,I bought a book in a charity shop (I know, I know). It’s called “Managing Difficult People.” I hoped it might have some tips for self-management, and it does. So expect New and Improved Marc any day now. Oh yes.
The book a slender thing, seven chapters. On page 36 there is the following
“The true meaning of a communication is the response which it elicits. It doesn’t matter what you intended to say, nor how you intended to say it: what matters is how the other person received it.”
Nicely put, and worth heeding, for sure. Something I’ve failed at repeatedly, ad nauseam, ad infinitum. Life would defo be better for me and others if I kept this at the front of my mind at all times.
And yet.
It’s that liberal “ideal speech community” thing again, with a bit of Grice thrown in for fun. Because it assumes two individuals both willing and able engage in active listening, in putting their emotions in a box, in stepping outside themselves, in steelmanning and so on. It makes no allowance for the way that in real life the design of meetings, the power structures (visible and invisible), and the sheer Dunning-Krugerness of so many of us so much of the time (all of us some of the time, some of us all of the time) will mean that you … well, I don’t know if you like Kipling, or indeed if you have ever Kippled, but this from an iffy poem of his…
If you can bear to hear the truth you‘ve spoken.
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools
marchudson.net 
OH , so very true, I’ll try hard to remember.