Simply Kind Tuesday, Week 2 : Kind words.

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It happened again.

I said, "this" and they heard "that."  They were so upset that they worried about it all night.

I was lucky. They trusted me enough to tell me they were upset.  Gratefully, we cleared up the matter fairly easily.

Still, imagine my chagrin!  I was heart broken to learn that I had so egregiously offended someone - on accident.

As I venture into the Internet stream, I strive to practice kind words.  Sometimes, I delete a comment rather than potentially be misunderstood.  Often, I focus on what is true and supportive about a blog post, person or email interaction. I am not afraid to apologize as well.

When in doubt, I pick up the telephone.

Even with all this effort, miscommunication happens.  In fact, did you know that words only account for 6 percent of the information translated in a conversation? 6 percent!  It's not suprising that we misinterpret the tone of internet communication over half of the time. Add a 140 character limit in plurk, twitter or facebook and you're bound to have miscommunication.

What do you do to keep your internet interactions kind and friendly?

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