Coaching to Your Better Future
"Players win games, teams win championships." - Bill Taylor
From time to time, people ask me about one on one coaching. Instead of writing a long letter, I decided to take a different direction. Listen to the audio below:
To schedule a private exploratory session, send an email to info@empowermax.com and include your phone number. You'll receive a call from an EmpowerMax PCS associate to schedule your consultation.
Best of Success,
David Martin
EmpowerMax PCS, Inc.
info@empowermax.com
The Performance Zone
Communications News
"To sit back and let fate play its hand out and never influence it is not the way man was meant to operate." - John Glenn
Communication is a multifaceted word that covers just about any interaction with others: casual conversation, persuading, teaching, and negotiating.
What does communication mean? The word is a static noun, but really, communication is a cycle or loop that involves at least two people. You cannot communicate with the waxwork dummy, what you do is meaningless, it gets no response. When you communicate with another person, you perceive their response, and react with your own thoughts and feelings.
Your ongoing behavior is generated by your internal responses to what you see and hear. It is only by paying attention to the other person that you have any idea at all about what to say or do next. Your partner is responding to your behavior in the same way.
You communicate with your words, with your voice quality, and with your body: postures, gestures, expressions. You cannot, not communicate. Some messages conveyed even if you say nothing and keep still. So communication involves a message that passes from one person to another.
How do you know that the message you give is the message they received? You have probably had the experience of making a neutral remark to someone, and being amazed at the meaning they read into it. How can you be sure the meaning they get is demeaning you intend?
There is an interesting exercise used in NLP training courses. You choose a simple sentence for example, "it's a nice day today" and three basic emotional messages you want to convey with it. You might choose to say it in a happy way, a menacing way and a sarcastic way.
You say your sentence in the three ways to another person without telling her. The three messages you wish to convey. She then tells you the emotional messages she actually got from your sentence. Sometimes what you intended matches what she perceived. Often it does not.
You can then explore what you would have to do differently with your voice and body language to ensure the message she gets is the same as the message you sent.
Remember, communication is so much more than the words we say. These form only a small part of our expressiveness as human beings. Research shows that in a presentation before a group of people 55% of the impact is determined by your body language - posture, gestures and eye contact - 38% by your tone of voice, and only 7% by your words or the content of your presentation.
Of course the exact figures will differ in different situations and clearly body line which and tonality make an enormous difference to the impact and meaning of what we say. To emphasize its now, what we say, but how we say it that makes a difference.
Margaret Thatcher spent a great deal of time and effort altering her voice quality. Tonality and body language determine whether the word "Hello" is a simple recognition, a threat, a putdown, or a delightful greeting.
Actors do not really work with words, they are trained in tonality and body language. Any actor needs to be able to convey at least a dozen different shades of meeting with the word "no". All of us expressed many shades of meaning in everyday conversation, and probably also have a dozen different ways to say "no", only we do not consciously think about them.
If the words are the content of the message, then the postures, gestures and expression and voice tonality are the context in which the message is embedded, and together they make the meaning of the communication.
So there is no guarantee that the other person understands the meaning you are trying to communicate. The answer goes back to the outcome, acuity and flexibility. You have an outcome for the communication. You notice what responses you're getting, and you keep changing what you do or say until you get the response you want.
To be an effective communicator, act on the principle that:
The meaning of the communication is the response that you get.
Master communications and you will master your world.
Show Up, Suit Up & Step Up!
Best of Success,
David Martin
EmpowerMax PCS, Inc.
info@empowermax.com
The Performance Zone
Straight to the Key Points
"The Process for Success in Life or in Competition is Identical: Strategy, Training, Commitment, Execution. Know What it is You Want, Prepare With That End in Mind, Commit to the Goal and Take Action!" - David Martin
If someone were to create an 'Elevator Speech' about the Pursuit of Excellence it would probably go something like this. The person doing explaining would say, "Ladies and Gentlemen of the elevator, to be successful in life you need only to remember three things."
"Firstly, know what you want; have a clearer idea of your outcome in any situation.
"Secondly, be alert and keep your senses open so that you notice what you are getting.
"Thirdly, have the flexibility to keep changing what you do until you get what you want."
Then somewhere in the elevator he would write on a white board that shows up out of nowhere:
And then he would exit as he reaches his floor - End of the Elevator Speech.
First is the skill of knowing your outcome. If you do not know where you are going, it makes it hard for you to get there.
An important part of your Pursuit of Excellence is training in sensory acuity: where to place your attention and how to change it in larger filters so that you notice things that you had not noticed previously. It is present moment sensory awareness.
When communicating with others, this means noticing the small but crucial signals that let you know how they are responding. When thinking, that is communicating with yourself, it means heightened awareness of your internal images, sounds and feelings.
You need the acuity or sensitivity to notice if what you are doing is giving you what you want. If what you're doing is not working, do something else...anything else. You need to hear, see and feel, what is happening and have a choice of responses.
The Pursuit of Excellence aims to give people more choice about what they do. Having only one way of doing things is no choice at all. Sometimes it will work and sometimes it won't, so there will always be situations you cannot cope with.
Two choices will put you in a dilemma. Having a choice means being able to use a minimum of three approaches. In any interaction, the person who has the most choices of what to do, the greatest flexibility of behavior, will be in control of the situation.
If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got. In other words, if what you are doing isn't working, do something else.
The more choices you create for yourself, the more chances you have for success.
The way these skills work together is rather like what happens when you hire a rowing boat to explore a stretch of water. You decide where you want to go: your initial outcome. You start rowing and notice your direction: sensory acuity. You compare this with where you want to go and if you are off course, you change direction. You repeat this cycle until you reach your destination.
Then you set your next destination. You can change or outcome at any point in the cycle, enjoy the journey and learn something on the way. The course is more likely to be a zigzag than a straight line. Rarely is there an absolutely straight path to where you want to go.
So know what it is you want, pay attention and be flexible. These are core concepts in any area of your life in which you seek improvement. In your Pursuit of Excellence you can use accelerate the process and the results.
Until next time, remember the BEST is yet to come!
Best of Success,
David Martin
EmpowerMax PCS, Inc.
info@empowermax.com
The Performance Zone
