Your ability to influence and persuade will play a huge role in your ability to get what you want.
Now you always want to aim for win-win outcomes, but it is so easy to misunderstand and, equally, to be misunderstood during an important conversation.
You want to avoid this. Erratic communication skills can cost you – can cost you dearly.
To succeed brilliantly in virtually any endeavour it is highly likely communication skills will be a pre-requisite.
Your ability to excel will probably depend upon having superior verbal, non-verbal and listening skills.
Better still, to be recognised as outstanding in whatever you do it is smart to settle for nothing less than becoming a master of communication.
And one aspect of this is to avoid the pitfalls that cause misunderstandings.
A breakdown in communication is often the result of a mismatch between rational thought and irrational beliefs.
To make matters worse, it is easy to trip yourself up and end up sending mixed messages.
The problem can be exacerbated because irrational beliefs are almost always saturated with emotion.
These beliefs are FELT to be true.
So, we create our own rules, a version of reality that represents how we think, how we feel and the way in which we behave.
We put our unique personality on show.
Unfortunately we expect and assume other people will agree with our point of view, but often they can misunderstand the meaning, and even totally disagree with the intent.
Even though we prefer to believe we make perfect rational sense when we speak this is not always the case.
Sadly.
The corollary is just as true.
When we listen we believe we fully understand what is meant.
Of course we do!
We rarely ask for clarification because we believe we fully understand and we think always second-guess accurately anyway.
But let’s face it, most of us are usually far too busy preparing our response to listen properly.
We make the mistake of assuming our own thoughts, ideas and feelings reflect everybody’s reality and is readily accepted by other people.
But bias creeps in.
And it is your own cognitive bias that decides your critical thinking.
And it is flawed.
To avoid the pitfalls and become a master of communication you need to ask great questions.
And this means putting your ego to one side, listen carefully and diligently, before clarifying what is truly meant by asking pertinent and timely questions.
Great communicators ask great questions.
And they are all very simple in construction.
Now let’s say you do all this, what can still go wrong?
I’ll answer that question in the next video in this series in a few days time.
Keep in mind that questions, great questions are the answer.