Month: September 2022

‘Communication works for those who work at it.’ Communication is less of a talent and more of a skill. Most of us are not born with it. While some people are intuitively great communicators, it is not a skill limited to that minority. It’s something one can learn and master. The improvement in communication is directly proportionate to the investment of time and effort made into learning the skills required. It is my personal experience that bettering one’s communication is a life-long experience. There is always scope to make a better worded, more precise, more effective, resonating piece of communication. The more we communicate the nuances of it are learned and get imprinted in our minds.

Bernard Shaw famously said, ‘The single biggest problem with communication is the illusion that it has happened.’ Most of us are very often victims of this illusion. Past two decades have seen a huge change in pattern on how we communicate.

There is a folklore from India where a wiseman set out on a long pilgrimage with his wife. On the way, they were blessed with 12 children and upon each delivery, the man enquired whether the baby had a mouth. If the wife said “yes”, he would say, “God will take care of the one with mouth” and would ask the wife to abandon the baby then and there and proceed. Eleven children were deserted, since they had a mouth. The tale goes that after the 12th birth, when the husband asked whether the child had a mouth, the wife said he didn’t have a mouth in the hope that she may get to raise at least that child. It goes on to say that when she looked at the child after saying that, the child indeed was seen to have been born without a mouth.

Assuming the presence of right intentions, the only real hurdle standing between a great job done and a mediocre one is knowledge deficit.