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Avoiding Communication Breakdowns
Have you ever had a difficult, complex or emotional conversation with someone, and felt like you just weren’t getting through to one another? Have you ever felt so disconnected from the experience another person was trying to share with you that it left you feeling incredibly uneasy? If so, you have experienced what we refer to as a communication breakdown.
Picture yourself sitting in an auditorium, listening to a presenter, and all of a sudden, they start speaking in a different language that you don’t understand. How would you feel? Surprised, confused, marginalized, upset, left out, angry? You’d probably have every right to feel that way!
Now, imagine for a moment that you are hard of hearing, and the presenter foregoes using a microphone, leaving you with only a faint, muffled sound instead of a crisp, clear voice. Imagine that you have low vision and the print on the projected slides is just too small and blurry for you to read. How would that make you feel? How about being part of an audience incentivized by the speaker to stand up and join him in a frantic exercise, but having severe arthritis or pain in your knees, and feeling incredibly anxious about having to participate in that unexpected and potentially painful activity.
If you can imagine the uneasiness, the discomfort, and the disarray, then you can also imagine ways…
