Leave the elephant at the door

In one of my first communications classes in college, the lecturer preached the value of metacommunication (communication about communication) in improving relationships.

To cite WikiAnswers’ example:

Ex. Talking to someone who is angry: (You do not seem receptive to listening to me now. Are we having a problem? Should I try again later?)

There are instances, however, when the feedforward absolutely makes me cringe. Such as when a speaker says something like

What I’m going to touch on next can be rather boring…

or

I hope I haven’t made you all fall asleep yet…

There’s a fine line between being self-aware or self-effacing and shooting yourself in the foot. Ironically enough, the next topic on the syllabus was self-fulfilling prophecies.

In recent weeks, I witnessed two such self-inflicted disasters – one involving a twenty-year-old kid and another a very senior agency presenter – both of which made me wonder if they had considered what they were trying to achieve by saying what they did.

It’s one thing to acknowledge the elephant in the room. It’s another to drag Jumbo in.