Unhelpful Hints

Communicating effectively is tough enough without outsiders constantly stepping in and telling you how you should be doing it better. It reminds of life as a new parents. Establishing your own rhythm with your new born is both challenging and wonderful. Leave it to others to muck up such an exhilarating time with one piece of unsolicited advice after another. I say "thanks but no thanks." Just because folks are parents themselves does not necessarily make them expert enough to begin telling new-parents how to do their job. One great thing about being a new parent is discovering new dimensions of life with your child. But I digress.

I concede that one purpose of this blog is to offer unsolicited guidance as to how to communicate more effectively. While I agree my so-called advice may be unsolicited, another goal of mine here is to instill in others a deeper appreciation of communicating well. Attempting to do this, however, I must acknowledge that not everything I say may be helpful. For instance, do people really need to be reminded how important it is to listen to others? Do people really need to be told two primary purposes of public relations are to persuade and to establish relationships? Perhaps not. Perhaps people already know all that.

Still, there is the reality that all of us need to be reminded of ways to communicate more effectively, particularly when so much miscommunication seems to swirl around us. This brings me back to "Unhelpful Hints." Here are a couple worth ignoring: people should not talk over others; people should not ignore the priorities or interests of others; people should not concern themselves with ways to sustain strong ties with others.  This kind of list, you might notice, is easily just as long as one of what people should do. To better reconcile this, perhaps we should all at least agree that communicating well is in the best interest of us all and that tolerating unhelpful or unwanted advice is  one of those things we will simply have to do.