Often we approach communication as an activity or a thing we do – a set of actions to master – like commanding a stage, owning a room, delivering a speech, writing a clear email. But at the root of many of our challenges is that we often miss a key way of thinking from the outset. It’s much more than something to simply master.
Communication as much about building relationships as it is about speaking.
The typical way most of us communicate is to get out into the world what’s going on in our heads. We think that once we’ve said what we have to say in the way it makes sense in our own heads or hearts, we’ve done the work. But that’s only half of it. This first half is the content or the message, but the best message in the world won’t land well unless the audience is receptive to it. And when it fails to be received by the other person, it’s frustrating. We often retreat or push harder, finding less common ground and more fault with the other person, and being less receptive to the messages other people may share with us over the long run.
So there has to be something more.
Leading, loving, and living are experienced through our relationship with others, and so communication is a two-part activity.
It’s more than just sharing or pushing information out into the world, it’s broader than just delivering a message. It’s about an array of styles and tactics that inform the way you share the information and how it’s received by others—about how you relate to and interact with others. If something is worth sharing with another person, it’s worth sharing because you think it should mean something to them.
The goal for you with what you share is to get significant overlap and alignment between what you say and how you say it—between your message and how you work to build a relationship with the audience.
Communication is a two-way interaction between you and your audience, an implicit agreement to seek some common ground.
That doesn’t necessarily mean 100 percent agreement, but it does mean mutual understanding. For most of us, effective two-way interactions are not a given. In any context, whether at work or in your personal life or online, the purpose of communication is to share ideas, thoughts, information, emotions, motivations, or intentions (information) with another person or people so that whoever you’re speaking to feels, knows, or does something you want them to (receptivity).
The goal isn’t to entirely overlap your world and my world, but to reside as comfortably and for as long as possible in the place of overlap, of common ground and mutual understanding.
Every person hears and interprets inputs slightly differently, and so how you say it is as important as what you say.
The intention, tone, and feeling behind what you say, even if it’s a weekly email report to your team at work, matters, because that’s how you connect what’s going on in your heart or mind with another person. Being successful in achieving your goal requires building a relationship with another person where that person (or persons) is receptive to what you’re saying.
The good news is that you have more control than you may realize over how receptive they are, and being good at communication is something everyone can do well, because we all practice it more than we may realize.
By keeping in the back of your mind how you approach communication as a means of relationship building, the words you use and they way they land will be far easier and land far better than they previously have.
This article is excerpted from Honestly Speaking: How the Way We Communicate Transforms Leadership, Love, and Life now available in hardcopy, ebook, and audiobook formats.