COMMUNICATE. Communicate. Communicate. Communication’s true essence is commonness, the mutuality of understanding and connectedness. Sender and receiver, one in goal and harness, where message channeling is handled with correctness.
Communicate.Communicate. Communicate.
Send and receive, receive and send love or hate messages. Reasons and emotions measured for appropriateness. Sounds of joy, of resignation and hopelessness will ring in our ears and pierce our consciousness.
Communicate.Communicate. Communicate.
Go for advice, or give advice. Propel feelings with kindness to ears ready to listen to outpourings of happiness and mournfulness. Jump in gleeful triumph in the comfort and lightheartedness, of patiently listening people who bring creative radiance and mindfulness.
Communicate.Communicate. Communicate.
Body and soul, heart and mind —in harmony and togetherness. Listen, not just talk. It is a gift, a great task toward effectiveness. Listen to the silence of the heart, it will lead to happiness.” Listen, and listen well. It is the key to an excellent communication process.
Communicate.Communicate. Communicate.
Every day, you make an effort, sincere or otherwise, to communicate thoughts, feelings and ideas to another person. You speak on the telephone, send text and e-mail, fax memos and make presentations. But do your communications fully connect you with those to whom they are directed? Do you really get through to others? Even when you do, does the right message get through, or some distorted version of your intended message? Communication alone means nothing unless it forges a connection. Whether parents seek to connect to a child, advertisers to targeted markets, PR people to their respective publics, coaches to their athletic teams, the efforts achieve little if they fail to connect to their audiences. Without connection, you cannot make things go right.
In all the communications you do, you sometimes see yourself listening to another person’s words but feel that your body language tells a different story. In such situations, your challenge is to make sure that your actions do not belie your words. There also comes a point that you believe so much in the soundness of a suggestion you wish to offer in a meeting, a forum, or a brainstorming, but feel too shy to bring it out, or too afraid to make it, lest you commit a mistake or generate oppositions from the other members of the group. Or on the other spectrum, you routinely seek out the opinions of others, but you don’t respond or listen objectively.
Whether you are in your workplace or your home, you oftentimes see yourself making the mistake of believing that simply because you have made a statement, or you have printed or broadcast your ideas and views to the world, you have communicated. Candidates to political office can talk all they can, but it is no guarantee that they are getting the empathy, much more the votes, of their constituencies. Mothers can blurt out lessons from their past, but it does not necessarily mean that their kids learn from them. Writers can craft stories, make opinions or scribble all the words they can muster, but all these may come to naught if the connection is not made right.
In reality, you may have lost your voice barking, and your ink writing, but you may still find yourself fulfilling only the smallest, simplest step in the process of fully connecting with your audience. The question then is how do you connect with your audience when they seem to have lost the interest, or worse have no interest at all in what you are trying to communicate. Emmet Murphy, in his book The New Murphy’s Law, teaches some lessons on commonness and connectedness.
- Commit to a cause. Communication and connection begin with commitment. You must wholeheartedly believe in the message you hope to convey to family, friends and officemates. Clearly define your communication goals. They will set the direction and help you achieve the bottomline effect of the process. Make your words, both spoken and written, spring from an honest desire to improve relationships and benefit the recipients of your messages as much, if not more, than they do yourself. Doing these, you stand a far greater chance of reaching, and connecting with your intended audiences.
- Couple your words with action. You must inculcate values that can drive actions. Appreciate the need for communications that is “talking the talk,” backed up by “walking the walk.” Do not make the mistake of expecting those with whom you hope to connect to “do as you say, not as you do.”
- Speak boldly and truthfully, or forever hold your peace. Don’t let your feelings of intimidation or shyness or lack of courage prevent you from saying what you mean, and meaning what you say. Holding your peace, expecting or assuming that someone else—perhaps someone with authority or eloquence—to do the communicating for you will be counterproductive. How many times have you missed the opportunity to connect, and be respected, because you passed up the chance to speak your mind?
- Use your ears more than your tongue. You like to talk. Resist the urge. Your audience is made up of thinking and feeling people, too, so they want to talk, too. Encourage them. Then listen. It’s hard to be a good listener. The Wall Street Journal reported: “Overwhelmed by the incessant, intrusive babble of the modern world, the skill of listening has fallen on hard times.” It has been estimated that most people speak at a rate of 120 to 150 words a minute. That sounds fast, but the human brain can process more than 500 words a minute. Because of this gap, you engage in mental fidgeting, letting your mind drift off the subject, and making you a poor listener. When you feel the impulse to think about what to say next while other people are talking, or the urge to grow impatient when the people you are conversing with start to ramble or repeat themselves, just be reminded of Epictetus’ musing: “Nature has given men one tongue but two ears, that you may hear from others twice as much as you speak.”
- Tailor your message to your audience. Take the time to get to know the feelings, hopes or fears of those with whom you wish to communicate before you start writing or talking. Try very hard to put yourself in another person’s shoes. This will allow you to gain intimate knowledge about your audience, and choose your words more carefully to forge a firm connection and establish commonness every time you communicate.
What these lessons are telling you is that you must move beyond the position of a communicator who sends out messages, hoping that your audiences will receive them, to a connector who builds relationships with others that help make things go right. To do so, you must fully communicate your entire message rather than just speaking or writing the words. There is no question that words are an important part of the communication process. They clarify and define human intentions and thoughts. But words become stronger with the infusion of the extra verbal or extra written aspects that can provide emphasis, deeper meaning and believability to the message itself. This calls for the continued and consistent connection and reconnection of your true and sincere thoughts and emotions to your publics.
PR Matters is a roundtable column by members of the local chapter of the UK-based International Public Relations Association (IPRA), the world’s premier organization for PR professionals around the world. Bong Osorio is the communications consultant and spokesman of ABS-CBN Corp.
We are devoting a special column each month to answer our readers’ questions about public relations. Please send your questions or comments to askipraphil@gmail.com.