Transferring Information? 🎙 Remember These Communication Pointers
During a particular class last year, the importance of how you communicate information to others was made evident by the teacher, with a simple example of two vases that are being united at a certain level via a tube. Imagine pouring a liquid into the first vase with the intention of the second vase also getting filled up, but then the amount of liquid stops below the tube. Will the second vase get the intended liquid?
No, right? Envision now that the liquid is representing the information, the vases are supposed to be the sender and receiver of the information and the tube the channel through which the communication is taking place. If the communication between sender and receiver is insufficient - leaving vital details out, not using the right words, being vague, etc. - it will leave the door open to discord between parties, even if it was without intent.
That's why it's crucial to firstly know what you want to say and mean and think about it before you speak, especially if the conversation is face to face. What also helps for more formal settings - like job- or evaluation interviews, (sales) pitch, etc. - is to be prepared and write down what you wish to discuss. And when information is being transferred via a electronic channel (e-mail, chat, etc.) you could type out everything beforehand and then review before you click on send.
Be mindful and aware of the tone in your message though, when you make use of a electronic communication medium, because the other won't be able to see your face and/or body language and the message could therefor be misinterpreted. Also knowing yourself (self reflection doesn't hurt anyone) could help you in this. For example, I could be blunt when interacting and because I know this about myself, I'll play the words in my head and/or read what I typed in and when I see the tone being "off" I'll use other words that better describe what I want to convey.
And this brings me to the importance of vocabulary. Some words mean different things and should be used accordingly and some words are synonyms, but are used for different settings, tones, specialties and/or situations, etc. It's also key here to know what you want to communicate, so that you choose the fitting words for that particular message.
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STOPCommunication is such an important topic. I think it's really key to know your audience. You may be communicating the same information to a number of different stakeholders or interested parties and it's important to know what each stakeholders's needs and requirements are eg: some may need very detailed low level information and data whilst others may only and specifically require high level summarised information. So communication of the same information to different people with either different needs or different ways of being receptive to the information requires different approaches. Some may relish a technical explanation of a complex issue, others may just want it given in simple layman's terms. So when communicating one of our best tools is to listen as much as possible, and learn. A good way of ensuring that the message that we were hoping to communicate was received as intended is to use the mirroring strategy. So if someone explains something to me and I want to make sure that I have understood what they wanted me to understand, I will mirror back to them in my own words what I understood from the communication. This helps to clear up any misunderstandings immediately. With my children, I will often ask them to mirror back to me what we have just discussed eg: if I have asked them to perform a couple of tasks and given some advice on order or approaches. This helps all of us to guage whether or not the communication was successful.
Totally right. This topic is so broad that I couldn't put everything down in one post 😅, but glad that you've filled in to discuss.
Also true. With people in the same field it's easy to use (technical) jargon, but to those who aren't you must be able to paraphrase or translate it in terms they understand.
In one of the classes this was also called "to summarize", especially for those experts who are helping people, like psychologists, doctors and even good journalists, etc.
!ENGAGE 20