It was a beautiful sunny Saturday when my friend Dan and I set out to cycle a section of the Cornish coastal path. Having been born a few miles down the coast in Newquay I knew this section of cliffs well. We had taken a detour off the main path to gawp at some seals basking on rocks below and were trying to find our way back. At first all was fine, but very gradually, over half a mile, the path got narrower. There was never a place to turn around and never an overwhelming need to do so. However, I began to get concerned about the sheer drop on one side, the steep cliff on the other and the increasingly thin path in front of my front wheel. Eventually, with Dan behind me, I stopped; the track was now about one foot wide. Too narrow to even get off the bike let alone turn around, I realised then that we’d been very stupid…
I’ll come back to this story in a moment.
Communication is an odd thing. We know what was said; we know what was meant; so surely we know what was heard? Not so. The filters we use all the time to simplify and make sense of the world around means that we all have unique ways of ‘hearing’ something. Now, since people are making up what they hear all the time why don’t we use this as a strength? In a Karate-like move why not flow with it rather than push against it? We’re so obsessed with getting across all information that ‘they have to know’ that we’ve stopped trusting the intelligence of those we’re communicating with. What if you were to throw away your carefully crafted bullet points and tell a story instead, trusting them to discover for themselves the important points? (By the way, there’s absolutely nothing stopping you from adding anything vital you think they may have missed at the end).
Over the years I have regularly been asked to speak to a wide variety of groups. One day I decided to take a chance and dropped all of my content and told a story instead. The rest of the meeting was spent allowing the audience in groups to decide what that story meant. It was, without question, my most impactful talk ever!
So what about you? Remember that cliff path where we couldn’t go forward or backwards and were stuck, fearing for our lives?
(1) Why do you think I told you that particular story? What relevance does it have? How might it apply to your communication challenges?
(2) What would you have done? (Ask me sometime what I did – it wasn’t an obvious answer)
(3) Want to be a better communicator? Want to learn a load of cool techniques and tools that will forever change how you across? Then come along to our new open workshop, Communications Mastery – 22 & 23 June.
Click here for more details
