When you’re communicating with anyone, whether it’s through online writing or in-person speaking…

You can expect some “loss” in your communication.

The receiving person won’t get 100% of what you’re trying to convey (and vice-versa).

Growing up, it felt a lot like the adults in my life didn’t understand this.

“I’ll explain it once, and if they ask repeated questions, they weren’t listening!”

Or worse: “they didn’t understand.”

Your communication will never be r3eceived exactly as you intended.

You must accept this as fact.

Use active listening, slowing down, and reflecting back to mitigate as much as you can.

#tvz

Mandy Brown via Zettelkasten/People/Austin Kleon

Orig Note

All communication involves some amount of signal loss—some information or context or sentiment (or some combination of all three) is distorted or lost as one person communicates to another. The amount of lossiness can and will vary—a skilled communicator or listener may be able to reduce it, while someone who is very distracted or stressed-out may unintentionally do the reverse—but its presence is inevitable and unavoidable. It isn’t a problem that can be eliminated; all we can do is mitigate it.

The most impactful mitigation strategy is to accept that lossiness exists. Simply adopting the mindset that signal loss is normal shifts your attention in ways that start to reduce it. Most miscommunication happens because we aren’t aware of the potential for it, or because we presume it’s unlikely rather than the default state of affairs. If you are aware of the likelihood that some of what you say is getting lost—and, conversely, that you aren’t hearing or absorbing everything that other people are trying to tell you—you are already three-quarters of the way to reducing the signal loss down to something sustainable, if not inconsequential.

Put another way: it’s lack of awareness to lossiness that dooms most conversations to miscommunication, not the lossiness itself.

Once you’re aware—and that awareness has to be something you hold steady, any time you are communicating with someone else, which is all the time—there are lots of habits you can adopt to reduce it:

• When listening to someone else, really listen, without trying to imagine how you’ll respond or anticipating what they’ll say next. This is harder than it seems, and it takes practice—but you can do it.
• When you think you’ve heard someone, reflect back what you heard and ask if you got it right. 
• When sharing information with someone else, prompt them to reflect back, and check to see if your message was received the way you intended it to be. 
• Try to slow communication down, when you can. This seems counterproductive—you’ve got things to do and so little time to do them—but lossiness increases with speed. Take your time and you can avoid time-consuming miscommunications later.