Communication Is The Response You Get
Do you remember the scene where Amir Khan got slapped for every action he did in PK? As he mixed the different cultural communication. For him, to give condolence to a lady was a good act and he expected a good gesture in return, but the results were the opposite. As his communication was not as per the lady’s culture.
You have to move “6” 180 degrees to let the person understand that it is “6” and not “9” or at least underline “6” like this.
There are two options for you,
- Blame others that they don’t understand you
- Improve your communications so that they understand you
And that’s what we call — Communication is the response you get. Understanding this will make you a great communicator. And to understand this statement, you have to be the one who takes responsibility for every action he/she does.
Generally, we make groups of the same community or same area, region, etc. We try to find similarities so that people understand what we say. BUT we do not learn other languages/cultures, to improve our communication and be capable enough to communicate with everyone.
You have to have different approaches to teach the same subject to two different people. Teaching English to 5 year OLD and 50 year OLD is not the same. If you use the same technique, the responses would be different. And those responses define your communication skills.
Subjects are always, same. BUT teachers are different. And for the same teachers, we have different students. And with every student, the results are different. And these results make you a good communicator or a bad one.
There is also a saying that, “If you ask for something and don’t get it, then you did not ask the right way.” And we all have experienced this throughout our life in our conversations with Mom, Dad, Wife, Husband, etc.
I remember one conversation between my Mom and Dad. Dad was having dinner a little late as Mom had a bad day and was irritated. After eating a few bites, Dad asked Mom, “were you thinking about me while cooking the food?”. The question surprised Mom and said, “Of course not. What happened? Why did you ask this question?”. Dad replied, “Sabji is a little salty.” With this reply, Mom was blushing with a smile and said, let me check. This incident is just unforgettable for me. This taught me the lesson of communication. How one can make an angry/frustrated person smile. How does communication help to get the responses we desire? If Dad had directly said, there is extra salt in Sabji, Mom would have replied with a few angry words and irritation. BUT Dad changed it into a blush and a smile.
Recently, I learned about the DISC profiles. As per it, for a scientist, you can not communicate casually and for an outbound person, you should not share deep technical things. You have to change your Pitch for the same idea while presenting it to two different people. You can expect that the BJP Government and Congress Government would agree to the same proposal with the same pitch.
Similarly, one of the studies says, in your communication, words matter 7%, tone of voice matters 38%, and body language matters 55%. So, whenever you communicate, you have to be cautious about your Tone and Body language. We can experience this when chatting with friends, where words are usually slang but the tone and body language makes the conversation attractive.
So, if you have got a responsible position, and your subordinates are not performing as you stated, you have to go back and upgrade your communication with them. Just blaming would not help.
The same concept is applied to Marketing as well. Not all strategies work. We need to analyze the responses we get for a particular advertisement or any activity we did and accordingly always improvise. The responses or conversion ratio for a particular campaign needs to be analyzed and its results have to be used for the next campaign.
In conclusion, to be a good communicator, we should always test the responses we get from the people. And upgrade our communication accordingly. Strongly note that communication is the response you get and not what you expect.
