I’m starting a series on business communication. I hope you guys can join me on this journey where I delve into the topic of business communication and writing in the hopes that you can apply it to your professional and personal lives.
"Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing."
–Rollo May
"I know that you believe that you understood what you think I said, but I am not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant."
–Robert J. McCloskey, former State Department spokesman
Communication is a skill, activity and art that incorporates lessons learned across a wide spectrum of human knowledge. Perhaps the most traditional form of communication is storytelling. We’ve told each other stories for centuries to help make sense of our world, anticipate the future, and certainly to entertain ourselves. The art of storytelling draws on the understanding of yourself, your message, and how you communicate it to an audience that is simultaneously communicating back to you. Your reaction, anticipation, and adaptation to the process will determine how successfully you are able to communicate. You weren't born knowing how to write or even how to talk—but in the process of growing up, you have without a doubt learned how to tell, and how not to tell, a story out loud and in writing.
You didn’t learn to text in a day and didn’t learn all the codes—from LOL (laugh out loud) to BRB (be right back)—right away. In the same way, learning to communicate well requires you to read and study how others have expressed themselves, then adapt what you have learned to your present task—whether it is texting a brief message to a friend, presenting your qualifications in a job interview, or writing a business report.
Effective communication takes preparation, practice, and persistence. There are many ways to learn communication skills; the school of experience, or “hard knocks,” is one of them. But in the business environment, a “knock” (or lesson learned) may come at the expense of your credibility through a blown presentation to a client. The goal of this series is to offer you a trial run where you get to try out new ideas and skills before you must use them to communicate effectively to make a sale or form a new partnership. Listening to yourself, or perhaps the comments of others, may help you reflect on new ways to present, or perceive, thoughts, ideas and concepts. The net result is your growth; ultimately your ability to communicate in business will improve, opening more doors than you might anticipate.
As you learn the material in this series, each part will contribute to the whole. The degree to which you attend to each part will ultimately help give you the skills, confidence, and preparation to use communication in furthering your career.