Most of us know how to speak, but do most of us know how to express what we want to express? Along my journey I witnessed people talking for hours but saying almost nothing and it made me wonder what the whole purpose of that is and how it’s affecting our communication skills.
Talking for the sake of… talking
It seems that we sometimes talk just for talking. There is no meaning in that and there is no purpose. Everything is the same before and after the talk. It’s just a way to eliminate some extra energy or to vent in such a way that nobody realizes we’re venting.
The thing is that doing it over and over again tends to develop a habit of saying something else than what we intended. This can be an issue especially when it comes to really trying to say something specific. I’ll give you an example based on real events: me and one friend had to go meet with someone else in a different city. My friend knew that person, but we didn’t knew the city. My friend talked to that person to establish a meeting and after a 10 minutes talk they only established the hour when we were going to meet. I was driving and we had to meet that person which was also driving so we can follow him to the destination. But as I said, they only established the hour. No location. And we didn’t know how that car looked like. We didn’t even knew what was the license plate or the color. This wouldn’t necessarily have been a problem if the whole purpose of that call wasn’t to establish these things.
Being specific is efficient
This is what I mean with specific talking. I’m not even referring to communication because that implies listening and understanding and it can be tricky. But when we don’t even say what we wanted to say in the first place, it’s useless talking and the time flies for nothing. When there is time, there is no problem, but what if it’s a more serious situation? What if some important things are not told because the teller cannot be specific in his/her speech? What if some accidents happen because someone is not capable of articulating some coordinates so the driver knows the direction of where he/she should be heading?
In my opinion, specific talking is a mandatory skill because it’s efficient. It’s not based on the assumption that the others will get what we tried to say because they won’t. At least, not every time. Sometimes it’s better to over-deliver information instead of under-delivering. It might form a very helpful habit.
What do you think? Is specific talking a mandatory skill?