One valuable experience I learned from my military experience is the expression of tact. Tact is a little known and poorly understood concept in our society. Wiki defines it as:
The ability to deal with embarrassing situations carefully and without doing or saying anything that will annoy or upset other people; careful consideration in dealing with others to avoid giving offense; the ability to say the right thing.
America applies connotation to phrases such as upset and offense. Within the last few years I have been hearing this phrase, “special snowflake” correlated with offense or upset. Defensiveness is a severe barrier of communication and being hypersensitive is ineffective.
People fail to acknowledge that the communication process occurs with both a sender and receiver, and the ability to tailor and adapt your communication towards the target audience is required to be an effective communicator. This snowflake cycle that I keep seeing is that a sender receives upset feedback and the sender’s response to the feedback is mocking. This occurs regularly in america and is horribly ineffective of both the sender and receiver.
I find vocabulary to be an incredible tool. Digging into the synonyms and antonyms of the word “Tact” reveal the synonyms: Common Sense and Refinement as strong synonyms, Control, Intelligent, Judgement, Perception, Skill and Understanding as medium accuracy synonyms. Antonyms are the opposite of all of these with the strongest word being Carelessness.
Tact is an emotionally intelligent skill. When tactless, you are failing to communicate to your target audience the message you wish to portray which often leads to the snowflake cycle mentioned above. Logic is also a skill but if you apply logic without tact, your communication is ineffective.