No matter the topic of conversation, there are bound to be at least two myths that stick in your brain as almost-surely-fact… but, are almost-surely-not. Like the ‘left brain vs right brain myth’ or the ‘swallowing gum takes seven years to digest’ myth, or any other urban myths!. The truth of the matter is there are myths surrounding everything, including communication. We're going to bust a few of them.

Myth 1: There is no such thing as too much communication.

False. There is absolutely such a thing as too much communication. The average office worker sends about 40 emails per day but receives 121. Multiply that by five working days, then by four weeks, then by 12 months, and you get the picture—and that's just the emails. Then there's the text messages, apps like Teams and chat, intranet articles, videos, social media, and so on. The average person now consumes the equivalent of about 16 movies worth of data every day. Our brains were never meant to take in this much information at once, let alone via multiple channels.

So, what’s the fix? Repackage the same message in different ways for different audiences.

Myth 2: My audience is everyone.

Your audience isn't really everyone. Think about who needs to take action or who might be impacted, and they're your audience. Segment your market to find who needs to know, and what they need to know, before spamming away. Also, remember there is a difference between stakeholder engagement and communication. 

So, what’s the fix? Tailor your communication for different audiences. There's no one-size-fits-all approach.

Myth 3: People should know this already.

When we assume people have context or background, or we assume they understand an instruction or know how to do something, we're usually wrong.

So what can you do? Number one, write as if you're explaining it to someone for the very first time in their entire life. Write it simply. Test it with your intended audience. Find a few people, share the message with them, and ask what makes sense and what doesn't.

Myth 4: If you can do communication, you can do change (and vice versa).

By asking a change manager to do comms or a comms manager to do change, you are setting that person up to fail, and you're not going to get the best quality output either. People don't know what they don't know. They might be blindly following a comms plan template someone else gave them or just making it up. If they don't know what good looks like, they won't produce great results.

The fix? On big, tricky, sticky change, resource those two roles separately. Have a change manager and a change comms manager.

Myth 5: Some people are just natural communicators.

The challenge is that because people aren't natural communicators, we're often not good at it. Layer on top of that another challenge: many people aren't aware they're not good at it.

So what can we do? Never assume you know everything, especially about communication. Take the mindset that you can always improve. Get feedback, listen to more podcasts, enrol in training, get a coach, or do whatever you need to make sure your message gets across in the right way and gets the right result.

Keep learning with HMC!

You can do exactly this with us here at Hey Mel!, because we’ve got some brand new courses, some free blogs and some free podcasts that you can learn all things comms-related.