Communication improves once guessing stops being treated like listening.

Guessing what someone means and calling it listening produces confident misunderstanding. You fill in the gaps with your own assumptions, respond to the version you constructed, and both people end up frustrated without knowing where it went wrong.

The correction is simple and slightly awkward: say back what you understood and ask whether that is right. It takes ten seconds and it catches most misreadings before they cause anything. Done regularly it also makes the other person more precise, because they can see where they were unclear.