbacks are positive but when it comes to negative feedback, they mostly come after something that didn't go right. Logical, correct? (If you mess up a client call your superiors will give you feedback, while everyone says feedback is feedback there is no negative or positive in it. but there is, and everyone knows it ) Here is why we are talking about it: When you are giving a feedback or receiving a feedback which is not positive: First, if you are a person giving the feedback, I would always recommend against sharing feedback over message only, feedback should always be followed on paper after a call. Here is the reason, while someone is expecting a negative feedback they are already beating themselves up over it (at least most of them) , a negative feedback over a text changes your voice in their head and they read it in a tone you cannot control, they can read a feedback as if you are yelling or sarcastically laughing and that will make it worse.

Secondly, If you are receiving feedback which is not positive, it is crucial that you do not let your state of mind control their voice and their tone of that feedback. Always reach out to the person who gave you the feedback and talk about it. This will change everything, and save you from resenting anyone unnecessarily for some good time. While all this sound so official, this is how it will roll the dice in personal experience , for example you are having a conversation with your girlfriend/boyfriend, they said “I think you should not wear that shirt with those pants” or “those shoes with that dress” (the lamest, right) if you are not very positive today or have insecurities about your dressing sense, you’ll just feel that "she/he dont like my dressing sense", and than where that train of thought can go, you know it very well. How to make it better? Call them , ask them for their opinion (or share yours), it's a feedback right, just talk it through, so if you are the one receiving or sending something like this, it's better to give a call and chat through it.

Understanding that they might be busy or unaware : If you get anxious just by looking at the number of pending messages you need to respond to, this one is for you. Let me try and explain this through a personal example, A lot of times when you work with leaders, a team with a critical job role or literally anyone. Firstly, I learnt that, it is unjustified to expect someone to respond to messages with the same urgency that you do(especially for the ones that are not actually urgent) , a study called "Large scale study of text messaging use" done by Nokia Research center, shows that more than 80% of the text messages we send out are non critical for relationships and business. Second thing I learnt is that, they might be busy. A lot of times especially during and after COVID when most of us are working permanently from a home/remotely/hybrid setting, it is important to stay connected and in touch. So yeah, when you have to continuously stay in touch with people you do not practically meet or possibly having never physically met, you need to understand that always making your thoughts run to a place where you feel, “she is ignoring me on purpose” or “he doesn't care” just think, give them a benefit of doubt, that they might be busy or they never saw the message. NOTE**If it sometimes gets difficult visit my instagram page and you will find small bits of everything we learnt together.

Over communicate: Over communication has a lot of benefits, extra details hardly hurt anyone, everytime you are sending a fresh text to someone, rather than expecting them to respond to you just because “YOU” texted, put the background in the first message you send out, make it detailed, share why you are reaching out even if it's to a friend. We learnt in my last blog about adult friendships, everyone is busy in their life, a little or good context about why you expect someone’s time and attention will never hurt. This will not only decrease the amount of time others take to respond to your messages but also increase the urgency of things for them, they may help you get to the right places quickly.

Personally I sometime dont feel too comfortable (or sometimes lazy) about writing out a para with the whole detail of why I am texting or pinging someone, what I do is, i try to put one “because” in my first message anyhow, and it brings a whole lot of meaning to the message I am sending and the value to the time I am requesting. Then in the second message I request for 5 minutes to chat about it, if possible. And here you go: a recipe for effective messaging.

Empathy Everyone knows what empathy is, but we forget the value of it. While we live in a generation where marketing is happening over text, it is unshocking that literally every conversation in some way is passed in the form of a text message or a ping. Just one thing I would always want you to remember is read your message and imagine what is the worst way someone can read it.

For example, this statement - “Do you have any idea how this works?” Now hear yourself say this in a really sweet way , arrogant way, sarcastically and practically yelling, you can read it in all these tones. Right? While it is accomplished that if the person reading a text is having a bad day, he will always read everything in the worst tone possible. So why not just take one moment and do this with every message especially to the ones that are about the person reading it. Not only will it make things better for you but it will magically make those relationships strong.

Bonus point: Emojis : A recent study done by, Research Center of Journalism and Social Development, Renmin University of China, Beijing, China says that, emojis are non-verbal cues with rich emotional meanings, emoji are an important medium for interaction and emotional communication on the Internet.Emoji can help users to convey feelings and understand the meaning of a text.

I loved how Zendesk explained in their blog, Bottom line is, email and text-based communication lacks facial expression—unless we add it. In what’s known as the “negativity bias,” we tend to read emails more negatively than intended by the sender. According to psychologist Daniel Goleman, emotions dilute as the message moves between sender to receiver. If the sender feels positive about the email, the receiver generally feels neutral. If the sender feels neutral, then the receiver may read it as a negative. Help your colleagues and customers out by providing an emotional cue. It’s simple: just add some extra punctuation. 🙂 So, in the present world where texting is the favorite mode of communication, putting a smiley 😀 at the end of the text is not gonna hurt anything. Try it. Conclusion : Everything you say, shows a lot about yourself and your character. So while we are building our character and our lives everyday. Why not employ these small things in our mode of communications? while you text your mother or wife “I am busy” just put a small “because'' and turnaround time in there, and dont forget to put a small heart ♥️. And turn your “I am busy” into “I am busy because I have a lot to do here at work, let me call you tomorrow in the morning ♥️ ” , it will take you 10 more seconds to type that (even if you are a really slow texter) but that can turn the anxiety of the other person in a completely different way. One text sent in a different and a better way can help someone get a good night's sleep. If it's a form of communication and it makes our life efficient, let's not forget to keep it effective as well. Thank you for reading, See you next Friday ! BeAwesome_BeYou #Thefriendlypsycho