Communication is not just about being understood it's also about understanding. Stephen Covey says "You need to understand before you can be understood." So you need to understand not only what the other person is saying in words, but also understand what they are saying through their body language and their emotional responses and from this have the ability and skills to adapt your communication style to attain the outcome you required.
When you can start to communicate with this in mind that is when your communication skills will develop beyond your expectations.
A great communicator will hold a number of skills, understanding, attributes and knowledge:
The chart shows that to become the best at communicating we need to understand and posess the skills and control of all six areas above:
Skills & Education:
Understanding why people do not understand you. Being aware of the filters and distortion that your message must pass through before it can be understood and having the skill to listen and percieve what is being said in response to your message. More details can be found in our earlier Blog.
Neurological Understanding:
The skills and education is what we describe as the "Rules" but to play the game effectivly, like any game, you need to be able to read your opponent. What makes a great Poker player? Is it someone who knows all the statistics of the cards and has a great memory or is it the one that can read the other players? have you ever watched the body language or wondered why in some professional games the players wear dark glasses? The best players are the ones that can a) Read their opponents and b) manage to control themselves from "giving away" what cards they have in their hand.
You need to know how the brain works to be able to read the subconscious messages shown and in doing so you will be able to manage your own.
The brain controls everything we do. The recent growth in research and studies into areas such as Emotional and Social intelligence is giving us an amazing amount of knowledge to not only create great communicators but also the knowledge and understanding to create great leaders, great salesman, great politicians, great parents, great husbands and wifes, great teachers... Infact whatever you do by learning, understanding and developing the above six areas you will become significantly better at what ever you do, you may even become a great poker player!
In our next blog we will be looking further into the science and communication relevance of EQ - Emotional Intelligence.
Research carried out by Daniel Goleman on Emotional intelligence from What Makes a Leader, quotes: “Where senior managers had a certain critical mass of emotional intelligence, their divisions outperformed yearly earnings goals by 20%. Division leaders without that critical mass underperformed by almost the same amount” Ref click here
