Communicating With Virtue

Throughout human history, we've sought ways to improve ourselves and our ability to communicate, cooperate, and live well with others. Across cultures and generations, people have developed traditions, ethics, moral teachings, customs, and laws to guide human conduct and strengthen the bonds that make community possible.

These ancient and continuing efforts find enduring expression in the virtues.

Virtues represent qualities of character through which we seek to refine our humanity. Honesty, courage, compassion, wisdom, patience, respect, and other virtues aren't merely ideals inherited from the past. They're living practices-ways of bringing greater intention to how we think, act, relate, and communicate.

Communication is more than the exchange of words. It's the human process through which we reveal ourselves, encounter others, negotiate differences, repair relationships, create understanding, and build community. The quality of our communication therefore depends not only upon what we say, but upon the qualities of character we bring to the encounter.

In harnessing the virtues, we seek something both ancient and distinctly contemporary: to refine our humanity by becoming more intentional in how we encounter one another.

This is where the virtues become essential.

The Ten Communication Virtues explored in this book offer a practical framework for doing precisely that. They invite us to move beyond simply communicating more effectively toward communicating more truthfully, attentively, empathetically, respectfully, compassionately, patiently, openly, discerningly, courageously, and wisely.

The goal isn't perfect communication. It's virtuous communication-the continuing practice of becoming more mindful of what we bring to every human encounter.

For when we refine the way we communicate with one another, we participate in the larger and timeless work of refining our humanity.