Luke, a VP: “I don’t have time for this.”
“What’s the matter?”, I asked.
Luke: “It takes him too long to explain things.”
Ramesh, the brilliant engineer: “He has the attention span of a gnat. He doesn’t even let me get one sentence out and he’s gone.”
Which one of them do I help?
Sometimes the answer is both. Sometimes only one of them comes for coaching. It doesn’t matter. One person can change everything.
I coached the VP first. He was wasn’t seeing the people who walked into his office. He was annoyed before they ever walked in. He was waiting for a good place to interrupt and take over.
Teaching him how to be fully present, to see them and really listen just about killed him. But he didn’t quit till he got there.
An amazing thing happened. The people below him walked in tense, waiting to be pounced on. In about two minutes they observed he was relaxed, realized he was focused … and they relaxed. As they relaxed, the frantic feeling went away, and their words came out clear. They even paused and gave him openings to direct the conversation.
Something that never happened before happened. This conversation wasn’t jagged with sharp edges. The flow of easy interchange led to an unexpected pinnacle of understanding. And conversations that had taken 20 minutes were now taking 10 or 12. With outcomes that were much better than any they had created before.
Warmth grew, and appreciation, and respect. It went both ways.
Real communication makes it inevitable.
Then I taught the people who were reporting to him how to get to the point. It just about killed them. They all insisted that “he needs to understand what led up to the point.” It was risky business to just get to the point. One man described it as “painful” to cut everything else out.
They couldn’t believe that when they got straight to the point, making their point clear and compelling (which it already was in their minds, just not when they expressed it trying to convince someone else), when they got straight to the point and made it compelling, the outcome they got was the one they wanted. One gentleman said, “I didn’t have to show him 42 slides why we needed to spend $7 million. I showed him one. To me it looked way too simple, I couldn’t believe he approved it. It’s in the budget now.”
Real communication builds that bridge we’re all looking for.
Here we are on the planet with 8 billion people. It’s truly worth learning how to communicate with them to create the highest level of human understanding possible in all of your conversations.
When you get there, you’ll be amazed at how it feels. There’s no way to describe it except to get there.
My job is to help people achieve and experience something they’ve never experienced before: real communication. Once you experience it, you will never be the same. It is the bridge to truly extraordinary outcomes and a skill we were all born to learn.
Be the cause!