It’s such a hard topic and taken for granted. Maybe I can put it in a category that we are sure of, we will get next breath. Let me explain why I think it’s so hard. Let’s first talk about factors which are not the same for you and me but we assume so.
- Words: There are different interpretations of the same word! If we living in closed society then this problem doesn’t exist but that’s true, we are global citizen, we interact with many people who have different regional and cultural backgrounds
- Sentences: The way one one put together words is different for people with difference on command of language
- Emotions: In my opinion this is the biggest culprit, anyway, depending upon your emotion state you interpret the same thing differently, also articulate your sentence differently. Emotions also impact our focus so we create our own words while listening and don’t listen to words which are spoken.
Based on the above factors, if I assume there is 50% chance that I speak what I intend to and 50% chance that the listener will understand what I intend to, then overall there is only a 25% chance of success. Meaning we are running our world on 25% success of communication.
You might be thinking here writing comes to rescue, I would say yes as it has a little higher success rate as speakers can think twice while writing and listeners can read twice while reading. But the cost of increase in success is time, its way slower form of communication. And still prone to all the problems described above.
What I want to say with this information is if we acknowledge these factors and somehow keep our emotions more stable then that’s the world where I want to be.