After spending 30+ years in the corporate world and consulting for the last 12 years I still find that there is a positive correlation between companies that have great communication and the health of their organization. We consistently talk about the importance of good communications and the perils bad communications, yet in the execution, most of us fall short in meeting our own expectations and those of others. There are many great communicators in history and in the world today. Look at John F. Kennedy or Martin Luther King, they were masters at concisely communicating a message to us through story and connection.
As humans, when we are listening to another person communicate, we will only interpret a conversation in one of two ways, either as an opportunity or a threat, there is really no middle ground, we fall on one side of the fence or the other. If you take the goal to deliver your message as an opportunity, even if it is a difficult message, you have a better chance to be seen as a great communicator. Many people are born with a talent for communicating and others have to develop it as a skill. The good news is that you can develop the skill to become an amazing communicator. The first step is by raising our awareness of the barriers to good communication so that we can address these obstacles quickly and even eliminate them.
Today’s Top 10 Communication Challenges
- Perceptual Differences
When we arrive in this world as a newborn baby, nature provides us with different capacities both physically and mentally. And we leave the hospital to enter our different nurture environments which further shape who we are and our styles of communication. Generally, by the age of five, the foundation has established our perception of the world and how we communicate. In other words, our persona has been molded by nature and nurture. Recognizing that this “persona” and perception is different for both us as the sender and the other person as the receiver is the first potential barrier to recognize. Everyone has their own way of looking at issues and decoding information. There can be a breakdown even when everyone is looking at the same situation but interpreting it differently. It means some will end up drawing conclusions different than…
