A Baker’s Dozen Sure Ways to Fail at Communicating

By

Bill Cottringer

Since babble is the main rule today in communication, here are a baker’s dozen sure ways to be highly successful at miscommunicating:

1. Reverse the adapted Carpenter’s Rule of talking once and listening twice because going against nature (having one tongue and two mouths) is not very smart, almost guaranteeing failure single-handedly. People like to be listened to, accepted and understood and you don’t want to succeed at doing that.


2. Make sure your project an exceptionally strong sense of arrogance, superiority, certainty, judgment and control. These are all  excellent ways to increase emotional defensiveness. People hate these things and so this is a sure way to hinder good communication; in fact there probably won’t be any communication at all.


3. Practice the main termite of poor communication: Assume, assume and assume—without verifying any of it, because if you keep doing a thing that doesn’t work you will surely achieve failure and be sure about it too.


4. Don’t ever doubt yourself or seek feedback as to how well or poorly you are doing, because that will jeopardize failure. It is safe to assume if you practice these dozen failure tips with due diligence, you will in fact be highly successful at failing to communicate.


5. Make sure you replace simple, clear sensible stuff with complex, foggy nonsensical end-runs that guarantee misunderstanding, confusion, distrust and great miscommunication.


6. Emphasize your poor communications skills with lots of negative non-verbal mannerisms that convey negativity, hostility, ego-mania, defensiveness, finger-pointing, blaming, complaining and disagreeability. When all else fails to help you fail, this will succeed (in total failure).


7. Follow the adapted Real Estate Law of the three most important miscommunication tips:  Interrupt, interrupt and interrupt. That is the best way to throw off potential understanding on either person’s part, which you certainly don’t want to risk in trying to be the master of miscommunication. If by chance this doesn’t work you can always go underground with your personal, self-serving hidden agenda to confuse things further and build more distrust.


8. Be open about manipulating and strategizing others with lots of slippery, but obvious dishonesty that can often shut down communication instantly or quicker.


9. Seek first to be understood and don’t worry too much about understanding the other person. This will probably eliminate any listening, which you want.


10. Make sure you disagree with adequate overbearing judgment and criticism, flavored with some annoying sarcasm and outright rudeness. This almost always works.


11. Inflate your ego and let it out of its cage to bite the other person with great annoyance. Other people definitely prefer humility so that will assure failure. 


12. Never make an effort to clarify miscommunication because that might work and you surely don’t want that. Clarification is on the taboo list. And whatever you do, never admit being wrong.


13. Never know anything about your “audience” because that would give you clues you don’t want about how to communicate successfully, which is not part of your agenda. However, you may want to find out some hot buttons to push the wrong way because they can help you miscommunicate better.

Warning: The disclaimer to all this is, if you follow each of these tips to the best of your ability, you will probably not have anyone left to communicate with.