Communicating effectively is one of the hardest things we can do. Professionals say that communication is “effective” when the person receiving a message understands it exactly the way we mean it. Should be easy, but it’s not.

For one thing, we don’t all use words the same way. Ask a group of people to close their eyes and picture a table. Chances are they’ll think of very different types and styles of tables, even though they all are tables. In addition, some words carry an emotional weight that can cloud people’s ability to understand a message. Talk about lying or perjury or rule of law or justice in the context of what’s happening in Washington these days and see how quickly people misunderstand each other. Talk about abortion or sexual harassment or assisted suicide and watch the level of miscommunication go up.

And then there’s “noise,” all the physical and emotional factors that can interfere with our ability to truly understand what someone else is saying.

Since communication can be so difficult, we can use all the help we can get, and a lot of help is available in a new book, “The Communication Coach,” with business communication tips from 13 communication pros, including Deb Haggerty, president of The Haggerty Group, York.

Contributors include professional communicators from Pennsylvania and elsewhere who regularly offer workshops and presentations on various aspects of this difficult art. Topics include networking, creativity, public speaking, negotiating, conflict, and media relations.

Each chapter is written in an easy-to-read, breezy style and contains very concrete examples and tips that can be applied immediately in one’s work situation.

Haggerty’s chapter deals with the role personality plays in effective communications. She notes that, to communicate successfully, we must become aware of our own style of communication and then be prepared to modify it to match the style of those to whom we are communicating.

“For us to ensure communication occurs, we must speak in a manner that the other person understands,” she says.

Haggerty maintains that our personalities constitute one of the biggest generators of noise that interferes with effective communication. The study of personality types has been going on for hundreds of years. Haggerty takes her four categories from those described by Hippocrates, who theorized around 400 B.C. in ancient Greece that people’s personalities differed as a function of the different kinds of bodily fluids going through their bodies. Drawing on Hippocrates’ work, Haggerty says people can be:

sanguine — an outgoing person who enjoys being the center of attention and needs approval;

choleric — the traditional “Type A” person who is determined, work oriented, and in charge of getting things done;

melancholy — the sensitive, creative person who is attuned to the feelings of nature and the outside world but also can be very orderly, organized, and detailed; and

phlegmatic — easy, relaxed, stolid people who are dependable and reliable workers.

Haggerty says that while some people are dominant in one of these traits, most people are a combination of two. She describes the typical communication style of each of the four, some of the possible combinations, and ways to better communicate with each.

The chapter also contains a number of tests for readers to take to help determine their personality and communication style in this paradigm.

Her concluding advice is that while many of us seek to follow the Golden Rule, better we should follow what communications expert Tony Alessandra calls the Platinum Rule — Do unto others as they would have you do unto them. In other words, she says, if we truly want to communicate, “we need to determine the needs of others and their preferences of communication. Once it is understood that communication comes from the inside out, our behavior can be moderated so that our communication is on an equal level with someone else’s style — not from out of our own.”