Stop Assuming, Start Communicating

We swap brutally honest stories where one small assumption turns a simple message into wasted time, lost money, and awkward apologies. We dig into how language, accent, and “shortcut thinking” derail clarity, then share better ways to check understanding without shaming anyone.
• defining communication as exchange through speech, writing, signals, and behaviour
• UK English versus Canadian English versus American English and why “same language” still misfires
• Sharon’s green ink story and how missing specificity creates avoidable errors
• Peter’s wrong garage clearance and the real cost of guessing
• the HP client brief that went off the rails after blagging through confusion
• accent and pronunciation issues like Fatty versus Faddy and speaking too fast
• idioms and slang like “barking” and “blimey” needing context
• replacing “does that make sense?” with better questions and play-back checks
If you want any more info or to let us know what you'd like us to talk about, go to the website beabetteru.ca and there'll be a link called podcast.

Have a question, a comment, or want to find out more? go to https://www.beabetteryou.ca/

Transcript

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Meet Sharon And Peter

SPEAKER_00 0:00

This is Straight Up Talk with Sharon and Peter. We are both proud Brits and Canadians. This is a no-nonsense weekly podcast about people, life, leadership, and all sorts of stuff. We don't always agree. I'm Sharon Jones, business owner of Be A Bet You, developing better managers and leaders, and this is Pete Johnson, owner of Movement Man Traders, Buy and Sell Anything. This is true, you do.

Why Language Trips Us Up

SPEAKER_00 0:33

The topic for this week is communications. Now, communications is a big topic. We're gonna do this a lot. The specifics for this week though is gonna be about language. So, first of all, definition of communication. It is the actual process of exchanging information, ideas, feelings, or messages between individuals through speech, signals, writing, or behaviour. You and I obviously are both from the UK, therefore we speak British, English. When we came to Canada, we had to learn Canadian and we go to America, so we speak three languages now. We speak English, Canadian, American. And you think it'd be the same, but it's not. Canadian does seem to be a bit of a mishmash of both, and there's many parts to it.

The Green Ink Assumption

SPEAKER_00 1:22

So what I'm gonna do is not go down that route so much as we're gonna talk about assumptions here, and I'm gonna start out by telling one of my own stories because assumptions is another big issue. This goes back to many years ago when I had a partner doing Beer Bet You workshops. I would work from home, she would work from home. We used to create workbooks, print them off. I had a really fancy Canon six-color inkjet printer. Now, if you know anything about printers, they typically come in four colours. It's called C M Y K, and those are the four colours of cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. Most printers come with that. Mine came with an additional two colours, green and red. So we'd developed this workbook. She was coming over because we were going to print them out, collate them, and I realized I was out of green ink. Now she lived about 40 minutes away from me. We were on a time uh project here because we were delivering this workshop in the afternoon. So I called her up and I said, On your way here, I know you go past a Staples or a Best Buy, can you stop in and get me some Canon green ink? She said, Sure. So I'm working away, completing the design of these workbooks. She arrives at my house about an hour later, knocks on the door, I open it, and she says, Here you go, here's your ink. And I look at it and it's cyan ink. And I said, I asked for green ink, and she said, I thought you meant cyan. In that moment, this is where assumptions tripped us up. The funny thing, of course, is the workshop we were about to do was on communications. So here's what should have happened. I should have realized that the printer I had was unusual and given her a bit more explanation. I've got a six-colour inkjet printer and a canon green ink. Give her more specificity. She also could have said to me, Are you sure that you mean green ink? A lot of the times what people don't do, and from a psychological point of view, we do it to shortcut because our brains like to think we know what we mean. The brain tries to be very efficient with information, so it goes, I know this, so it fills in the gap of what it thinks it should be based on the knowledge that you have. The result though of that assumption was that we lost time and money, and we almost didn't make the workshop for that one tiny assumption.

SPEAKER_01 4:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:02

Over to you, Peter.

The Wrong Garage Clearance

SPEAKER_01 4:04

Well, my story goes back about 25 years when I made an assumption, and it could have been very costly to me, but fortunately it turned out okay. We was um we're doing a job for this client, uh, she was a lady we knew from the tennis club, and she brought me in to do a to do a clearance, like a large part of our work when we first started out uptown was um rubbish clearance. Rubbish clearance. Rubbish is like uh yeah, for all the Canadian listeners, garbage garbage. So yeah, so she said, I've got a garage and uh it's full of rubbish, so just need you send a couple of guys around, pick everything up and dump it. So after work, uh I think it was a Wednesday. She said, like, you know, just fit it in when you can do it, you know, in next week would be great. So after work we finished a bit early, we went round there, and she lived at I think it was 137 something hill, and there was flats A, B, C, D. And she lived in flats C. So we went round to the back, and there were four garages. They didn't have letters on them, but we just presumed, assumed, A, B, C, D. She's C, so it'd be the third garage. So we get we went in there, opened the door, uh, and he loaded everything onto the truck, and there was all this nice weightlifting equipment, gym equipment. There was some really nice car um bathroom tiles. There was a bike, like an exercise bike.

SPEAKER_00 5:36

So anyway, later that night she um And you thought she wanted that to go to the tip tip?

SPEAKER_01 5:41

Yeah, so later that night she called me. She said, Pete, did you get did you get to take all the stuff away? I said, Yeah, yeah, we did. Luckily, you know, we got it in, we just fit it in in time. I said, but um and I'll I'll I'll call her Mandy. Her name wasn't Mandy, but I'll call her Mandy. I said, Mandy, I said, but there's one thing, I said, you you're getting rid of a lot of good stuff there, you know, like gym equipment, exercise bike, you've got some really nice bathroom tiles. She said, exercise bite? Do I look like I could use an exercise bike? Jimmy Quitman, do I look like the person that would be have any use for Jimmy Quitman? And bathroom tiles, my I don't have any tiles in my bathroom. I said, Oh, so the pennies dropped. So anyway, she said, which garage did you take them from? So I said, Well, I we you know, A B C D, we took them for th oh, she said, no, no, that's next doors. One of the tenants, because the the properties were rented out as well, one of the tenants over the years had switched uh C and D around so it became A B C D. Like the rock group, A C D C A B C D. So uh anyway, I said, well, luckily um the dump was closed because it was a council run dump and they shut at four, and it was like half five by the time we finished. So we had it on the truck because we luckily we luckily and we returned it all the I said, don't worry, I said we've picked up the stuff from D garage instead of C. And um we returned it the you know first thing the next morning. But um I often wonder, and I've asked you this before, uh, if there's anyone l you know legally qualified to answer this, what would have happened had we made it to the dump that evening and just dumped it all? And and then the guy wakes up and says, Oh, I've just gonna go to the gym for half an hour, goes to his garage and there's no equipment there.

SPEAKER_00 7:32

Well, I think you'd have been liable because you made an assumption.

SPEAKER_01 7:35

Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 7:36

Yeah, that's that's the bottom line because the lady would have oh Mandy would would have said, Well, I didn't yes, I said my garage. Okay, Mandy, did you tell them which garage it was? Oh no, it didn't. So she may have some culpability there, but I would guess because you didn't ask specifically.

SPEAKER_01 7:52

We would just have to have replaced it all.

SPEAKER_00 7:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:54

Yeah, oh dear. So we made a a big big mistake.

Blagging A Client Brief Gone Wrong

SPEAKER_00 8:00

Well, the problem is that miscommunication in the workplace alone costs billions of dollars globally. Uh when people end up having to I'll give you actually a prime example from my background. I used to be vice president client services at one of the largest global advertising agencies in Toronto. Toronto, trial, for um, and one of my clients was HP Hewlett Packard. Um, and they had been it was compact, then it was HP. Honestly, technology was not my jam, it wasn't my favourite thing. I had account directors who would who were passionate about technology, which was great. I would always get them to go to the client, take the brief, brief the creative. I over I looked over it all, of course, but I didn't do that stuff. One day, my main account manager and account director who was responsible for that business was ill. I had to go to HP and pick up the brief. As the client is talking, I realized I didn't really know what she was talking about. This is a long time ago, didn't know what she was talking about, but instead of asking, I thought I'll bluff my way through it. I know, so I created a brief for it. Um, I briefed the creative department, they came back with some ideas that fit my brief. We then set up a meeting with the client, and I always like to have the creative people present their work so that they could showcase it. It's not my job, it's theirs. So they're starting to go through the ideas and the concepts, and the client puts her hand up and she says, What is this? And I start to feel a bit uncomfortable in my seat. What's the problem? She said, This is not what I briefed you on. And at that point, it's not very often that I go red. I probably went a deep shade of crimson at that point.

SPEAKER_01 9:55

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:55

As the penny dropped for me, of the implications of not checking my assumptions and not asking for the specifics. Yeah. I had cost the creative department money, I had thoroughly pissed off the client.

SPEAKER_01 10:08

Did you get fired?

SPEAKER_00 10:10

No, no, I didn't. Amazingly, I've never been fired. I once told a client to sling the hook. Um and I wasn't supposed to do that, but that's a different story entirely. But no, I didn't get fired, I just had to um uh admit my uh failings that I like the faddy story, is it?

SPEAKER_01 10:29

Is that uh that oh that is that the same company?

SPEAKER_00 10:33

Yeah, I know. So interesting,

When Accents Create New Words

SPEAKER_00 10:36

relates to communication in that you and I, Otti, both from a UK. I moved here in 1997. I'm from Manchester, which is a north of England, and typically Manx, as we are called. We tend to talk very fast and very flat. So if you're not from Manchester, you've got haven't got a clue what we're talking about. That is how I arrived in Canada talking. My first big job at an agency, I was a vice president group count director, uh at what at another big agency, and we had a big project meeting, and so there's about 25 people, and it's a round table. And there was this one guy, and he was rather large, he was rather large, and he seemed to know the answers. He was the the project manager, and people were were calling him um and asking him a question. So I thought I need to ask him a question. So I said, So Fatty, tell me, and the whole room went, so what? You just called him Fatty. Now, to be fair, he was a bit of a humper lumper. So I said, Well, that's exactly what you're calling him. Because I thought, wow, how progressive is Canada? You know, we're being honest here. And they said, No, his name is Faddy with a T.

SPEAKER_01 11:50

So put Turkish name in it, Faddy.

SPEAKER_00 11:53

Yeah, yeah, but because of how they pronounced it, I interpreted the T. So I'd call him Fatty.

SPEAKER_01 12:00

Oh, Fatty. Well, that was my nickname when I was at Batley's.

SPEAKER_00 12:04

Yeah, but you were no, no, you well, you got that because you were thin.

SPEAKER_01 12:07

Oh yeah, it was ironic nickname.

SPEAKER_00 12:09

That was an iron now now you can say it's not ironic.

SPEAKER_01 12:12

Now they should call me skinny.

SPEAKER_00 12:16

Exactly, but that's an you know, the whole the whole thing about communic communications is is interesting in that, yeah. I made a I also remember another guy coming to me and I'd been talking about what I wanted to happen on this project, and he said, I've no idea what you said, but I'll have it on your desk by Monday.

SPEAKER_01 12:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:37

I realised then I had to learn how to slow down.

SPEAKER_01 12:41

Yeah, you've you've really tamed it down a lot.

SPEAKER_00 12:43

Well, I except when I have a trip.

SPEAKER_01 12:44

I remember you 40 odd years ago, you were like, my love, how's it going now?

SPEAKER_00 12:48

Yeah, it's out of it. I know, but you're doing North Manchester then. You're doing oasis.

SPEAKER_01 12:54

Oasis.

SPEAKER_00 12:54

You're doing oasis. So I had to put cadence into my speech as well, yeah, to be able to enunciate properly. Otherwise, I just get those blank stares look at looking back at me. And another thing, actually, about communications. Just recently we got at

Idioms And Checking Understanding

SPEAKER_00 13:10

the barn where I keep my horse. There's a there's a young girl, lovely girl, very much into Harry Potter. And she came, she said, Can I ask you a question? Of course you can. She said, What does barking mean? So I said, uh, you have to give me a bit of context. Give me a bit of context. And this was from Harry Potter, of course. She's a big Harry Potter fan, it's written in English. So, of course, we know barking means barking mad. Mad.

SPEAKER_01 13:37

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:38

And she didn't understand why, so then I had to explain what it meant. And then she also asked me, Well, what does blyme mean? So she's been called. It means it's it's a statement of surprise. Yeah. Um, but it's another difference of communication, and I think the the key to it all is when we are sending a communication out, you know what you mean. And this is what often happens is we know what we mean when we send the communication out, and we assume that the receiver knows exactly what we mean, but often they don't. A way to find out if you're making assumptions or not is to ask yourself, how do I know this to be true? Is also if you say things like, Well, obviously, how do you know that's obvious? Or, well, everybody knows that. How do you know everybody knows that? It it's a pain to do. I still make assumptions because I'm human and it's taxing on the brain, but those big things it's worthwhile slowing yourself down. And I say it to you sometimes, it's driven you nuts in the past when I've said to you, Well, how do you know that to be true? When you've lost your rag at me, you say, Stop being a trainer.

SPEAKER_01 14:55

Yeah. Because you have to you do often bring your training self into your normal normal self, into my relationship self.

SPEAKER_00 15:03

Yeah, yeah. And I know there there are times I should put that aside.

SPEAKER_01 15:06

I I've also I've got the benefit of having watched you train a few times, and I've noticed that quite often you say to people, um, is does that make sense? Is that are you with me? Is does that what I've said so far is uh do you understand what I'm saying? And are you with me sort of thing? And does it make sense to you? And quite often, you you know, the whole the whole group just says, Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's fine, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:31

Which is interesting because I've just read that asking somebody, does that make sense is not a good question. So I need to change.

SPEAKER_01 15:37

Used to say quite a lot.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

I know I did because at the time I thought that was a good way of checking in. But the problem is when you ask that question, it's got a yes or no response. Most people in those situations are gonna say yes.

SPEAKER_01 15:49

Right.

SPEAKER_00 15:50

So now instead, what I'll say is, is there anything that I haven't covered? Are there any questions coming to mind for you? Sometimes I'll even say, Would anybody care to play that back to me just so that I know I've said it in the right way? Yeah, because it's easy to say, um, are you with me? Yeah, I am. Nobody actually wants to admit that they don't know something. So I I'm continually learning, because I think that's very important to do so, especially in in communications. Um, so I think yeah, we've done quite a bit on communications right now. Let's you're going for hours about communication, and there will be more topics. I've got a whole list

Takeaways And How To Reach Us

SPEAKER_00 16:34

here of um examples of words that have different meanings, which we can cover in a different topic because that's a fun one.

SPEAKER_01 16:40

That's for another day.

SPEAKER_00 16:41

It is so brutally honest takeaway of the week about communication. For me, communication is a two-way street. There has to be a transmitter and a receiver. The transmitter needs to ensure that the message is received as intended, and ideally, the receiver should also check that they have understood it. But that's a big cognitive ask. The shortfall of this is try to be as clear and specific as you can when communicating. Peter, your takeaway.

SPEAKER_01 17:14

Well, again, I'll keep it simple and uh just ask everybody in the room. Uh are you okay with that?

SPEAKER_00 17:25

Do I need you don't want to explain it again?

SPEAKER_01 17:28

No.

SPEAKER_00 17:30

Yeah, you're you're actually very good at communicating. I just last quick story though. I remember when I was doing um uh some time management training and you came with me and I was doing it in an office, and you just assumed that everybody in office was going to be smart and able to communicate. Do you remember that?

SPEAKER_01 17:49

I do.

SPEAKER_00 17:49

And you were blown away by the fact that uh it wasn't the case, and you're actually a far better communicator than you give yourself credit for.

SPEAKER_01 17:57

Oh, thank you.

SPEAKER_00 17:58

Truth. On that note, thank you for listening. If you want any more info or to let us know what you'd like us to talk about, go to the website beabetteru.ca and there'll be a link called podcast. And this week's podcast has been thoughtfully produced by the Isle of Sound. Thank you and good night.

SPEAKER_01 18:18

Thank you and good night.