What are some examples from you own life of communication failures?

From my perspective it has usually been due to presuppositions that were in my mind – and I am assuming that everyone else has been thinking about the exact thing that I’ve been mulling over for the past hour. And they assume that everyone else has been pondering the same dilemmas that they have been wondering about. But in fact everybody is in their own world. I suppose I need to slow down and try to put myself in their shoes. . .

Isn’t that the meaning of “get on the same page”?

Greatest communication failures = every sermon I ever preached, without listening first to folks’ concerns, problems, fears, beliefs, definitions, and vocabulary.
As we grow older, we tend to speak in an idiom decades out of date, to an audience that has died, about subjects that no longer matter, with solutions that no longer work.
Last evening, trying to explain to Madame why we can no longer afford to stay in our house (outrageously-high property taxes and deferred maintenance requirements), all she could hear was that she would have to find new shops that might prove inconvenient, and distance away from grandchildren. Solution: shut up and walk away. There is no communicating with or by those holding irrational fears.

I learned that my sense of discernment and observation was about 6 months to a year ahead of my team members in “what God was doing” and in “what God wanted to do”. I thought that because I saw it, that they saw it. BOY WAS I WRONG. Once I came to the realization that I was gifted and processed things differently, I started doing more listening to see “where they were” in the process, and worked to be more patient in their discovery and ownership for what I sensed we were led to do by the Lord. It also caused me to be more accountable to the “Kairos” of what God was doing with us and through us.