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People in life spend over 95% of their time in interpersonal situations; communicating with others. That number might be higher and I’m simply gauging it based on my own day-to-day and I’m here to tell you that root of a large number of relationship problems are because of poor communication.

We learn to communicate with others from infancy, the problem is that most of us are taught the wrong way of transmitting the messages in this complex process and that results in potential errors. I say this because I’ve found myself making those errors. This issue is often attributed to a number of reasons and sometimes it is because of language barrier but that does not exclude those in the same culture. I recall having to communicate with someone that wouldn’t respond to any of my transmissions. It was as if I was speaking to a wall, which the individual had placed around her to protect herself from what might be potentially hurtful. Problem is any observations will often be seen toxic to someone that doesn’t want to hear it out As a result. a result is the person will put up a wall to protect her. One could argue about the person and label him/her with physiological labels but, that’s not the point of this post. Moving on…

Talking to someone that puts up a wall is often difficult. This is because the wall will be too thick and too tall for that person to hear you. This reminds me of how computer applications work through TCP (Google search TCP) protocol. When you have two computer applications that want to communicate over an IP space, they do it using TCP, which goes something like this:

Computer A will send a transmission to Computer B, waiting for a handshake and this happens thousands of times in a fraction of a second. However, while Computer A is transmitting data, it’s also expecting an acknowledgment from computer B and if that transmission is not acknowledged within a set time (e.g. 30 seconds), the first transmission is dropped.

Imagine all of those thousands of transmissions being lost. The communication is broken and no acknowledgment is provided, resulting in a virtual communication failure. This could also happen because there is a firewall (putting up a wall around you) denying the transmission from computer A, or it could be that computer B is listening on a different port (Not seeing eye to eye), which means they’re not going to communicate until the issue has been corrected by the IT personnel (e.g. Me!).

TCP follows the same constructs of our behavior, mimicking how we communicate with each other as human beings. Communication is difficult because at each step of the process there are major potentials for error. Thus it is no surprise that social psychologists estimate that there is usually a 40-60% loss of meaning in the transmission of messages from sender to receiver.  It is critical to understand this process, understand and be aware of the potential sources of errors and constantly counteract these tendencies by making a conscientious effort to make sure there is a minimal loss of meaning in our conversations.

Part of communicating is to really take the time to say I care by striking up a conversation and initiating contact with that person, be it through email, instant messaging, a phone call or in person. Sometimes it’s up to you (and me) to make contact. Taking that first step shows that you care!