This is the information age, everybody tells me. This is the age of communications. This is the age where we have all exploded – the whole generation – from being a neighborhood fixture, to being a global citizen.
We speak to the world. And the world misunderstands!!
Most of us need to upgrade our skills here.
The right communication is not about being clear, concise and crisp anymore. It’s not enough that your message reaches its’ intended audience correctly. It is crucial, now more than ever, that the received message also carries the right intentions and emotions that it was originally sent with!
Why should that be a difficult task? Mainly because while listening, a typical person tends to add in his or her own perceptions, prejudices and feelings in the experience of deciphering the sender’s message. The message is unwittingly altered, often without any knowledge of the sender.
Liken it to a scenario where a soft dough ball is being passed among a number of people. Every time it changes hands – it changes shape. Someone squeezes it too hard, someone else stretches it, yet someone transfers the blue ink marks from his fingers to the ball. And everyone has added their own fingerprints to the ball.
We add our own ‘mind-prints’ to the communications we send and receive.
A successful communication is one where we make the message delivery and reception so robust, that it becomes immune to the environmental factors. We ‘vaccine’ the message, so that it doesn’t succumbs to the misunderstanding epidemic!! We build in so much information redundancy into the message, that it becomes difficult for even the noisiest environments to misinterpret the message.
Does it mean that instead of saying, “Will you do the dishes?”
We say,
“Honey, I love you. And while I’ll go to world’s end for you, would you mind taking care of the dishes for this one night, so that I can watch the meaningless football game on T.V. , and not feel guilty about it?”
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