Baseline Communication: Be Neutral While Communicating With New People

Time and time again throughout our lives many of us hear “be yourself whenever you are around other people” or something to that nature. This is good and true IF everyone were on the same or similar psychological and emotional development level. However, everyone has different levels of psychological and emotional development preventing them from being able to communicate the same way with everyone whom they come into contact with. Just think of those moments when you made a joke with someone new where you felt the joke was extremely funny, but the other person felt it was extremely offensive.

In this article I will explain what “Baseline Communication” is, its importance and how to utilize it within your own life when dealing with other people.

Baseline Communication:

Baseline communication is when meeting new people whom you’ve never met before, you start off your conversations with them as standard and neutral as possible, getting straight to the point, avoiding all jokes (or at least keeping them very light and general), and limiting your vocabulary to a standard understandable level until you know exactly what vocabulary and overall conversation level the other person or people are on. Overall maintaining your communication with them on a standard, neutral baseline level until you become certain of your overall limitations that exists when communicating with the new person or people. This takes consistent concentration and analyzing of the other person/people in order for you to become conscious of your limitations that exist when communications with them. This type of effort will be well worth it for you in the long run allowing communication to be as pleasant as possible for all parties involved and lessening embarrassment and controversy of any sort.

Things To Keep In Mind:

Listening, observation skills, and memory are all vital keys when meeting a new person. Listening to and analyzing the new person’s consistent tone of voice (their tonal baseline) for many people is an advanced skill that seriously needs to be developed unless you already have that developed. A person’s tone of voice offers a variety of information about them and how they feel about anything that they comment on. Listening to their choice of words and how they choose to put their sentences together is also key. This will also provide you the identification of what verbal level that they are currently on.

Memory is required with this baseline communication process when meeting a new person because after you recognize and analyze the information that you have received from observing the other person, you will have to remember as much as possible if not everything when communicating with them in the future.

Observe as many of their insecurities, likes, and dislikes. This is where you are able to identify their limitations and their likes and dislikes that will allow you to connect with them effectively.

Avoid making jokes during your first meeting with them as much as possible unless they are light and fun general jokes. Light jokes that doesn’t degrade anyone especially dealing with race, sexual orientation and religion. Making heavy jokes that degrade other people, without you first identifying your communication limitations that you may have with the new person, you might offend them and they might not want to speak and be around you anymore (especially if you offended them with a joke that dealt with a bad experience that created a present insecurity within them).

In summary

Being yourself is a very good thing to be in general, however, you being yourself is a peaceful thing for you, at the same time might be overbearing to another person due to their overall psychological and emotional sensitivity level. It’s kind of like a person who walks into an extremely dark room with an extremely bright light, walks up to another person and points the light directly at the face of the other person whom has been in the dark for quite some time. It is very overwhelming to the person whom has been in the dark for awhile and then out of the blue comes someone with a bright light and flashes it in front of them. I am sure you might have experienced this yourself at least once or more times within your own life.

Overall, until you know your limitations with the new person or people , I highly recommend that upon meeting them, avoid being aggressive.