Hi, Grace here and welcome to Sensitive Communication Tips.
So today I want to do a deep dive of misunderstanding and communication. Or what I also like to say is communication breakdown. So one of the speakers that I’ve been studying is Jeanne Robertson. Now, Jeanne Roberson has now passed away, but I still watch her video clips, because she’s a really, for me, I feel she’s a really good public speaker. And she’s also very humorous and which I really love, I love putting in humor. And so in one of the clips in– on the YouTube that I saw, is called, Don’t Send A Man To The Grocery Store. So the reason I like this clip, and I wanted to share a bit about this story that Jeanne Roberson shares– shared is because it has to do with misunderstanding. And misunderstanding in communication doesn’t even have to always be in a verbal form. It also can be in a written form, because after all, communication isn’t always verbal. Sometimes we communicate through written format, or through gestures, or facial expression, body language, through the writing, the speaking. So there’s lots of ways that we communicate. And what captured this was, since we’re talking about miscommunication, I thought this would be a really great example of that. And a though it’s not in a verbal format, it was in a written format. But it still, I feel, portrays it very nicely.
So Jeanne Robertson, basically, in the clip, and I’m just going to summarize it, but again, you can watch it on YouTube, and she tells it– the way she tells it is so wonderful. And it’s hilarious. And like I say, she’s a really, in my opinion, a really great public speaker. And again, some thing that that I would like to– I’m learning, and hopefully one day I can be almost as good as Jeanne Robertson because she has a really good high standard. Anyway, not to digress on that.
So basically, Jeanne is, you know, sending her husband now to the grocery store, because she wants to bake a cake. So she’s from the south. And down in the south, if somebody is sick, a friend, family member who’s sick, or has passed on, they bake something, they make something to show comfort or show support to their friend or to the family members of that has had a family member that passed on. So when she sent her husband to the grocery store, her husband also had something that he wanted to do, I think he wanted to play a badminton game or something like that. So he goes, Okay, I’ll go to the store. As long as I can go into the Express Checkout. That way I can get into things quickly and still make it to the game or what have you.
She’s like, Okay, fine. So she wrote up the list of items for her husband and everything, and she sends him away. And like I said, I’m summarizing basically what she shared on the YouTube again, you can watch the full story, the full clip on YouTube. And again, it’s called Don’t Send A Man To The Grocery Store. So basically summarizing it all up, he comes back, and it’s taken a while. So she was about to call the grocery store to say like, is my husband still there to even show up, you know, but she figured maybe he wanted a badminton game. Lo and behold, he comes home and he’s bringing up all these bags of grocery stores. I mean, bringing all these bags of items that he bought from the grocery store. And she’s like wondering, okay, so she looks in the first bag. Okay, there’s the pound of butter. She looks in that second bag, and she’s like, there’s two gigantic bottles of vanilla extract. And then she looks in the other bag, and there’s like three dozen eggs and she’s like going, why are there three dozen eggs? I just need a dozen eggs because I just need just five eggs to bake this cake. And then she looks in another bag and there’s like 12 pounds of shortening of lard. So now she’s like she says in a fourth bag. This is where she finds the list that she had given to her husband. And basically she had one It was one pound of butter, no problem. And two, next to number two, she had a large bottle, vanilla extract. And then three, she wrote down a dozen eggs. However, when she looked in the bag, like, you know, there were two large vanilla extract and three dozen eggs. So and four, it was four cans of shortening. So therefore she got instead of one can have, there’s just a shortening, she got four cans of it. And then now she looked at number five, and she saw Okay, so she– her husband’s still getting stuff from the trunk. And then she goes, I bet you, he’s gonna bring up 25 pounds of sugar. And sure enough, there were five pounds of sugar, 25 pounds of sugar. And then for six, it was now because it was a pound of all purpose flour. So now she got a total of 30 pounds of flour. And then she knew so and the way she says is, is this when this understanding, but she didn’t say in this way, but I’m, I’m gonna just say because it’s we’re talking about misunderstanding, she says sometimes she knows when to harp it on, which means to kind of talk it through, we’ll talk about it, and sometimes when to let it ride. And this time, she said she let him ride.
So she hid the list behind her back and knew that her husband, and she didn’t want the big liters of Seven Up, she wanted the cans, the medium cans size. So she knew that she was going to get 42 cans of Seven Up. And she didn’t say anything. And her husband just says, you know, got everything on the counter, what have you and he’s like, I’m going to my Badminton– badminton game. And then he turned around, I think, and he actually didn’t acknowledge that he couldn’t go through the express lane. But by the time the bleep the cashier had checked him out. And everything when she started checkout in those Seven Up bottles, that’s when he realized what he had done.
Basically, she had written it out, like 1,2,3,4, these are the items I needed, there are seven items. And that way it will make it easier for him to know what items and– and to go through the Express Checkout. But he misunderstood and took like, I need one of these, two of these, three of these, you know, and all these are, so misunderstanding can occur.
And Jeanne Robertson says her husband is left brain, very smart, he has all these degrees. And yet he still made a mistake. Misunderstood how to– how she wanted the list. You know, it wasn’t like she needed one of these two to have it, was just us listing out the items. So, again, a learning experience. And again, the way she said it is, you know, when things happen, either sometimes she’ll harp it on, you know, talk her through whatever it is, you know, and then sometimes she’ll just let it ride. And sometimes, you know, that’s what happens with this understanding. In this case, she’s, she let it ride. And, and she, you know, the way she’s presented as also in a very humorous way, right. And sometimes when misunderstandings happen, sometimes it’s okay to have humor, you know, laugh it off, let it go, let it ride, as she says. And then sometimes, if it’s serious, where we need to acknowledge, we need to accept that this has happened, either, you know, if we know that we were responsible for we just say, Okay, this happened, I realized this happened and I made a mistake. You know, in this case, her husband did kind of acknowledge, you know, he did turn you know, to his wife and say, you know, I realized my mistake, but by that time the cashier has already checked out. So, you know, just started to finish number seven of checking out the Seven Up bottles when he realized the mistake but by that time, it’s kind of too late.
And, you know, he did say the people behind him were all laughing and everything but you know, it happens. So sometimes again, depending upon the severity, you know, or how serious the misunderstanding is, sometimes we can laugh it off and just say: Well, it happened and it’s okay, we know next time, or sometimes we just acknowledge what had happened and just say, you know, a misunderstanding occurred. And this is what we can do next time to try to prevent it, or what we– or what we ourselves can do to make sure it doesn’t happen. And again, it might be just not jumping to conclusions. So that might be one of the ways. It might be next time we learn to just listen.
Again, like I mentioned in the last video, just to listen, and not listen, with needing to respond or reply quickly, will help. And perception. Clearly this example, with what happened with Jeanne, when, you know, she shared her story, that clearly this was a perception, you know, she was listing the items and her husband perceived, like, these are the number of items that she needed for the thing that she had listed. So sometimes, you know, if you’re not sure, you can always clarify, this is where you could say, I’m understanding it this way is it, you know, meant to be like this? Sometimes just asking for, like, clarification, don’t be of you know, embarrassed or, you know, because that might save you a lot of hassle later on. So, again, misunderstanding can and– it can happen verbally. But it can also happen in clearly in this case, in a written format. And you think it’s so simple, but things can go astray sometimes. And you know, it’s okay, so. So just learn from it. And sometimes, you know, let it ride and sometimes you might just need to discuss, discuss it through.
So I hope you found these tips to be helpful, and that it’s okay to you know, have misunderstandings occur, but just also realize it’s a learning experience, and to be able to repair the communication breakdowns. So, I hope you found this to be helpful. Again, if you’d like to know more about how to work with me, then please visit my website Gracesoulutions.com GRACSOULUTIONS.com to see how you can book a FREE Communication Breakthrough Session with me so that you can learn how to repair misunderstandings and repair communication breakdowns if it happens to you. And so thank you for being here. And I look forward to seeing you here next time at Sensitive Communication Tips.
Thanks again. Take care, bye!
