And what do you mean by that?

Introduction

For as long as I can remember I have been obsessed with communication. It is probably why I got into sales and marketing. I have been obsessed with not only how we communicate and what it tells us about our thinking, behaviour and actions but also how often we miscommunicate and misunderstand each other.

I may have told you this story before but as a small child, I spent a lot of time in the company of groups of adults. Often, I was sat in the room listening to conversations that I probably shouldn’t have been hearing and often being told to ‘close my ears’, however you are meant to do that I have never discovered. But the one factor that I noticed so often was people miscommunicating, talking past and at each other. Often stating the same points and opinions but in such different ways that somehow it would snowball into arguments and misunderstanding.

Often as a way of gaining understanding, and I now know a way of me trying to ‘cool the situation and stop the upset’ I would turn to my mom and say things like “when so and so said this, did they actually mean this which a was the same point that the other person was making?” She would often remark that I had a natural ability to read between the lines and no doubt this was one of the reasons I was allowed to stay in the room listening to adult conversation. And I no doubt where I developed my listening and reading between the line’s skills. If indeed I do have them.

I am a quiet guy by nature. I am an analytical and creative thinker. I am introverted. I am, I think a decent listener, but I am not the greatest 0rator. This is probably why I prefer the medium of written over the spoken word. Don’t get me wrong I am much better today than I was previously, but this is down to studying this subject in anger from the early 2000s until now, and long will it remain. That said I still fail massively on too many occasions and I am sure my partner would even question my listening ‘skills’ at times.

This is why I wanted to write this book. I like to think of myself as a data-driven sales and marketing professional and a specialist in behavioural communication. This is where my training, qualifications, and experience sit and it is through that lens that I want to take a look at the world of miscommunication, misinformation, and misunderstanding because if we do find a way of addressing these areas, we can have better conversations and move the debates we need to have forward.

I am going to write the first draft of this new book live on my website. So, if you are seeing this there please excuse the typos and grammatical mistakes but this is an experiment worth trialling, I feel.

Another note is that I am going to try and use satire, humour, sarcasm, metaphor and similia. As a former SEO guy and a hacker of the search engine and social network algorithms, I am experimenting with these tools as a way of beating their suppression engine. So, stay tuned on that.

----

Photo by cottonbro from Pexels