Better Communication
The Simplest Way of Communicating Clearly…
During the last couple of months, we have coached hundreds of people, individually or in group settings. In nearly all sessions, we have introduced the simplest tip for communicating clearly. We use a dirty windscreen as a metaphor for “unclear conversations”. Imagine you are navigating the journey of life in a car. You are in control of your car but you experience and see everything through your own windscreen; which looks a lot like the picture below. Everything you see and experience is unclear; blurred by your own personal thinking, your own take on life and your own psychological mind. If, like the image below, your thinking is not clear; perhaps blocked by the stresses of life and negative thinking, you will find yourself communicating innocently through this “distorted thinking”. It is almost impossible to see or hear the other persons point of view. When we understand this, it becomes easier to drop our barriers to communication; knowing that your take on any situation or conversation is seen through your eyes and ears.
If you take this metaphor one step further, and understand that everyone else that you are communicating with is navigating their own life through their own “distorted thinking” you will quickly understand how communication breaks down. If is almost impossible to communicate effectively if everyone in a conversation has blurred thinking; whether through stress or the simple biased thinking that we are all blessed with!
Quite often, in these conversations, we innocently believe the other person is not listening and we raise our voices or repeat ourselves. This only makes the communication more difficult. A simple way of breaking through these misunderstandings is to ask “what did you hear in that?” 99 per cent of the time, you will be surprised by the difference between what you said and what was heard!
Please reach out if you are interested in talking to us about this topic.