Every day you miscommunicate something to someone. You don’t do it intentionally but it happens. It actually happens all the time, you just don’t know it.
The only time you realize there is a miscommunication is when something bad happens and even then you may not think it was because of bad communication.
Almost all conflicts (fights, arguments, etc.) are caused by poor communication. If you wanted to choose one skill to better your life today both professionally and personally, it is to improve your communication skills.
“Communication”, like the words “mission” and “vision”, has become a generic term overused by corporate Human Resources Departments. All of the power and meaning of these words have been lost and people have forgotten the importance of good communication in their lives.
Almost every company has some type of training on effective communication skills but does it really help people become great communicators? Unfortunately not. Many of these trainings have great content and tips but they don’t work because they never get to the root of the problem.
Most people tend to believe that because they were at a particular event (e.g. meeting, discussion, presentation, etc.), their account of the situation is correct. They generalize their perceptions of reality to be true for everyone and assume that what they saw is what really happened.
That is not true.
Even for all of you who have perfect vision, there are things you are blind to that you don’t realize.
Watch this 1-minute video and follow the instructions in the video before reading on (this is actually part of a commercial but you only need to watch from the beginning up to the 1:06. The rest is not important):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hwCzasHBXNc
This experiment not only shows the power of attention but more importantly how our realities are based on our perception and that our perceptions are based on what we focus on. Depending on our experience, our mood, our thoughts, etc., we focus on different things of the same event. This means we only see a part of reality. To be more specific, we only see OUR part of reality.
Despite this being true for everyone, most people don’t realize this. They don’t know what they didn’t see and will generalize their portion of reality to be the full reality. This is why so many people communicate badly. They stubbornly hold on to their “truth” and they discount everyone else’s “truth”.
If you were shown the above video only once and without mention of the gorilla, you probably would have lived your whole life thinking that there were only two teams passing the ball around and that the white team passed the ball around 13 times. If someone later told you there was a gorilla in that video, you would probably argue against it fervently.
Life works the same way. We can’t rewind to see what really happened and arguments start when we think we have the whole truth even though we only have part of the story. Did you ever accuse your spouse of doing something they didn’t do? Did you ever disagree with your boss about how your meeting went? If so, you’ve experienced this phenomenon first hand.
Improve Your Communication by:
- Realizing that your perception of reality is partial and dependent of your experiences
- Believing that people have good intentions and being curious about their perception of the world. Even though their actions or ideas may not make sense in your world, it is very possible that it makes perfect sense in their world.
- Taking other people’s perceptions of reality to be as true as your own
Source: http://www.embracepossibility.com/blog/reasons-why-people-are-bad-communicators/
