Thursday, March 8, 2012

Communication rant.

Communication is one of the most valuable skills someone can have.  In my mind, it's one of the most important aspects to life, especially in a professional setting (but really in any setting at all).  I've always been a good communicator, and I think that a lot of my irritation with bad communicators comes from my experience in high school.  High school for me was not the best time of my life (I'll discuss that in a later post), and I got seriously burned time and again because of people having a strange and, to me, incomprehensible inability to communicate.  I don't know if any of you readers have ever been the victim of bad communication, but it hurts.  A lot.

At work a couple of weeks ago, I got to the office and didn't hear anything from anyone for 5 hours.  No emails, phone calls, nada.  I just sat in the office on my own for most of the day, trying to occupy myself.  It would have been completely fine if I had known what was going on.  That's where the communication thing comes in.  Even a simple text would have made me feel better.  I don't actually care that I was there for 5 hours before anyone showed up, but I do care that I didn't know why no one had showed up for 5 hours (which I still actually don't know).

So that's it.  Communication.  It's really simple and it's a much more considerate way to deal with people.

5 comments:

  1. Are you really able to determine if you are a good communicator or not? Shouldn't that determination be left up to the people you communicate with?

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    1. When you know what a good communicator is, you know how to be one. It's just a matter of choosing to do so.

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    2. ^ Being a good communicator is being considerate while still knowing how to get your point across.

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  2. I would beg to differ. Recognizing a problem is only a tiny step to fixing it, and what a good communicator is is different to each person. You may recognize what you like in communication, but that isn't the same for every person.

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  3. I have to agree with Anonymous on two counts - I think you can know what a good communicator is but fail to communicate well. I also think that it is often what other people think of your communicating that determines if you are "good" or not, not what you think of your own communication.

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