A few months ago someone Tweeted a really cool statistic that I thought would be perfect for a speech I was about to deliver in Houston.

I got a little suspicious when the statistic wasn’t attributed to anyone so I emailed and asked where they heard it. They told me they heard it from an expert on this particular area and I was given a name. I reached out to them and asked the same question and the process continued until someone basically said “I heard it somewhere”.

When I finally found the “somewhere” they were referring to, the numbers and the findings were dramatically different than that tweet I originally came across.

Around the same time, I attended a webinar where the presenter said “Google alerts is now called ‘Giga Alerts’”. I must confess that I felt like a Grade  A   A –Hole because I have referred to them as “Google Alerts” in at least half a dozen blog posts and in front of no less than 1,000 people who have attended my training program.

I decided to look it up and the information was way off base. Google Alerts is still Google Alerts. While Giga Alert owns the domain http://googlealert.com, Google Alerts are still alive and well and guess what . . . they are still called “Google Alerts”!

This kind of thing has been going on for years.

Did you ever hear the one about the famous “Yale Goals Study”? Its been told for years by credible people like Anthony Robbins, Brian Tracy and Zig Ziglar. Even wannabe guru’s like yours truly have cited the study.

According to FastCompany Magazine (who went right to the “University’s mouth” the study never happened!*

I’ve also heard:

Conflicting reports on how long you have to make a first impression

The average amount of contacts it takes to land an appointment

The best day to call a prospect

Some of us will even high tail it over to Snopes to check out the validity of some of these things. At times its like you woke up in a world where it became “The Gospel according to Snopes” . . . and that worries me!

Which brings us to a rather important point . . . We’d better be real careful and check our facts. After all, its only our credibility on the line!

There’s also another lesson we really (and I mean REALLY) need to understand.

We need to understand another reason why this “Telephone Game” of sorts exists.

It exists because of a little thing called “Filters”. Filters are things we have in place that can radically shape how we interpret a message.

A few filters to consider:

1)    How much noise you have going on in your world when you are exposed to the message. This is a biggie. If I’m “multi tasking” and scanning my messages while my attention is someplace else . . . couldn’t that interfere with the message?

2)    How about viewing a message when we’re on the fly? How about the fact that we are all so busy trying to communicate in 140 characters or less, that we might leave out something critical? Don’t think for a moment, that it isn’t happening.

3)    Our opinion of the person sending the message. Example: I might think that your message is just you over reacting again so I decide to discount your message. Meanwhile someone else who I deem as an “expert” says something and I’m ready believe them in an almost “blind faith” sort of fashion. Here’s another example: I see people popping up daily who have the equivalent of about 10 minutes worth of experience. My rejecting of their message because of that perceived lack of experience gets in the way of the message because its filtered by my opinion.

I could go on and on but here’s where all of this gets real interesting.

Either somebody screws up the facts initially and/or these crazy filters kick in and through the wonders of technology I tell two friends and they tell two friends, and so and so on, until the original message has morphed into something so far removed that we all should hang our heads in shame.

Bottom Line: We had all better slow down, research our facts, cite our sources and become more mindful of these filters.

Until then, effective communication remains a hostage . . . along with our credibility!

*FastCompany article, If Your Goal Is Success, Don’t Consult These Gurus, Dec 1996