“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place”.

• George Bernard Shaw

There are times when a C-Suite Executive instructs his colleague, and the person does not decipher the message. When he returns with what he was sent to do, the Executive asks, “But I explained to you? Did you not understand my instructions?”

This is what happens when we assume that we have communicated but have not. Customer service representatives are trained to always re-echo what the customer has said so that there are no assumptions.

According to Judith E. Glaser’s Harvard Business Review article, People often think they’re talking to each other when they’re really talking past each other. They carry on monologues, not dialogues.

There is a biological explanation: when we express ourselves, our bodies release higher reward hormones, and we feel great. The more we talk, the better we feel. Our bodies crave that high, and we become blind to the conversational dynamics. While we’re being rewarded, the people we’re talking to might consciously or subconsciously feel cut off, invisible, unimportant, minimised and rejected, which releases the same neurochemicals as physical pain.

Feeling that rejection sends them into a “fight, flight” response, releasing cortisol, which floods the system and shuts down the prefrontal cortex, or executive brain, letting the amygdala, or lower brain, take over. To compound conversational challenges, the brain disconnects about every 12-18 seconds to evaluate and process, which means we often pay as much attention to our thoughts as we do to other people’s words.

These are natural impulses. But we have to learn to master them because clear, two-way, empathetic, non-judgmental communication is critical for the high functioning of any business. It’s how deals get done, projects get run, and profits get earned. That’s why I now spend my time teaching people how to become more intelligent about conversations.

Recognise your blind spots.
Stop
• assuming that others see what you see, feel what you feel, and think what you think, since that’s rarely the case
• failing to recognise that emotions, such as fear and distrust, change how you and others interpret and talk about reality
• Think you understand and remember what others say when you only remember what you think about what they’ve said.
• underestimating your propensity to have conversational blind spots!

Start
• paying attention to and minimising the time you “own” the conversational space
• sharing that space by asking open-ended discovery questions, to which you don’t know the answers, so you stay curious (i.e. What influenced your thinking?)
• listening non-judgmentally to the answers
• asking follow-up questions

They started asking discovery questions and paying close attention to their customers’ answers, which expanded their frame of reference and gave them new insights into needs and opportunities. In so doing, the executives presented themselves as conversationally intelligent partners.

Let me end with the words of Dr Amy Zalman, “Good communicators reveal, in speech and action, that they understand the motivations and aspirations of their audiences- and it is via this understanding that they gain their sympathies”.