“The single biggest problem within communication is the illusion that it’s taken place.” George Bernard Shaw
In his book, ‘Outliers, the Story of Success,’ Malcolm Gladwell talks about the 10,000 hour rule – the number of hours reached by those who demonstrate elite level and beyond performance.
We all have 10,000 hours in communication under our belts – but how many of us would be categorised as stand out masters in communication?
Six common reasons why we haven’t all reached a beyond – elite level of communication that I’ve come across in my work with clients are:
- ‘Life’ gets in the way – we are operating in crisis management mode so often, it gives us very few opportunities to actually think through how and what we’re communicating. Resorting to a survival or fighting fires mode doesn’t always give us the best patterns to choose from at the time, and it also limits opportunities for observation and reflection. We need to make time for this.
- We think we already know what needs to be said or what others are thinking or feeling. We base far too much on our assumptions and our own model of the world.
Andy Murray said recently ‘Commentators like to speculate what someone is thinking at different stages on the court. They have no idea what each individual is thinking.’ We tend to fall into this trap too often. - Our ego can get in the way – it’s not easy to admit that we could improve something that we’ve been doing our whole lives. However, adding to your toolkit helps you be far more influential if you can see other ways of communicating and act on them.
- We wait for others to ‘get’ us and our style. That won’t happen. It’s up to us to flex our style if we want to get different results. An NLP belief worth remembering is ‘The meaning of communication is the response you get.’
- We are unaware of all the different linguistic tools out there to appeal to different ways of thinking and processing. Some leading therapists in history were masters at linguistics – take Virginia Satir or Milton Erickson as two legendary examples.
- We don’t often see the link between communication and wellbeing. We don’t realise how our unintentional bad communication skills can eat someone up inside and have them battle negative emotions that continue way beyond the working day.
Just like with our diet and fitness, there is always room for improvement with our communication. Why not aim for a beyond – elite level?!
(Photo credit mentalfloss.com)