How to – Get Your Message Heard If you want to sell, persuade, inform, or motivate people, you will have to speak and they need to listen. Many professionals prefer to shoot from the hip and hope for the best. Why not give yourself a better chance to be heard? If you want to stand apart from the crowd and experience a higher rate of success, take some time to really be professional, and plan your message.

• Determine what is important to your audience? What do they want? What are they thinking? What is important to them and their situation? Through active listening and some good research you can answer those questions before you open your mouth and deliver a message that fits their framework.

• Communicate caring. You want to convey your concern for their welfare.

• Talk with energy and enthusiasm. If it doesn’t excite you, why would it excite them?

• Be concise. Choose phrases that are like sound bites – they are memorable and repeatable.

• Get their attention. Ask a question, tell a story, or relate and interesting, alarming or surprising statistic that immediately creates a bridge between what you want to say and what thy want to know.

• Practice phrasing, opening comments and strong concluding statements. You want to be able to focus on your energy and their attention, rather than searching for words.

If you want people to really get your message, make sure that it is heard. To compete with the data overload that everyone experiences, hone your communication skills for maximum impact.

Labels: Communication, message

  1:55 PM •  0 Comments •

How to - Deal With Difficult Situations Many people will tell you that there is no conflict in their organization – and what they often mean is that when there IS conflict, it is avoided. Therefore the disagreement simply goes underground and remains unarticulated and unresolved.

When resolving conflict, the following guidelines are part of a valuable philosophy to have:

1. Preserve Dignity and Self-Respect

That goes for all of the people involved in the conflict. In a heated discussion, it is easy to say something demeaning. Keep your focus on the issues you are talking about, not personalities. Unless proven otherwise, assume that the people are expressing legitimate concerns when they disagree. Even if they appear stupid or stubborn to you, you won't get any closer to resolving the dispute by putting them down.

2. Listen With Empathy

Try to put yourself in their shoes. See things from their perspective. If their ideas conflict with what you already believe, see if you are discounting their message. Are you communicating hostility in your tone or body language? To fully get the information basic to managing differences, you need to listen with a neutrality that suspends critical judgment. When you listen fully to understand, you send the message that you respect them, regardless of whether or not you agree with them.

3. Don't Expect To Change Others' Behavior

When the stakes are high, the reflex reaction to disagreement is the desire to change the other person's basic behavioral style. Changing your own behavior is tough enough. Changing the behavioral traits of someone else is almost impossible. Instead, focus on what you say and do when you are with a "difficult" person. Behaviors automatically transform when either person changes their customary pattern of relating to the other.

4. Express Your Independent Perspective

When you are the lone dissenter, it is tempting to surrender your conviction to conform to more popular views. At other times, it is possible to get so enmeshed in the dispute that you loose the war in order to win the battle. What you provide others is your individual point of view - which means that you have to reflect about what really matters to you.

Labels: Communication, difficult, expressions

  8:11 AM •  0 Comments •