Say it Better

Connective Communication Happens When People Feel Heard

Does it feel like people stop listening before we stop talking? Feel under-appreciated?

 What makes us feel known, understood and grow closer with others? First we must feel heard. Mark Goulston describes exactly how in Just Listen – the best book I’ve read on the topic.  If he can help FBI agents talk down hijackers and stop those intent on committing suicide then his methods might help you.

An added benefit to listening deeply? 

When you connect with someone you are more likely to be able to correct problems and resolve conflict before perceptions harden.

 Why? We are more likely to bring up what bothers us when we think we’ll be heard.

“Just because nobody complains doesn’t mean all parachutes are perfect.” ~Benny Hill 

Next what do we say to evoke interest and involvement? In this interview with Bonnie Marcus, hear some of the methods I’ve discovered and try, with uneven success, to follow in my life.  What are some of the ways you’ve found to connect with others?

Look at Me (Bet You’ll Pay Attention)

 Do people stop listening before you stop speaking? 

Sometimes an ad can be used as a primer on how to attract and keep attention  - and get people talking about what you said. 

Watch Isaiah then consider these tips:

1.  Say your first sentence in three words or less.

2.  Make the first word a verb.

3.  Suggest a specific action to take.

4.  Evoke one or more senses.

5.  Use word pictures and gestures and movement to reinforce your words.

6.  Maintain a tempo in the cadence of your speaking

7.  Repeat a phrase that supports:

     •  The way you want them to feel, and 

     •  The main action you want them to take.

8.  End by looping back to the beginning, with your action phrase. (By that time they should be saying it out loud with you or at least saying it to themselves.)

Notice that in this ad the sexual cues and special effects don’t keep viewers involved as much as the “we’re having fun here” compelling presence of Isaiah Mustafa, the man; his face, stance, voice, and, most of all, his use of words – and his rhythmic sequence of sentences. This ad has attracted over five million online views. 

Yet if the advertiser’s market is to influence, not just men but also women (influencing their men) then Armpit Mountain misses its mark. 

Get Someone to Open Up

  Feeling down? Start smiling as if you mean it. Faster than thinking your way into a better mood, smile and move “as if” you are happy. You are more likely to feel happier sooner – and so will the people around you. Even botox-induced frown prevention has that mood-lifting effect.   

 You can evoke a similar "as if” effect when you want someone near you to open up, discovered Mark Goulston. Get that person to:

1. Look directly at you.

2. Uncross their arms. in front of you.

 “How do you get them to do that?” wrote Goulston in Just Listen.

Ask them questions that will elicit an emotional charge. Ask him, for example, to explain one of the biggest fears or opportunities he faces.

Words will not be sufficient to convey the intensity of his emotion. He will feel compelled to gesture with his hands and arms.

When people gesture, Dr. Goulston found that “they have opened themselves up to you. The important thing now is to build on the sense of importance and urgency with questions such as:

• ‘What will happen if you seize that opportunity?’

• ‘What will happen if you miss out on it?’”

Want more? You may enjoy these related posts:

1. Do people stop listening before you stop speaking?

2. When Worry is Worthless, When Fear is a Friend

3. How You Prove Yourself Right

4. More About Dissolving Conflict, Part Two of Two

5. Why Smart People Can Be So Stupid

6. Passive Men and Wild, Wild Women (How Stop Fighting)

By the way, March is International Listening Awareness Month, as if we needed that nudge to hone our capacity and willingness to listen.

The The Impotence of Proofreading

 “Proofreading your peppers is a matter of the the utmost impotence.”  

Mortified by some of the mistakes you’ve made in writing and overlooked when re-reading? In a droll stand-up act Taylor Mali covers many of the most common, sometimes Freudian slips. Imagine proofreading as comedy that cracks you up as you cringe at familiar writing errors.

“I need to be challenged, challenged menstrually…I need a college that could give me intellectual simulation. Not just anal community colleague.  I really felt that I could get into an ivory legal college…. Gone would be my dream of going to Harvard, Jail or Prison.”

“There is no prostitute for careful proofreading.”

Only a warped mind could imagine Icarus Airlines. Then, in another spoken word performance, enjoy his take on our increasingly inarticulate speech, advocating clarity and conviction.  In a more personal vein, see another side of Taylor, where he ruminates about her after she…  

Discoveries like slam poet Mali and monologist Sarah Jones remind me, again of the network effect, through friends, finding prodigious talent on the Internet.

 

Finding the Words to Forge Success in This Connected World

 Sharing, via Twitter, his 73-year-old father’s often profane comments in their daily conversations after he moved into his parents’ basement doesn’t seem like a smart career move, yet it is for Justin Halpern, proving, again how the world has changed in this ever more Connected World.  He didn’t need Hollywood connections or piles of money.   

He “just” needed a catchy concept, a capacity to write what some people loved to read. Humor helps. And there’s a ready audience for down home wisdom mixed with profanity.

"A parent's only as good as their dumbest kid. If one wins a Nobel Prize but the other gets robbed by a hooker, you failed."

Less than seven months since he started sharing his Dad’s blunt comments Halpern has 1.16 million Twitter followers and 99,777 Facebook followers.

"No, I'm not a pessimist. At some point the world s#%&s on            everybody. Pretending it ain't s#%$ makes you an idiot, not an optimist."  

 Yes, a non-actor managed to attract a legion of fans, and, perhaps, so can you or I with a sufficiently captivating premise, delivery format and messages. That’s the dream anyway. And it came true for Halpern.   

Post Secret and Six Word Memoirs and Daily Candy are other examples of this approach.   

 Back to Halpern’s quantum career leap forward.  Last month, William Shatner signed on to play his father in a CBS TV show produced by the two guys that created Will & Grace. To top off his dream, 29-year-old Halpern gets to co-write the TV show.  In the warped ways of today’s media culture the actor who’ll play Halpern is moving over from a TV show about cougar women. Everyone involved in the project readily admits that the memorable title has to be changed.