Communication Gaffes: How to Handle the Misses.

A time or three in the last couple of weeks I’ve been called out for content I’ve posted on social media platforms. It’s sometimes easy to catch foot-in-mouth disease or to realize, later (much, much later) that out of context, something I’ve said seems really, really bad. Or a double entendre exists that I hadn’t considered at the time. Or someone other than the intended recipient is reading the message. Or that I simply didn’t communicate as plainly, clearly or with enough characters to make it make sense to anyone who might read it.

In other words, I had a couple of anxious moments in the last few weeks.

And I share this not only to tell you that I’m human, and that it takes constant vigilance and thoughtfulness to communicate effectively, well, and always appropriately. And sometimes, mistakes are made.

So what did I do, in the face of this? Well . . . I apologized. And I reviewed the context and the content to see how I could avoid the same scenario in the future. I edited some content where appropriate and changed some settings. I created some additional parameters for myself and without changing my level of engagement, have made some decisions about sharing that are going to change my interaction a bit.

I think in any communications practices we’re all going to misstep, be misunderstood, misfire or flat out make a mistake but owning it, and fixing it, is the only way to move forward.