| | Good intentions aren’t good enough…From our free The Pegasus NLP Newsletter The old song goes something along the lines ‘It’s not what you do – it’s the way that you do it’. This is quite good advice when applied to communicating since it’s not just your message that counts but how you deliver it.
And yet it's still only part of the story. And not even the most important part. Because that’s to do with whether you communicate ‘at’ or ‘with’ people.
And this, in turn, is all about whether or not you have the ability and the flexibility and the receptiveness to adapt your communication based on the feedback that you are receiving from them, moment to moment.
And it is this ability to ‘respond to feedback that we are receiving from moment to moment’ that distinguishes people with whom it is a joy to communicate and those who are boring or egotistical or patronising or irritating. A painful lessonBack in the 80s when I first began to see some of the NLP ‘big names’ in action I was highly impressed with their style and began to emulate it. That was a big mistake as I quickly discovered. It's one thing to walk into a conference or workshop with a reputation that you can walk on water and proceed to mesmerise your adoring audience with your skill and wisdom. That’s performing – it’s not communicating.
Inspired by watching and ‘modelling’ the style of the big names, I used to, as was the perceived wisdom in those days, really get myself ‘into state’ to the extent that I would be practically punching the air with enthusiasm. It didn’t matter what my audience wanted to hear - I knew what they needed to hear.
I still wince slightly when I think back to some of my ‘performances’. I was, as Benjamin Disraeli so wonderfully put it, inebriated with the exuberance of my own verbosity!
Happily not getting repeat-business from the individuals or organisations that I ‘communicated at’ provided me with a very effective (and speedily adopted) motivation to adapt my behaviour. Performing or communicating?Real communication is about exchanging ideas. It's about interacting. Yes, it’s useful to have a plan for how you would like an interaction to go, whether it be with a friend, or customer, or group.
However once the interaction begins - once you begin communicating with them - what matters is how the other person is responding to you and your messages from moment to moment - and, more importantly, how you use these responses to adapt your style and your message.
The meaning of your communication...This idea that your effectiveness as a communicator is based on your ability to receive and, more importantly, to respond to moment to moment feedback from the other person is, of course, encapsulated in the NLP Principle: The meaning of your communication is the response you get.
It also encapsulated in the more widely known warning: message intended isn’t always message received!
Collecting and reviewing examples yourself or others not operating from this principle is a great way of creating an ‘away from’ and ensuring that you don’t fall into this trap in future. For example:
1. People who do not notice or respond to feedback – salespeople from their potential customers, customer services people from their customers, managers from their teams, teachers from their pupils
2. The person who organises a party which people do not enjoy and who then moans about their ingratitude ‘after all the trouble I went to’
3. The trainer who, when presenting their meticulously planned workshop, doesn’t recognise when the content or style isn’t what people want – yet carries on regardless (and is then surprised when their customers mark them low on the feedback ‘happy sheets’)
4. The shop which opens in a burst of enthusiasm and then, because they didn’t check what the customer wanted or whether their potential customers wanted the product (or were prepared to shop for it in this location), is shocked when they go out of business a few months later Action pointsFeedback-led communication is a joy to engage in and is the best way of achieving a ‘win-win’ for both parties. It is also, by using the skills you’ve encountered at NLP Core Skills, relatively easy to engage in:
1. Develop your ability to see visual indicators of state/mood changes and your ability to hear subtle vocal signs that the other person's state has changed (We cover this thoroughly in our NLP Core Skills course)
2. Use these skills to pay attention to how the other person is responding to your message (or information or workshop or product etc) as you are delivering it. Remember that waiting until afterwards to consider the feedback may be far too late
3. Rather than trying to overwhelm them with your wonderfulness or with that of your message/product deliver in ‘bite-sized chunks’ so you can gauge from moment to moment how you are being received – and can then adapt as you go along
4. In planning, delivering, and afterwards assessing how you came across make good use of Different Perspectives (aka Perceptual Positions) to put yourself in their shoes and to see things from an objective angle (another NLP Core Skills technique).
And finally…The Big Picture, here, is to do with your attitude towards the other party. If you think you know what is right for them then you only need to communicate at them. However, it is unlikely that a sophisticated audience/customer will appreciate not being included in your plans for them!
Communicating ‘with’ people, and exchanging ideas and information and messages with them communicates the Three R's - Respect, Recognition, and Reassurance - thus demonstrating your respect for their integrity.
Back in the early 1900s one exchange in Parliament between the ever-sparring politicians Gladstone and Disraeli went as follows: Gladstone: Mr Disraeli cannot possibly be sure of his facts!
Disraeli: I wish that I could be as sure of anything as Mr Gladstone is of everything. To receive our free newsletter subscribe here © 2000-2010 Reg Connolly - copyrighted, all rights reserved - but you can freely pass this newsletter on to friends as long as you do so in its entirety, include this message and link: http://www.nlp-now.co.uk. Please contact us for written permission if you would like to reproduce this article in your own newsletter, literature or web publication. |
