Effective communication is generally not something that we're taught as children or adults, and it's very hard to master. By the time most of us have an interest in learning to communicate better, we find that we're very heavily programmed by our upbringing and our culture, both of which tend to be imbued with ineffective communication techniques. In this article, I offer a simple system that anyone can use to overcome common communication challenges.
I call this system S.M.A.R.T. communication. It's a technique designed to help anyone overcome the bad communication habits that their upbringing might have instilled in them. The acronym S.M.A.R.T. stands for:
- Specificity
- Motive
- Adapt
- Repeat and Reinforce
- Time out!
Let's have a look at each of these components and how you can make use of them.
Specificity
One of the main stumbling blocks to effective communication is a lack of specificity. Without providing your listener with enough detail, you're inviting misunderstanding. Think of any communication like a blueprint. When you initiate a conversation you most likely have something you want to convey, just as a contractor has a specific building in mind when he begins his construction. Suppose the blueprint he's working on doesn't specify a unit of measurement – inches, feet, meters or yards. In the absence of that information, he may build a house that doesn't meet the desired dimensions of the buyer.
When you hold a conversation with someone, you are building a relationship with them. The less specific you are, the less likely you are to build the kind of relationship that you want. So think about your desires and needs when you begin your communications and be careful not to assume important information.
This is particularly important when you are experiencing or describing an emotion. If you are angry with someone and say, “I'm pissed off at you!” you haven't told your partner what they've done, how to help resolve the anger or how to prevent you from getting angry in the future. The statement also opens the door for assumptions or guessing about you and what their response to your statement should be. That means you've opened the door for further failures of specificity.
Motive
Identify your motive when you're communicating with someone. What effects do you want to produce by saying what you are saying? I recently read an article that contained a surprising statistic. The article showed that 90% of terminally ill heart patients who were told that they would die within six months if they did not change their diet and lifestyle found it easier to die than to change their diet and lifestyle. What this tells you is that the physicians were unable to identify their motive to communicate or instill change. They couldn't identify what would motivate a change in their patients' diet and lifestyle. Often times when we are communicating we want to facilitate change. We want to change how someone is treating us, we want to change an appointment, and we want to change our own habits and so forth. Because our communications are so frequently about making change, we need to recognize that change is hard for people and take that into account when we formulate our communications.
Adapt
We've talked so far about understanding your listener's motives and being specific, but that isn't enough. Different people react in different ways to different styles of communication. For this reason, it is important to adapt your communication style to the listener. There are a number of ways that you can do this and I'll discuss them here.
We all have our own natural pacing or rhythm of communication. You've probably had the experience of speaking with someone that talked really fast. Likewise, you've probably spoken with someone that conversed really slowly. There are a number of ways you can adapt your conversation to make the communication more effective. If the pace is too fast, slowing down your own contributions just a bit is one way of leading your target or pacing your target so they will slow down a bit themselves without having to say, “Whoa! Slow down!” Likewise, you can lead a conversational partner to speed up a bit by increasing your own pace slightly. Again, this slight adjustment is often just enough to prompt them to speed up without having to ask for it. If the person's pacing is quite different from your own, you don't want to prompt them to come too far out of their natural pace, because their pace reflects their natural processing pace as well. Speed them up or slow them down too much and they may have a much more difficult time assimilating the information you're presenting them with. It's much better to try to find some mutually acceptable pace and that way communication will go much more smoothly.
Word choice can also affect the conversation and the rhythm of the conversation. In his Dianetics, L. Ron Hubbard shows that if someone reads a word that they don't understand their brain actually stops on that word and even if their eyes continue to scan over the text, they won't pick up what their eyes are seeing. Their brain will continue to process over the word they hadn't seen before. The same can happen in a spoken conversation. If you use a word that someone doesn't understand when speaking to them, they may be stuck trying to determine just what you meant. In the meantime, you're three or four sentences ahead in the conversation. It's important if you want to get your point across to check to make sure that any terms that may be unusual are being understood or make it known that the listener can and should ask for clarification if you do use words with which they are unfamiliar.
It is also important to understand your target's viewpoint. Be careful not to close your mind off to your conversational partner's ideas because your viewpoint is different from theirs. Often times when I'm speaking to people that claim to be devoutly religious I do my best to allow myself to imagine life from their viewpoint. I have to, because their viewpoint can be limiting. If I don't try to understand their view I simply won't be able to communicate with them. This is a way of connecting to the listener that allows you to see how their view limits them and how you can communicate your ideas within the bounds of those limitations. It's also a way of understanding why they are saying the things they do. Understanding their view can head off some of the negative emotions that might arise from the conversation. As my Mother always says, “connect before you correct.” You may not be trying to correct whomever you're speaking to, but connecting with them allows you to be present with them, which allows you a greater opportunity to be compassionate with their position in life.
Repeat and Reinforce
Getting feedback is one way to assess the clarity of your conversation. So if somebody repeats back to you what you've just said, you know that they have understood what it is that you were trying to convey. It also reinforces the point for the target. You can do this in a number of ways. You can ask them straightforwardly to repeat back to you what you have said. You can ask the target, “Can we agree upon... ?”
If you are making a request of someone, it is probably a good idea to follow up the repetition with something like, “Are you happy or comfortable with this arrangement?” Why is this important? Asking them about their feelings regarding your arrangement makes your listener aware of the fact that you are sensitive to their needs. It also opens the door for them to make adjustments to the arrangement that both of you are comfortable with and which allow them to complete their part of the arrangement more effectively.
Repeating and reinforcing can also be a helpful tool because it allows the speaker to hear their own words. This opens the opportunity for reflection on what they've said and many times they will correct themselves, either being more specific, taking into account emotional impact that they might not have considered and so forth. This may also help them to correct an inaccuracy. They may have misheard you or misunderstood and so the repetition provides an opportunity for correction.
Time Out!
Now sometimes, no matter what you try, either your listener or you may start to feel anger, jealousy or some other emotion during your conversation. When it gets to that point and you sense the downward turn in the conversation, the best thing you may be able to do is to take a time out. Find a polite way to continue the conversation at another time so that the both of you can continue it in a clearheaded, objective way. If you match someone else's negative energy in a conversation you're doubling the negative emotions and that's a surefire recipe for trouble! If you get upset, the nature of the universe is that everything is moving. Every atom, every sub-atomic particle, every planet and every organism is moving in some way. If it's here, it's moving. This means that all negative energy must move towards positive. So don't lose heart if your conversation starts to steer towards the negative emotions. Take a time out and you'll have the opportunity to move back towards something more positive.
The main goal behind the S.M.A.R.T. talk is to help you to avoid certain common roadblocks to communication. These roadblocks often trigger negative reactions in our listener or inhibit us from truly hearing what the speaker has to say. In either case no participant in the conversation is likely to be happy with the outcome. So always remember to use the following five components of the S.M.A.R.T. talk technology when you're communicating with someone:
Specificity
Motivation
Adaptation
Repetition and Reinforcement
Time-out
If you can use these five components in your daily conversations, I think you'll find your communication is stress free and both you and your listener will be happy with the outcome.