That’s Not What I Thought You Said, The Clarity Difference.

How many times have you failed to do what someone expected, or someone failed to do what you expected because the communication was not clear? If you are like most of us the answer is many times and sometimes with potential high impact results.

How many times has someone failed to respond to a request you never made?

Obviously, you thought you made a clear request but many times we are not clear and fail to verify that the person we are making the request of is hearing the intended request. This is also something that happens all the time with impacts ranging from small to meaningful.

Why is clarity so difficult?

We may assume that the person we are trying to communicate with has the same worldview as we do. Sometimes we are right and many times we are wrong. We all tend to think certain beliefs we have are universal and most of the time they are not. We all filter information through our life filter. As we have more experiences, we tend to look for confirmation of our beliefs and we can always find them, and our world view fails to grow or may tend to shrink. How our beliefs are established is a very big topic that is well researched and going any deeper into that topic is not the point of this brief post.

This is just a brief awareness post. If you are aware that communication will always be a challenge no matter when, with whom or on what subject you will be better prepared to take the extra time to establish clarity by asking for it. There are plenty of tools to help you learn to communicate better and all I want to do is raise your awareness that the risk of miscommunication is very high especially in highly charged work environments and it will serve you well to? be continually alert of the need to establish clarity. Make no assumptions just take the time to ask the question or make the comment necessary to establish clarity.