Communicating effectively is key to building and maintaining personal and professional relationships.
“Miscommunication is at the heart of many of our problems as individuals and as a society, and at the heart of much of that miscommunication is the fact that most people don’t have very good listening skills,”David Cunningham is a senior program leader at Landmark Education. This global enterprise offers communication training and other development programs in over 120 cities. Landmark Education helps people to discover their barriers to communication and master the art of listening and speaking.
Cunningham said that with practice anyone can master the three main principles of good communication: distinguishing, listening and creating. These principles combined can have a dramatic impact on your quality of life.
Cunningham stated that people are often not as skilled at listening as they think. “We’re often so busy thinking about what we’re about to say or remembering the last time we interacted with the person that we are likely paying more attention to our own thoughts than to what the other person is really saying.”
The second principle in good communication is distinguishing. It involves knowing how to tell the difference of what was said and what was thought.
“Once you’re really committed to hearing what the other person is saying and are actively listening,”Cunningham claimed, “then you practice looking for where you are adding your own interpretation of what that person said. We do this every day, but the trick is, we’re not usually aware we’re doing it.”
Cunningham stated that one example is when the boss asks for a meeting at night. “You might hear, ‘You’re in trouble,’ or ‘We’ve got a problem,’ or even, ‘I’m sorry, but we’re going to have to let you go.’ And all she really said was, ‘Could you step into my office around 4 o’clock?’ You start reacting to what you think she said, not what she actually did say.”
Language to create is the third principle of communication. Cunningham explained that typical conversations use language to communicate. “We talk about what happened, the weather, what we’re going to do, how we feel and so on. Which is all fine, but it doesn’t actively create anything.”
Communication is key to master communicators who use language to create. “Do you say, ‘I’m the person to do this project,’ only when you have iron-clad evidence from the past that that’s the case?”Cunningham concluded. “If so, you’re missing out on some of the greatest power communication has. You can say, ‘I’m the person to do this project,’ and in saying it, it can not only make that real for the other person, it can also have you be in action to make it happen.”
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