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 through which an unfortunate lack of consideration for inclusion principles might easily lead to communication breakdowns for your audience members. These situations can occur at any given time, and they are sadly very easy to cause. And they are not limited to our introverted audience members either.

It’s important to point out that the breakdown in communication can and should never be put on the listener.

It’s always your responsibility as a communication professional to ensure that as many audience members as possible are taken into consideration when creating content and planning for the live, in-person or virtual experiences you craft for your audience.

A little extra planning for inclusion can go a long way

Let’s face it, we have all experienced some sort of communication breakdown from time to time, for one reason or another. There are many potential obstacles to consider, so let’s take into account what we need to be aware of, and strive to be as inclusive as we can be! Many disabilities are not noticeable, and we tend to overlook what we don’t see… So make it a point to remember and go out of your way to include those in our audiences who are so often dismissed, or forgotten. It’s about so much more than just the obvious barriers of blindness and deafness. This is about another person’s perception of the information you are sharing as a speaker, and how it is received, mentally, emotionally, and physically. That spectrum – and the potential for gaps – is incredibly broad.

You have to make sure that you are catering to, and accounting for anyone who might feel disregarded. It’s not an easy thing to keep track of! Some examples of such barriers include information overload, which is when audience members receive too much information and can’t process it all.

Another such example might be micro-aggressions stemming from ableism that are derogatory or even abusive to people with disabilities, to minorities, etc. The systemic exclusion and oppression of people with disabilities that is expressed through actions and language is a lot more prevalent than we realize.

Ableist language is even more common, normalized even, and many of us are guilty of using ableist language without even being aware of it. Words like “crazy, “dumb”, or “lame” are just a few examples of words that can trigger some people, and you should try to avoid them at all costs. You would likely never use blatantly offensive or derogatory words in your presentation to hurt someone on purpose, so always keep in the back of your mind how your words can affect others.

Keeping the lines of communication flowing for everyone in your audience can be a pretty daunting task. Don’t overthink it. Just keep an open mind. If you are aware and work to create inclusive experiences, not only will you have more appreciative viewers, but you will also naturally stand out as a speaker that is truly inclusive. This, in turn, may just get you more business, because those very people who you thought about and worked hard to make feel involved, will inevitably share your information with others and will be sure to talk about you in a great light!