Before you start looking for the right communication technique or words to use to convey an idea, you must consider three critical factors. They are not complicated. They are important. Failure to include them in your thinking, could lead to a failed communication.

Proper consideration of these three factors coupled with understanding the underlying principles of communication and conflict resolution will lead you to successful, powerful, and effective communications.

The general principles, concepts, and mindsets of effective communication are simple to say. In fact, they pretty much reduce to:

• Assume the other person has benign intent until you definitely learn otherwise.
• Communicate in ways that do not project a threat to the other person.
• Make it easy for the other person to receive your message.
• Close the loop on your communications to make sure you understood correctly and that the other person understood you correctly.

This list is probably not inclusive of every key communication principle. It does include the basic, underlying ideas for most of the techniques and approaches that I teach in workshops, help coaching clients to implement, and that I work to apply in my personal life. They are simple enough to express, and they are often difficult to apply.

Application becomes difficult because of the three critical factors I mentioned above. The foundational principles and core ideas combined with the three factors accounts for the wide range of possible communication strategies you could apply in a given situation.

The three factors are:

Your Message

In many cases, this is the first factor that most people consider, and they often consider it only from their perspective.  If stated out loud, most people’s thinking would probably sound like this: “Here’s what I want to say.”

In reality, your message has two parts:

1. The message you are attempting to deliver, and
2. The message that the other person receives.

The second part of your message – the other person’s perception of it – is at least as important as the message you intend to deliver. As you choose your approach, make sure you consider both sides of the message.

Your understanding and consideration of the next two factors significantly influences how the other person receives your communication.

Your Relationship

The nature of your relationship with the other person must figure in your thinking as you communicate with him or her. While the general principles remain the same, the specific strategy for communicating with your supervisor is different from the strategy you would use with your colleagues or with people who report to you.

If there is a power mismatch between you and the other person, it could increase the perception of threat felt by either party. Keep this in mind as you plan your communications. If you are the “superior” party, you might have to work a little harder to take any subtly implied threat out of your communications.  If you are in the “subordinate” position, you might hear threats that are not intended.

The Context

Where are you during the communication? Is it spoken or written, on the phone or face-to-face, one-on-one or in a group setting? Each of these situations – contexts – calls for a different consideration as you choose your communication tactics and techniques.

The bottom-line is this: if you are looking for silver-bullet, one-size-fits-all communication strategies – look no further. You will not find them.

Work on building your communication tool kit, develop and practice multiple approaches and phrases to use in different situations and with different people, and learn to read situations so that you can choose the best communication tool for the job. Do these things well, and you will become a remarkable communicator.

As you look for the right tool for the job in various situations, remember the three critical factors to improve your odds of success.

Related posts:

1. Four Ways to Improve Your Communication
2. Beware of Labels
3. Six Questions to Make Sure You Have Communicated Effectively

I am also reflecting on the fact that today marks the twenty-seventh anniversary of my commissioning as an ensign in the United States Navy.

Many things have happened in that twenty-seven years. I…

• Completed my service as a submarine officer.
• Married my amazing wife.
• Became the father of two fantastic daughters.
• Worked in research, technical service, product development, and process development in both the plastics and coatings industries.
• Launched a consulting, training, and coaching business.
• Edited and contributed to several books.

Along the way, I have met and worked with some incredible people. More than my experiences, it is the people I have met that come to mind today as I reflect on the last twenty-seven years.

As a result of these relationships, I have the opportunity to do what I do today. For example…

• I am in the Chicago area because of a relationship that began about seven or eight years ago when the contact I have with today’s client worked with a different company.
• I co-authored a book (From Bud to Boss), co-created two workshops (Ultimate Communicator and Bud to Boss) that will be delivered across the country in more than fifty cities next year because I had a cup of coffee with my friend and colleague Kevin Eikenberry almost ten years ago.
• I have enjoyed dinner aboard a yacht in Seattle harbor because of friendships I formed in the Navy.
• I have traveled across North America, parts of Asia, and Western Europe because of personal and professional relationships that created business opportunities.

I could continue this list with other opportunities and experiences I have had over the last twenty-seven years because of people I have met and relationships I have developed over time. I won’t do that because the list is long, and I run the risk of leaving someone out in my rush to move to my next task.

As I reflect today, I see that technical competence has been a part of the opportunities I have had, and that relationships are the bigger part. It has usually been a relationship, not my skill, that got me “in the door” for an opportunity.

I also see that, in the rush of daily activities, it is easy to move quickly from task to task without investing the time to honor and acknowledge important relationships.

Today, I encourage you to remember the value of relationships in both your personal and professional lives, and to do something in the next 24 hours to honor and acknowledge at least one of those relationships.

Related posts:

1. How Much Margin Do You Have?
2. How to Take Charge of Your Life – General Principles

A little over a week ago, my wife and I drove our daughter from Indiana to Texas to begin her freshman year of college. On the return trip, we drove through Oklahoma. As is common this time of year, we encountered road construction marked with a sign similar to the one above, and I felt frustrated as I thought about the coming  delay.

We then saw another sign with additional information. The sign with additional information gave us an estimate of both the actual speed and the estimated time in minutes that we could expect to drive through the construction zone, and I felt relieved.

The actual speed was much slower than the posted speed. The estimated time we would drive in the construction zone was longer than I wanted to experience. The delay was the same, and, still, I felt relieved.

At that moment I gained a powerful insight into heading off conflicts before they start.

As I wrote previously about why your natural response to conflict is probably wrong and how conflicts escalate, we often feel angry or frustrated as conflicts get started — just as I felt frustrated when I first saw the construction signs.

In my driving situation, the frustration dissipated when I got further information. The speed I could drive and the time I would likely spend in the construction zone did not change. The delay I would  face did not change. Nothing about my experience would change.

The change in my frustration level came from knowledge about what to expect.  And that is the insight I had about heading off conflict.

When you communicate clearly about what people can expect in the future — even when they do not like what they will experience  — you will probably reduce the frustration and anger levels they feel as a result of the experience. By reducing their frustration and anger levels, you can reduce the emotional energy that they bring to their interactions with you about the issue in question. When you reduce the emotional energy, you reduce the risk that the communication will escalate to a destructive conflict.

Related posts:

1. Conflict Prevention: Just Fix the Problem
2. Conflict Resolution from John Wooden – What’s Right Not Who’s Right
3. How to Tell If a Conflict is Good or Bad

Sometimes, life gets messy — as shown by the picture of the living area in my home this morning.

When I first walked through this area on my way to get a cup of coffee and some breakfast, I felt a bit stressed.

My family was still asleep, and I had a full day of work planned in my home office. The mess felt a bit overwhelming and out of control.

If you look carefully by the rocking chair near the middle of the picture, you will see an insulated coffee cup. That cup represents the time I spent reading, reflecting, and planning before starting my day.

My morning reading included Today We Are Rich by Tim Sanders, and my reflection included writing in my Gratefulness Journal (an idea I got from the book).

As I wrote a list of things for which I am grateful, I looked around the mess in my home, and I saw evidence of:

• One daughter’s recent high school graduation and the celebration that followed
• Another daughter’s four day HOBY leadership seminar experience
• Two daughters who love listening to and playing music
• My dad’s hastily celebrated birthday while my parents visited our home for graduation ceremonies
• A community service project that my wife helped to organize
• A wife who worked hard to keep up with laundry during the last three action-packed weeks
• The opportunity that my wife and I had to work at the HOBY leadership seminar
• People who came home at the end of long days of serving and working with others too tired to put away the mess
• Business projects and opportunities that I have worked on while my wife kept everything else moving forward

As I re-framed my view of the mess in terms of the lives, relationships, and experiences that it represented, it transformed from stressful to soothing.

The lesson in this for leaders is to, at least for a short time, embrace messiness because of what the mess represents.

Your mess might by physical, like the one in my home this morning, or more intangible, like a long to-do list or a hectic project schedule. In either case, learn to embrace the temporary disarray, disorganization, and messiness because of the growth and progress it represents.

You can’t live with the mess forever — eventually you’ll have to clean it up. In the meantime though, find a way to frame it positively so that you can find the energy and enthusiasm to lead positively.

Now, I think I’ll go take another look at the mess and the memories it represents before my wife and kids get it cleaned-up.

Related posts:

1. Commit to Continual Learning – Life Lessons From Cal Ripken, Jr
2. Rules Without Relationship Breeds Rebellion
3. Conflict Resolution from John Wooden – What’s Right Not Who’s Right

In a recent post, I presented a simple model for understanding what drives our behavior.

According to the model, punishments (negative or unpleasant consequences) can reduce the likelihood that a behavior will repeat in the future. This observation implies that leaders can hope to eliminate “bad” behaviors by using punishment and discipline strategies.

If you face a situation where you need to eliminate inappropriate workplace (or family) behaviors, then you can apply negative consequences to achieve your goals. And, you might achieve partial success.

Using only negative consequences might eliminate a “bad” behavior. This approach will not guarantee that a “good” behavior will happen in its place.

According to the model I presented previously, we choose our behaviors from among the behaviors we perceive are available to us in a situation.

By making the consequences for one choice painful enough, you might encourage the person you are working with to choose a different behavior.  If you do not explicitly define the behavior that you would like to replace the “bad” behavior in question AND make the consequences for the new behavior positive, you run the risk of encouraging him to choose a third option that is even worse than the behavior you hoped he would change.

As you work to become a more effective leader, parent, teacher, coach, or friend, remember that only positive consequences for desired behaviors will encourage people to repeat those behaviors in the future.

When you  apply the model I wrote about previously, remember to:

• Beware of perception error
• Understand the application of both positive and negative consequences
• Explore all consequences the other person might experience (both tangible and emotional). In other words, think beyond the external consequences that you “apply” to the other person.

Most importantly, remember that…

You cannot punish people into good behavior.

Related posts:

1. A Simple Model for Understanding What Drives Behavior
2. The 5 Be’s of Motivation
3. Praise matters – Give four atta-boys for every one gotcha

The diagram above shows a simplified model for better understanding what drives behavior.

Since people often spend their lives studying and understanding what really drives our behavior, I am pretty confident that I cannot hope to fully cover the topic in this short post.

I can provide a quick overview you can use to diagnose what’s happening in your interactions with other people and how you might be able to modify your approaches to get better results, have more fun, experience more satisfying relationships, and make sense of what you see people do.

Here’s a simplified description of what the model shows:

1. We enter a situation.
2. We anticipate the outcome we want from that situation.
3. We choose the behavior that (we hope) gives us that outcome.

This description leads to the following implication:

We choose our behaviors based on what we expect to happen after we do them.

The consequence is what we expect that we will experience as a result of our behaviors. In this context, a consequence is anything that we experience as a result of our behavior. A consequence might be some external thing we receive or get because of our behavior. A consequence can also be the feelings we get from the behavior.

As you might guess, we tend to avoid negative consequences and to pursue positive consequences.  As a result, negative consequences (like punishments) tend to discourage repeating behaviors and positive consequences (like rewards) tend to encourage behaviors to repeat in the future.

Part of the challenge with applying this model in practice comes from a common error known as perception error. Perception error happens because not every person sees every consequence the same way. What one person sees as a reward; a different person might see as a punishment.

You can use the  DISC model to gain insights to avoid perception error.

For example, public recognition might be a reward for an outgoing, people-oriented person and it might be a punishment for a reserved, people-oriented person.

You can also apply the 5 Be’s of Motivation as you work with other people to encourage better interactions and results.

Remember, this is a very quick, very simplified description of this model and it’s implications. I’ll offer more insights in future posts.

Related posts:

1. You Cannot Punish People into Good Behavior
2. The DISC Model of Human Behavior – A Quick Overview
3. Employee Motivation Tips: Their DISC Behavior Style

Bad stuff happens to everyone.

We all face illness, the death of loved ones, financial crises, job setbacks, relationship challenges, and mechanical malfunctions. All of them are real, and all of them can breed frustration. When faced with these events, we often view them only in the negative context, and we ask the question: “Why me?”

Recently, I read a quote by the great tennis player Arthur Ashe:

If I were to say, “God, why me?” about the bad things, then I should have said, “God, why me?” about the good things that happened in my life.

— Arthur Ashe

If I understand correctly, he said this sometime after he was diagnosed with AIDS — after he was confronted with and had to live with “bad” news.

After this diagnosis, he went on to speak out for AIDS awareness rather than quietly retire to a private life.  Shortly before his death, he founded the Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health.  He kept using his blessings to help others even when he had received what many would call a curse.

Here’s what I propose, don’t ask “why” questions when confronted with adversity. Instead, ask “what” questions. Ask:

• What lesson have I learned from this experience?
• What will I do now?
• What good is there in this situation?

“What” questions give you power. “Why” questions sap your strength.

And, I come back to the title of this post: Count Your Blessings.

Despite any hardship, all of us have some blessing.

If I have a co-worker who drives me nuts, I have a job. If my car has a broken water pump, I have a car. If my furnace breaks, I live indoors.  If I lose a loved one, I had the privilege of knowing them.

I do not suggest that counting your blessings during a crisis or hardship is an easy thing to do. Nor do I claim to always execute this thought perfectly.

I do know that when I have found the strength and wisdom to look past the challenge to see the blessing, the challenge seemed less daunting, and I had the energy to persevere. When I have focused on the challenge, I have felt hopeless and without energy.

So, to have energy, enthusiasm, and happiness — count your blessings.

Related posts:

1. How to Take Charge of Your Life – General Principles
2. The ABC’s of Life: Accept Difference
3. The ABC’s of Life: Be Kind

A few days ago, I posted about the tragic death of a young lady who was part of my life when I was in college and she was a toddler. You can read that post here.

Sadly, I was unable to attend her funeral. I learned of the accident that took her life late on Thursday night and the funeral was on Saturday. I live in Indiana, and her funeral was in North Carolina.

My inability to get to North Carolina to lend my support to people who were a big part of my early adulthood saddened me equally as much as hearing of Krystal’s death.

In reflecting on the events of the last few days, I see that the problem is one of margin.

To explain what I mean, I’ll lean on my background as an engineer.

In my engineering design classes, I learned about the concept of design or safety margin — a factor built into design calculations to allow for minor errors, miscalculations, under estimations, and other variables that are difficult to accurately determine.

While I was in the Navy and learning to become an Engineering Officer, I learned about the specific margins that were built into both the submarine and the engineering plant to ensure safe operation.

Later, when I was working as a research engineer in the chemical industry, I used the concept of design margin as I developed new products and worked with customers to get our products qualified for their applications.

Safe engineering design always considers, allows for, and builds in some margin for safety.

This weekend, I became eminently aware of the lack of margin in my life. I didn’t have enough time margin to safely make the 12-hour one-way drive in the time I had between learning of Krystal’s death and her funeral. I didn’t have enough financial margin to jump on a plane and go.

Do I have enough time to live up to my immediate commitments? Yes. Do I have enough financial margin to meet my financial obligations? Yes.

And having enough to meet the minimum requirements does not create margin.

Just as the concept of margin applies to our schedule and our budgets, it also applies to our personal and professional relationships. For example, do you have enough margin in your relationships to…

• Withstand a communication error?
• Make it through a misunderstanding of intention?
• Survive a missed appointment?
• Last beyond a forgotten task?
• Etc.

I don’t propose that I have a “silver bullet” answer for creating more margin. I do find myself thinking about it a lot the last few days.

I suppose that each person has to find his own way to create margin in his life. So, as we prepare to end 2010 and begin 2011, I’ll share the question with you that I’ve been asking myself:

What will you do, starting now, to create more time, financial, and relationship margin in your life?

This is a big question to consider, and it relates directly to how you set your goals for next year.

If you have suggestions for me or others reading this post that might help in this process, please leave a comment below.

If you have specific questions about setting better goals, my friend and colleague, Kevin Eikenberry, is leading a free teleseminar on December 21 to address goal setting issues. You can leave your question for him and register here.

Related posts:

1. How to Take Charge of Your Life – General Principles
2. Conflict Resolution from John Wooden – What’s Right Not Who’s Right
3. Learning to Embrace Messiness

To take charge of your life, focus on controlling what you can.

As a practical matter, there’s not much you can control. So, you might as well control what you can.

You cannot control:

• How other people treat you
• How other people respond to you
• What other people say
• The weather
• Company policies (for many people)
• Laws (again, for most people)
• etc.

You can control your own words, actions, reactions, and interactions.

That’s it.

When I discuss this idea in training, I often say that of the 6+ billion people on the planet I can only control one of them. And he doesn’t always cooperate with me.

Still, controlling myself is all I’ve got.

For example, I can’t control whether or not people read this blog. I can control how often I post.

I can’t control if people treat me with respect. I can control if I treat them with respect.

And, the list goes on in like manner.

The point is this:

By focusing on what I can control, I become less concerned with what I cannot control.

With this as my focus, I can take charge of my life. You can choose to do the same.

Related posts:

1. How to Take Charge of Your Life – General Principles
2. Commit to Continual Learning – Life Lessons From Cal Ripken, Jr
3. Victim or Victor – You Decide

As I reflected on what he had to say and I considered some of the questions I receive in workshops, seminars, teleseminars, and coaching calls, I realized that part of what I hope to accomplish with my work is to help people get free of thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors that trap them in bad situations — bad work relationships, bad personal relationships, bad partnerships, etc.

So, I’m starting a series of articles targeted at specific things you can do to take charge of your life. I haven’t mapped out a detailed plan at this point. The series might be 6 articles or 16. I don’t know right now. I’m just going to write them and keep adding to the series until it is finished.

The general principles that come to mind as I start are:

• Control what you can
• Influence who you can
• Forget about the things and people you can neither control nor influence
• Stay focused on what you can do rather than what you can’t do
• Take responsibility for your situation.

I might think of some others as the series progresses. I would certainly be open to input on what to include on this list. Please let me know if you see a core, guiding principle for taking charge of your life that I missed.

The general principles are sort of like the airplane control panel in the picture above. They give you a way of looking at and evaluating your life to see what you either need or want to change. I’ll be exploring each of them individually and some related ideas in future articles. I hope you’ll stop by again and check the series out as it unfolds.

Related posts:

1. Take Charge of Your Life – Control What You Can
2. Commit to Continual Learning – Life Lessons From Cal Ripken, Jr
3. The ABC’s of Life: Accept Difference