A short talk by Cameron Herold about how messages sent (especially written ones) are often not the same as messages received. He demonstrates how emphasis on different words in a six-word sentence changes meaning and recommends confirming intent with the recipient to avoid miscommunication.
Chapters
Hey, have you ever had one of those experiences when you are talking to another person over slack or over email or over text and the message that you intend to be delivering isn't received? Or, or maybe you read something and you get super frustrated and upset and you call the person on it, they're like, no, that's not what I meant at all. I'd like you to read out this sentence. Write down the words, I didn't say you were beautiful. And then I want you to read that sentence out loud to yourself and put the emphasis on the first word. So it would be I didn't say you were beautiful. Then try it again, put the emphasis on the second. I didn't say you were beautiful. If you put the emphasis on the third word, I didn't say you were beautiful, it means something very different from if you put it on the fourth word, I didn't say you were beautiful, etc. So that six word sentence means six completely different things depending on which word you put the emphasis on. The problem with a lot of us right now in our communication is we believe that our message being delivered is our message received. And the reality is it's often not. The message that we're delivering is often very fast paced or a little bit too acerbic, or, you know, we have more content in our mind that maybe we're delivering or maybe we write it all out, but we put so much down that the other person doesn't read it or they skim through it. And often it is that, you know, message delivered is not necessarily the message being received. Written communication can often cause more conflict than any kind of verbal communication can. You know, certainly verbal communication can cause problems where tone, tonality and people's frustration can come out. That also can come out in written communication. So the key with this stuff is to make sure you think about the intent and to deliver the message to the other person and validate that they've heard back what you were intending them to hear. But also to remember that sometimes written communication can mean very different things depending on which word you put the communication in. So sometimes you'll see that you know, too long, didn't read, sometimes it doesn't matter if it's long, sometimes just even putting it down short, a six word sentence can often mean six completely different things. So make sure that you connect with the person you're communicating with to ensure that they understand your intent, bounce it around with them and make sure that the idea is stuck and that both sides are really clear.
