CAN WE TALK?

Founder and CEO, Jerry Houston, is going to take time this week to talk about the art of communications and explain that truthfully, communicating is a process, more than an art. Once we understand and follow the process correctly we will learn that following simple rules is necessary to have clarity of our communications and verification that the party we are communicating with actually received the message as intended. Enjoy this Week’s Power Idea.

More famous words were never spoken, and…by of all people, JOAN RIVERS. Truly great comedians are great communicators. They have little time to get their message out there and their only feedback is audience reaction… positive or not! The message needs to be clear, to the point and elicit a response (hopefully gales of laughter for the comedian) to ensure that the message got across as intended.

I think that we have communication challenges with each other because we believe it is such a simple process that it doesn’t require rules. If that is true, why are there so many miscommunications and misunderstandings among ourselves and others?

Here’s the communication process, gone wrong:

The originator of the message “sends” it to the receiver and it’s done… RIGHT? Some questions come to mind. Was the message sent clear? Did it reach the intended receiver? Did the receiver understand the message the way it was intended? Hmmmmm. What could have gone wrong?

The answer is “Noise In The Channel.” Every time a message is sent, there are distractions going on. Maybe it is background noise, maybe the receiver is distracted, or not paying attention. Maybe the message was delivered in a hurried manner and it was garbled. No matter what, Noise in the Channel always exists and there is a remedy to solve this basic problem… FEEDBACK.

It seems so simple, doesn’t it? Soooo, why doesn’t it happen? It takes time to ask for and receive feedback on your communication. Try taking the time to say, please respond to me with (send feedback) your understanding of what I said, so that I am sure I communicated to you correctly. Not doing this creates a great risk that your message was not clear, was garbled, or that the receiver wasn’t in a good receive mode to understand what you were trying to convey.

If you will practice this simple idea, you will quickly see that successful communication will grow by leaps and bounds. Give me some feedback when you try this little exercise and let me know if it helps in your daily communications.