What is good communication?

Did you ever get the feedback that you need to improve your communication?

🖐️ 

I most definitely did and every time I got this feedback, I was so confused about what to do next… Was it what I said? How did I say it? My tone? My body language?

For the longest time, every time someone gave me feedback that I needed to improve my communication, I would become super self-conscious of my “fairly thick” Italian accent and blame that for my inability to convey my point.

Eventually, I became better at communication (but my accent is still there 😉) and, since then, I have strived to give actionable feedback to people about improving their communication.

However, I never had a good framework in mind that I could use to define what good communication is. Until a couple of weeks ago when I discovered the proactive, deliberate, and structured framework.

I ran into this idea during Farhang Kassaei’s “You are in the communication business” talk at the Plato Elevate conference.

Here is my AleGPT summary of the talk, pulled together from hand-written notes (yes… I still take notes in a paper notebook).

1. Proactive communication gives people the information they need on their own terms. People shouldn’t have to come and ask you. You should distribute information proactively so that people have the information they need whenever they need it.

   This bit resonated with me because it is the reason why I started this newsletter. (No, I’m not trying to claim I’m an excellent communicator but I’m 100% claiming I got this one right, ha!)

2. Deliberate communication means you are intentional about what you share. You are what you communicate. Being deliberate requires empathy to understand where people are and frame your ideas in their terms. Deliberate communication is all about knowing your audience.

3. Structured communication is about making things easier to understand and remember. Structure helps organize the information you are trying to transfer and makes it easier to understand and grasp what one is trying to communicate. The human brain remembers better with structure.

So, the next time you are failing to get your point across, ask yourself if you are communicating proactively, deliberately, and with structure.

The next time you need to give someone feedback about their communication, use the framework above as a way to structure your feedback (see what I did there 😉 ).

Ciao!

-Ale

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