“Did you understand?” We all know that we can never trust the answer “yes” to this question, yet we fall into this trap unavoidably. Most often due to lack of time or patience.

Ideally, we should get a summary from the listener of his understanding in his own words, much like a checksum, so you are sure the message gets across. Or when we are listening, we should summarize what we just heard and aim to get an acknowledge to that. This is called active listening (or reflective listening on Wikipedia).

Yet sometimes the time is tight, we just feel lazy to execute this method, or our communication partner is not willing to prolong the conversation. In this case, I find an easy solution is to ask if it’s a good or bad thing. An example: