The Blooms and Thorns of Communication

Words are one of the most powerful things we possess.

They can be used to create something beautiful between people - a blossoming of encouragement, hope, and building up the other.

Words can also lead to the opposite: a thorny tangle of discouragement, despair, and tearing down others. (Is the image making sense yet? 😅 )

But here's the thing: it's not as straightforward as deciding what mode to enter.

Assumptions, biases, motivations, body language, self-awareness, contexts, and much more can easily shift the first category into the second. Great words, unaccompanied by corresponding action, can become hypocrisy. Best intentions can count for little when we are haphazard in the words we choose. It happens to all of us.

Truly empathetic communication that leads to mutual understanding and thriving takes more time, care, attention, skill, and knowledge than we often afford it.

And while there are many, many ways to improve at all of this, in today's distributed workforce we're going to need all of the help we can get. It's one of the things we're working on at Crewjoy - a platform to assess your outgoing communication for its alignment with the specific and unique needs and styles of the actual recipient(s).

Good grammar is table stakes. Deeply empathetic and personalized communication is the future!

‍