Attuning our communication is key to obtain the best outcome of our exercise and it is achieved when we consciously consider when it is a proper time to ask, when to listen and when to be silent. Sometimes the good use of time for achieving effective communication is not so obvious. Let’s take a look at how a good awareness of the time used, can lead to achieving our objectives.
The first thing I want to consider is opportunity. Am I trying to communicate something to someone at a time when they are willing to listen to me?
We often make the mistake of being untimely -for example- when we meet a colleague in the office who is thinking that he is late for his next meeting and yet we tell him something that we had in mind. This way we thought we had freed ourselves from the responsibility of saying something that was important and then we both forgot the point. And one day this communication error comes back to us in the form of something unresolved or worse, in the form of a problem that could have been prevented.
Second, speed: In the spirit of being efficient with the use of our own and other people’s time, we may communicate too quickly, omitting important details (context) or talking about a topic that is less known to the other person than to me, and by saying things so quickly, we don’t give the other person a reasonable time to assimilate it. Thus, they don’t understand enough to agree with our points or express their doubts.
Let’s not forget that listening demands an effort from the other person’s mind to understand us. The exercise of communication -well done- is a two-way excercise: on one side, the person who speaks, has to work on being understood and on the other, the person who listens, makes the effort of understanding and acting on the message received.
Third: length. The length of a message adorned with too many examples is as counter-productive as speed. Talking too many examples manage to lose the listener’s attention or, worse still, deviate our attention from the idea that we wanted to communicate.
Finally, interruptions: These are a symptom that our internal dialogue prevails over the external one and that we are not actively listening. We are showing little interest in what the other person is telling us, interrupting the dialogue and the potential creation of consensus and agreements.
Let us not forget that communicating is not simply knowing what words to pick and saying them. Several factors -time being one of them- help our message to be better understood and achieve better results with those with whom we work.