I meet a few people who apparently wilfully and repeatedly misinterpret what I’m saying, even when told that wasn’t what I meant at all and I don’t know how to deal with that.
You mean like this?
“Man, that guy looks so gay, I just want to bash his fucking head in.”
“My brother is gay.”
“I didn’t mean gay, I meant, like, gay.”
Maybe you need to win their trust and improve your communication skills.
Not like that, at least not that I can generally detect—but I do agree that my communication skills could do with some improvement—which is odd, since I’ve had a ‘public-facing’ job for over 10 years and get a fair amount of practice talking to people and it seems that it hasn’t helped :(
It could be that even if it doesn’t seem like that to you, it sounds like that to them. Surely almost everyone has gone through lots of experiences where they interpret someone correctly to have said something offensive, at which point the offender attempts to weasel out of it; perhaps that’s the template you’re matching in their mind, even if it’s not what you’re doing. By comparison, the number of interactions where someone is trying to explain a difficult concept is pretty small, outside of certain small groups.
You mean like this?
“Man, that guy looks so gay, I just want to bash his fucking head in.”
“My brother is gay.”
“I didn’t mean gay, I meant, like, gay.”
Maybe you need to win their trust and improve your communication skills.
Not like that, at least not that I can generally detect—but I do agree that my communication skills could do with some improvement—which is odd, since I’ve had a ‘public-facing’ job for over 10 years and get a fair amount of practice talking to people and it seems that it hasn’t helped :(
It could be that even if it doesn’t seem like that to you, it sounds like that to them. Surely almost everyone has gone through lots of experiences where they interpret someone correctly to have said something offensive, at which point the offender attempts to weasel out of it; perhaps that’s the template you’re matching in their mind, even if it’s not what you’re doing. By comparison, the number of interactions where someone is trying to explain a difficult concept is pretty small, outside of certain small groups.