How you phrase it counts.
How you frame it counts.
How you use your tone of voice counts.
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Positive Communications - The Tone, Phrasing and Framing of Your Message.
Dear Friends:
No matter what the nature of your message, you must (despite yourself, and despite years of societal conditioning) frame it in a positive way, and in a positive tone.
The Human subconscious disregards negative commands.
In fact, as soon as you run to your boss at the Toyota dealership (or wherever you may happen to be working) and say, "Boss! We've got a problem!," he (or she) will 1) become defensive, unresponsive and angry, and 2) will resent you, personally. -- yep -- it is sort of like that whole, saddening "kill the messenger" thing.
People respond to bad news, or more accurately, to badly-framed and negatively-intoned messages, with fear, resentment and paralysis. This is behavior which is hard-wired into all of us.
In communicating, you have two choices:
1) Change Human Nature; or
2) Accept Human Nature, study it, and use that knowledge to your advantage.
Let's eliminate the guesswork. Choice 2) is the better one. [If you chose number 1, you are indeed either a) an ambitious person; b) a truly impressive optimist, or c) a somewhat feeble person who does not perform well on multiple choice tests. If you fall into this latter category, you are excused and needn't continue reading]
If your business is experiencing problems, and you stand up in a meeting and say "What costs can we absolutely cut? What things can we definitely survive without?," every person in the meeting will sense impending doom, and creativity will shut down.
In a business meeting, talking about "cuts" and "survive" (and other words which are negativevly-charged in their usual context) is not only detrimental because people generally try to escape problems rather than solve them...it can actually initiate a downward spiral in many other areas of the business. It's an attitude-killer.
Talking about how to increase revenues, or how to raise money will generally yield more cooperation than "what can we cut?" The first sounds like ambition. The second sounds like gangrene or some other horrible disease requiring amputation, dismemberment or something equally unpleasant.
There are exceptions.
For example, if the boat has sprung a leak, or the nuclear reactor is overheating, or there is a bomb threat in the mall, you occasionally have to wave the proverbial red flag as an immediate call to action.
Having said that (and I did, didn't I?), unless the situation is a physically threatening emergency which requires immediate, definitive action in order to avoid loss of life, the tone of your message, and the way in which you ask a question or make a request must be positively framed.
As they say..."The glass is always half-full." This is unless, of course, you are Socrates, and the glass contains hemlock.
Faithfully,
Douglas Castle
SENDING SIGNALS! - find us at http://SendingSignals.blogspot.com
”Communicate with precision and power.
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