It’s How You Say It

It’s not always what you say, it’s how you say it. When it comes to communicating your message, there are many ways to deliver it.

From Facebook instant messaging to emailing or calling someone, technology provides us with plenty of ways to contact someone. It can be overwhelming deciding which platform will get your message to the other person effectively. So how do we decide how to communicate with the people in our lives?

Your mom may like to hear your voice on the phone, while your boss may prefer to speak to you via email, so it’s all in writing in case they need to go back and reference something.

Whether you’re communicating with friends, family, a client or your work colleagues, each person has their own preferred style of communication.

In fact, there are four preferred styles. It’s important to know how to recognize the different ways that people want to be spoken to, the type of words to use for each style and people’s preferred methods of receiving a message.

Knowing how to communicate effectively will save you a lot of time and will go a long way to helping you avoid misunderstandings and potentially difficult situations.

What you’ll hear in this podcast:

• How to communicate effectively
• The four preferred communication styles
• The psychology behind each style of communication
• How to discover someone’s communication style
• What words to use to suit different communication styles
• The different communication platforms
• How a platform may suit one person, but not the other
• How being on too many platforms can be overwhelming

To listen to the full audio, CLICK HERE.

Being a boss is different than it’s ever been. The workplace is different, the workers are different. Even the way we work has changed. Welcome to difficult happens where we talk about the most effective ways to communicate in this new environment. Are you ready? Then let’s dive in.

Hello and welcome to the program. I’m so glad you’re here. You know, it’s not always what you say. It’s how you say it. Nowadays, there are so many ways that people can contact you. Instant message, email, text, instagram message, phone calls, even landlines. Does anyone still have a line? Last night I was watching Grace and Frankie and Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin are the two characters and the phone was ringing and it was a landline and Jane Fonda said, no, don’t answer it. Nothing good comes from a land line. I guess that’s true. Not only are there so many ways that people can reach us. There are also many ways to say something to communicate your message. The same message communicated in different ways is heard differently. Your clients, your team members, they have a preference on how they want you to communicate with them and today we’re going to take a look at how you determine those ways and how you determine the ways that people want to be spoken to, the words that you say and when you know how to say it, it can go a long way to avoiding a potentially difficult situation.

Speaking of difficult situations, have you grabbed your free 10 tips for how to deal with conflict? Just go to difficult happens.com/ten tips and I want to thank atomic kitten 99 who gave us a five star rating and review on itunes. She says, love this podcast packed with great content for business owners. Thanks. Atomic kitten. I really appreciate you taking the time to rate and review the show. So first let’s talk about the way that you communicate with someone. The way you reach out to someone. It’s going to depend on if they are a team member, a client or someone that you’re doing business with, but I’m going to go under the premise that this is someone that you want to have a relationship with in some way, some business relationship. This can also go for your personal life as well. Like so many of the topics that I talk about really communication is communication.

You can use these tips that I give you effectively at work, but also at home. A couple months back I was preparing to be on Tina Mitchell’s the money hour radio show, and we had sent a couple of emails back and forth. Anyway, my phone rings and I didn’t recognize the number, but I picked up the phone and answered it and it was Tina Mitchell. She gives that real personal one on one touch. She just reached out and called me just to say hi and to give me a bit of an overview on what was gonna happen on the show and on that phone call she agreed to be a guest on my podcast. You can hear that in episode 15 and I’ll put a link in the show notes sometimes just picking up the phone and making a call is the best way to communicate with someone you know.

I love to hear from you guys, right? Well, I have had listeners reach out to me in many different ways through my instagram stories as just a chat back and forth through my facebook page. These are both at difficult happens if you want to join me on social media. I’ve been sent instant messages, emails, linkedin messages, and with my team members and the clients that I work with, we will often voxer each other that sort of like a walkie talkie on your phone and it’s great because you can send messages, files as well as audio clips. I also Marco Polo with a group of women. Do you guys know what Marco Polo is? I love that APP. There’s also whatsapp, skype, Zoom, slack, base camp. It’s really enumerable the ways that we can all communicate with each other, but it can also be overwhelming. You want to make sure that you’re not on too many platforms with too many different people when it comes to onboarding your clients or working with team members.

Pick one. You know there’s not one crm that does everything. There’s not one drive that does everything. I’m thinking of like Google drive and dropbox. I use Trello and I link my trello with my dropbox and my google drive to my trello and that’s how I communicate with most of my team members, but again, I’m a visual learner and that’s why I prefer Trello and we’re gonna. Get into what that really means being a visual learner because that’s all of. That’s all part of how you say a thing. Right, and it’s going to be important for you to know in how you can communicate better. I mentioned Tina Mitchell for episode 15. Well, a couple of weeks ago. I was speaking to her group at a lunch and learn and her amazing assistant Victoria was there. Well, Victoria and I were texting back and forth to get some information for the presentation that I was giving.

That’s the best way to communicate with her. Now sometimes it has to do with the age, right? My kids and I, we text all the time. However, my son prefers phone calls. He may respond back to text and he may text me every once in a while, but he’s a deep thinker. Sometimes his texts go for pages. He, he’s a thinker that one. A conversation is really the best way to communicate with him, so you need to take into consideration how they want to be spoken to, but also one of the clues might be the age of the person you’re speaking to. I know that my mother’s generation in general, and again, generalities are just that they’re general, they may not apply to everyone. Well, my mom’s generation in general like phone calls. However, I’ve mentioned in the show before that my mom is a sign language interpreter and very well known in the deaf and deaf blind communities and they have been texting since way back in the day.

I remember her blackberry she used to have it had a keyboard on it. They have been huge textures, so my mom and I will text or email with each other, however, she also loves it when I pick up the phone and give her a call. I work with a lot of people who really prefer email and I know why because when it comes to email you can have that clarify and verify factor built in. You have it in writing. What was I supposed to do again? Oh, let me refer to the email. You can do that with text and Trello boards and all the other CRM’s as well, but when you’re in your email every single day, sometimes that’s the best place to have it and file it away. Have you ever sent someone an email with a couple of questions in it and when they respond they only respond to one thing.

That’s kind of the disconnect. For me, an email, I’m a bit of a skimmer, I’m gonna admit again, visual learner and I’ve been known to read the directions from the bottom up. Kind of just looking for the highlights. Well, an email, you want to be real specific but also not go into too much depth. It can be a little overwhelming and as my friend Molina Palmer says, and she’s from the brainy Biz podcast, if you’re not listening, check it out. It’s awesome. Well, we, our attention span is getting shorter and shorter and there’s only really so much information we can retain. I heard a statistic the other day, I’m not sure where I heard it, but the statistic was that we can only keep seven things in our mind at any given time. Seven kind of seemed like a lot to me, but when you think about it, you can really only have seven concepts that you can consciously be thinking about.

So here’s a tip for you. When you are discovering someone’s communication styles, the best way to identify that is to know how they contact you. Do they most often send you a text message or an email or pick up the phone? Think about the past and when you’ve had the most productive communication with that person, was it face to face? Was it over the phone? That’s going to be your clue on how they like to be communicated with. Now, the second part of that is how you communicate meaning visually, auditorily. That’s an awkward word to say.

There are four preferred communication styles and they are visual, auditory, kinesthetic, and auditory digital, and I’m going to define each one of those, but first I fun fact. Did you know that rapport is established in the first 90 seconds or less with someone? Ninety three percent of this communication is communicated and received unconsciously. Meaning it’s not something that you’re really aware of. It’s true what they say. First impressions are so important, so visual communicators are people like me. I learned by seeing it and I can look at pictures or I love to watch videos. If I’m listening to a long drawn out seminar, my mind tends to wander and I have a really hard time paying attention. Appearance is important to me. I don’t mean your physical appearance. I mean the appearance of the message. Have you ever heard that? The, that old saying a picture paints a thousand words?

Well, it’s true, and if I get an email that is just thick and chock full with big blocky chunks of words, not my favorite. So if you’re communicating with someone like me who’s very visual, used pictures, diagrams, slides, images or videos rather than anything written, written words always buttress what you’re saying, which is great, but it’s best to hit the visuals with them. And another tip, you can use words that are visual, meaning when you convey your message, you can use words like see, look, view, appear. Um, you can use phrases like a bird’s eye view, you know what I mean? Beyond a shadow of a doubt, that type of thing, but don’t be dramatic beyond a shadow of a doubt that that’s a little dramatic. Now, for the auditory communicators, these are people who take in information by listening now, right now you’re listening to the podcast.

Do you ever like drift off a little bit when you’re listening to podcasts? I do. It’s because I’m usually listening in some crowded place, either at the gym or while running errands sometimes. Well, just working around the house. Hey, wherever you are right now, take a picture and tag me on social media, either instagram or facebook. It’s at difficult happens. I’d love to see where you’re listening to the podcast. Auditory communicators will they learn best by listening, by what they hear. They’re often literal listener, so choose your words carefully. When you’re talking to someone who’s an auditory communicator, they can be easily distracted by noises because they’re listening so intently. They love music, audio books, and talking on the phone. They’re going to be most aware of what your message sounds like, right? Whether it sounds right to them, these types of communicators will be interested in like teleseminars or conference calls.

More often than not, they are very good at steps and procedures and sequences, so structure your communication in that way. They also respond to tone of voice and words and they like to be told how they’re doing with auditory communicators that use some of the following phrase and they’ll really go a long way. Of course, hear, listen, sounds resonate. You know, like in a manner of speaking or lend me your ear or rings a bell. Now this one is kinesthetic communicators. I think I’m like half visual and half kinesthetic because kinesthetic communicators learn something by doing it. It’s like with the podcasting, if you’ve been listening for a while, you’ll know that I learned how to podcast from scratch, watched a ton of youtube videos and just got in there and did it. It’s the same thing with home remodeling. My sister and I just dove in there and did it.

We refinished floors, we redid walls, we dry walled. We taped, but we got in there and just did it, so I may be half and half on this one. Oftentimes kinesthetic communicators will be a little slower when they speak. I realize as I say that, that that’s not me at all. We’re not all one thing. We’re a mix of many, many different things and experiences. Now. Kinesthetic communicators, they really care about how a message feels, you know, like if it feels right, they trust their gut, they memorize by doing or walking through the steps of something. Kinesthetics will respond favorably to, towards like grasp, concrete touch, feel, tap into boils down to, are you with me? Great. Let’s go to the last one. Auditory digital communicators. Now this one was new to me. I knew the visual, the auditory and the kinesthetic because I’m. I’m creating a an online training for dealing with difficult people and you really want to hit all three because you don’t know who your learners are going to be and when you see it and you write it down and you hear it, it is cemented in so many ways.

This has been the most effective way for me to learn and I think it’s the most effective way for everyone to learn. When you do all three. Now the auditory digital communicators are the most analytical of the four types of communicators. They also memorize steps and procedures and sequences, but they’re going to also use words like sense, understand, think, learn. They’re more interested in whether a message makes sense to them. So what I want you to take away from today’s episode is that it’s the. It’s how you say a thing, not just the words that you use, but the venue that you use as well. It’s important. Pay attention to the people around you, especially the ones that you want to build a deeper relationship with or more rapport with and see what their different style is. Is it auditory, visual, kinesthetic, and what’s their mode?

Do they prefer voxer? Email. I am. Now, of course there’s a caveat here. Sometimes you need to use a certain way of communicating with a broad group of people and it may not be their favorite and what you can do is then buttress it with their favorite or a buttress it with the right verbiage to help them identify and pick up your message. Don’t forget to tag me on social media and go to difficult happens.com/ten tips to grab your attentive for dealing with conflict and I am super excited about our next show, the amazing Dr Laura gala her is a back and you know what? She just did a Ted talk. I’m definitely gonna. Ask her about that. We’re going to be talking about everything from psychological safety and team building to her trip to Maui and her year abroad. That’s right. She spent an entire year on the road working, man. I’m a little jelly. All right. Until next time. Be honest, but kind be firm but fair and be in touch. You know, I love to hear from them.

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Resources:

The Money Hour, Tina Mitchell Episode 15: Dealing with difficult clients

Melina Palmer – Brainy Biz Podcast

Show Intro music is Whispering Through by Asura