Article Link: http://exchangepress.com/article/is-anybody-out-there-listening/5010482/
It is a common belief that what we have in such cases is a failure to communicate. That's not true. We have communicated, but we have not sent the message that we intended. It's almost impossible not to communicate. Even stony silence may communicate something to another person present, whether the sender intends to do so or not.Have you ever wondered why sometimes people just don't seem to hear what you say? Imagine yourself as Betty Jones in the situation above. You're standing in the door, whatever errand you were on interrupted. You get a burst of messages from a busy person with a phone in her hand. It is quite possible that you are not even focused on the messages being sent, but are instead distracted by other factors.
To understand how communication is going wrong and how to fix it, a simple model of the process can be helpful. A sender has a concept or idea which first must be encoded into a message of spoken or written words or other nonverbal signals. The message is then transmitted through some channel or medium to a receiver. The receiver (or ...