What Did You Say?

In a couple of weeks, my friend Bruce and I will be presenting at the IACP (International Academy of Collaborative Professionals) Forum in San Francisco on informed consent in the collaborative process.  A large part of our presentation centers on what people understand, and how the same word can mean different things to different people.   Sometimes the emotions of the speaker or the listener can affect what's heard.  Sometimes it's the speaker's or the listener's experience, upbringing, profession, family that affects meaning.  How different words mean different things to different people was driven home to me today.  I am involved in a collaborative case.  There are five professionals involved:  two lawyers, two coaches/mental health professionals and one financial professional.  We had a professional team phone call last week and discussed what we were going to do next.  Next thing you know, two of the professionals were doing something the other three didn't think they were supposed to do.  Then, two of the remaining three talked and found out they didn't exactly agree on what was supposed to be done either.  Short story is that all five of us are talking tomorrow to make sure we're on the same page moving forward.  You'd better believe we're going to check and double check that we actually all understand the same thing this time.  We will make no assumptions about the meanings of our words, whether we speak them or hear them.  The point here is that we have five professionals who communicate for a living, all taking different conclusions from the same conversation.  We had no emotional undercurrents to get in the way of our understanding, and yet, look what happened.   It just drives home how easy it is for our clients to misinterpret even those things we think we say clearly.  Active listening makes sure all of us are on the same page.