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Perception affects communication: Two-Minute Takeaway

By Paul Schaumburg posted 10-16-2017 14:06

  

“We don’t know who discovered water, but we have a pretty good idea it wasn’t a fish.” –media philosopher Marshall McLuhan

Perception is like a mental skin. Just as any physical sensation passes through our flesh, communication must filter through each individual’s frame-of-reference. No two are identical. Perception is not passive, but rather an active process of selecting, organizing, and interpreting information. Those elements explain why achieving communication can be difficult.

Many people see their own perceptions as reality. One mark of an educated person is the critical thinking skill to separate subjective perception from objective reality, or at least to realize that a difference might exist. Awareness of perceptual differences can increase empathy.

Probably the greatest problem in communication is the assumption of it. We reduce assumptions by distinguishing between objective facts and subjective inferences. Being specific improves accuracy. Simplicity improves clarity. As Lewis Carroll wrote in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, it’s best to “say what you mean.” How something is said often is more important than what is said.

Legendary communication teacher Dale Carnegie says we have only four contacts with the world by which people evaluate and classify us: what we do, how we look, what we say, and how we say it.

Gradual change often progresses unnoticed. Place a frog in boiling water, it immediately jumps out of the pot. If placed in lukewarm water with the temperature raised gradually, the frog will allow itself to be boiled to death. That lack of perceiving the change and its danger is the lesson of the parable of the boiled frog.

There’s often more than one perception of reality, depending upon perspective. In the story from India of six blind men examining an elephant, each encounters a different body part. The man who feels the trunk thinks an elephant is like a snake. The one who touches the tail believes an elephant is like a rope, etc. People can have somewhat accurate, but differing views of a situation, due to perspective.

We don't see things as they are.  We see them as we are. — writer Anais Nin

How does perception affect your communication?

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