The Curse of Careless Communication

I wanted to start this email with a funny anecdote of me miscommunicating, so I decided to ask my wife.

“Can you think of an example when I communicated badly?”

That was a mistake, it was as if she went to the library and pulled out a thick folder.

“Where should we start?”

In the workplace communication is key to exchanging ideas, collaborating and building trust. Conversely, poor communication is a common source of frustration, arguments and distrust.

Yet, when we study science and engineering there are rarely courses on how to communicate well. Sometimes it is even assumed that if the idea is good enough it will speak for itself. However, it is usually not that simple.

Ten years ago I had an experience where my idea was not good enough to speak for itself. I needed people to buy into it. So I had to improve my communication skills, and learn how to influence people, to get them to see things from my point of view. Since then I’ve had an active interest in this topic, and recently I’ve started writing up some of my thoughts. Below are links to three posts of mine on the theme of communication.

• One challenge when communicating is that subtle differences in phrasing can produce drastically different results. I outline some examples of this in Making effective use of words.
• A common source of frustration is receiving unsolicited advice. In this post I discuss some tactics to avoid falling into the trap of giving Unsolicited Advice.
• On a long enough timeline we are all likely to fall into situations where miscommunication results in frustration and arguments. When this happens it can be useful to have strategies to fall back on, here are 7 techniques I've used to get out of arguments.

I hope some of this is useful. Stay awesome! 😃

Best wishes,
Tjelvar

PS. The biggest faux pas of mine, stored in my wife’s folder, took place 8 years ago. We were in an elevator going up to a New Year’s party. My wife gave out an exasperated sigh as she looked into the elevator mirror. I thought she was unhappy with her dress, so I wanted to say something sympathetic. However, what came out was: “Yes, I agree, that dress used to look better on you”. To make things worse, my wife wasn't even thinking about her dress when she sighed. But she sure did think about it after my comment…

Somehow we are still together — not sure how though — particularly after having reviewed some of the material in my wife's folder. 😅

PPS. Feedback is really valuable to me. Please feel free to let me know what you liked and what could be improved by replying to this email.