Here’s an easy way to add instant punch to your written and verbal communications. It doesn’t matter how good or bad a writer you think you are… you can do this:

Communicate as if you were the recipient of the communication.

Forget your role as transmitter. No one cares that you “have the floor;” people only care if you grab them. (Not literally.) If you can do this, you’re golden.

But how? Emotional impact, folks. I don’t care how popular the wisdom is to “just give the facts,” there are very few times when it is appropriate to deliver only facts, and fewer times still when it is possible. You are ALWAYS selling.

To recap:

Communicate as if you were the recipient… and since you probably don’t like dry, droll, boring, drawn-out communications, give your audience the same brief, high-impact, emotional punch that you look for in others’ communications!

(Is this beginning to sound like the recipe for a commercial? It should… billions of dollars annually tell us that the commercial is the most effect form of communication (at its best); that’s the form people buy when they have to pay for their words. Think about it: commercials couple a single message with an emotional (often entertaining) element, while limiting themselves to a ridiculously brief window.)

Emotional impact can take many different forms, as this video will demonstrate…

(RSS readers, click through for the video!)

Posted under Video, Communications

Looking for a quick way to maximize your conceptual skills? If you’re reading biz book after biz book, you probably are stymieing your strategic abilities rather than nurturing. This video explains way, and also includes quick tips on how to recognize intelligence in others. (RSS readers: click through to see the vid!)

Posted under Self-Development, Communications

After wrapping up a coaching call with an individual who is working to improve his confidence in a variety of business-social settings, I found myself at 900 N Michigan Ave (aka the Bloomingdale’s building), which is a pretty big mall here in downtown Chicago.

Naturally, I grabbed a spot at the top of the escalator on the main floor, cracked open the laptop, and filmed a vlog for all y’all introverts.

In a nutshell, here’s what you’ll learn in the video:

• Track your experiences and convert them into stories that have beginnings, middles, ends… and emotional appeal.
• Track situations that make you uncomfortable and admit to yourself what it is about yourself that makes you uncomfortable. (Usually, when you blame someone else for your own discomfort, it’s because you refuse to admit something *about* yourself *to* yourself. Get over yourself.) Then identify what you’ll need to do to master those situations.

(RSS subscribers, click thru for video.)

Posted under Coaching & Consulting, Communications

In talent development work, one the greatest difficulties I run into is a lack of a robust lexicon to describe emotional issues.

I know, someone’s actually asking for more jargon, right? But here’s why I think we need it: Try to explain where personality ends and mood begins… or where mood ends and emotion begins. I bet you can’t.

But turn the conversation to something intellectual, and you’re covered in spades; we can even distinguish the type of understanding you have of an issue into one of six levels!

Generically, you can comprehend something, get it on a surface level or dig deeper, analyze it or synthesize it, grasp it or not quite follow, consider, ruminate, ponder, wonder, imagine, or think about it…

And so on.

Yet… pondering an emotional construct like love or hate makes no sense. You don’t “think” about love. you can’t decide to do it.

There is nothing intellectual about emotions.

Which means none of those words that are intellectually based really work.

So we need some words, please, because “feel” just doesn’t cut it.

Personally, I’d like words to describe the following…

“to enable learning” (a more active form of “facilitating;” the inverse of “teaching”)
I doubt I’ve ever told anyone anything they didn’t already know. My value isn’t in being new or novel, it’s in being able to package ideas in a way that makes them more accessible. So I’m not really a “teacher” who imparts knowledge… but “coach” to me suggests practice through rote repetition and “facilitator” sounds too hands-off.

“emotional logic”
Let’s say that empathy is to emotions what understanding is to intellect. We then need a word that describes the process of achieving empathy… akin to “If I follow you’re logic… then yes, I understand.” In Stranger From a Strange Land, L. Ron Hubbard gave us “grok,” which comes close, but then came Scientology, so we’re back to needing a new word here.

“empathy directed toward an idea”
Sometimes, empathy isn’t really meant for a person, it’s meant for the collective feeling a group of people will have after a particular idea is adopted. It’s not always pity; sometimes, the emotion you’re connecting to is positive. Imagine being able to describe for a volunteer the ability to vicariously experience the joy of someone who’s life s/he’d touch, if s/he’d only engage… with a single word.

“to respond based on your feelings, even while framing your disagreement as a logical one”
Playing politics certainly gets to this, but we ned a more generic term to cover politics, blind spots (like when Reps or Dems—shockingly!—fall in line with their party), and mischievous instigations.

“trust based on consistency of character rather than excellence of character”
I have a friend who is trustworthy not because he’ll necessarily always do the right thing, but because he’ll act predictably, so it’s easy to anticipate when/where he’ll bend the rules. I can’t always trust him per se, but I can, since I can predict exactly where my exposure is and therefore eliminate it.

stages of friendship between acquaintance and close friend
Terms like hi/bye friends, frenemies and bromance start to distinguish some of these lines, but we need more here.

What about you? What “emotional” words do you wish you had?

This is one of those topics that I can’t claim to have any of the answers. My creativity isn’t suited for a challenge like this.

So any help is appreciated!

Posted under Lists, Communications

Three times in the past three weeks, I spent time with people who are very good at their jobs as individuals, but who didn’t operate well as a team. In each case, the issue was that no one asked any questions. Instead, team members would say things like:

“Let me try to explain this to you…”
“Oh, that’s because…”
“Yes, but…”
“No, see, you’ve overlooked something…”
“I’ve already done that…”

Guess what: I don’t need you to explain it to me again; if I didn’t get it the first time, I probably won’t get it the second time, either, regardless of what decibel you use to inflict your explanation on me. I certainly don’t want you to explain it again.

Guess what else: I understand the drivers behind what you did. I don’t care! I don’t doubt that your intentions were good… our problem isn’t with what you tried to do—as noble as the image in your head may have been—it’s with your execution.

Wait, guess what else else: don’t “yes, but…” me. The “but” negates the yes and highlights the fact that you are are trying to pander to me. Telling me I’ve overlooked something implies that you haven’t overlooked anything… and if we disagree, chances are, I think you’re the one who missed something. I’m not very likely, in the heat of the moment, to disagree with myself, so stop pretending like you are so magic that you can make me choose to agree with you over myself, who I know much better and like much better, thank you very much.

So how do you get out of the vicious cycle you’re in with your team? Maybe you saw this coming from the title of the post, but start by ASKING QUESTIONS. From today forward, you are an eternal Jeopardy! contestant: everything you say should be in the form of a question. Second, always paint yourself as the one who needs help. And third, CARE. You can’t fake this stuff: a question wrapped in an air of disdain is just as bad as a statement. No, it’s worse, because it leaves you with the illusion that you actually tried, when you didn’t, you just made it so you could pretend like someone else wasn’t listening when the problem was actually your attitude. Way to make things harder.

Good questions to replace the above statements include:

“OK, obviously I did a poor job explaining this. Replay back to me what you heard and I’ll see where I need to fill in the blanks to cover what I missed the first time.”
“I need to think about that… I was trying to have a particular impact, but from your reaction it’s clear that I missed my goal… what impact did I have?”
“Yes, AND…” (feel free to disagree at this point, as in, “Yes, I do like waffles, and you know what breakfast food I really love? Pancakes. I love pancakes so much that given the choice between pancakes and waffles, I always choose pancakes. Always.” Or, “Yes, bribing our vendor could probably lower our costs, and, since it’s illegal, it probably comes with that added thrill of doing something dangerous, you know? I wonder who we go to for approval for something like that.” Or, “Yes, I love meetings, and I especially love when they finish early.” Or don’t disagree: “Yes, that sounds interesting, and I’d like to hear more. I have a few questions that jump to mind.”)
“Interesting… have you considered…?”
“How would that suggestion differ from the program I ran with ___ last year?”

Ah, I can feel everyone getting along better already.

Posted under Team Dynamics, Communications