My World: BUSSINESS COMMUNICATION

BUSINESS COMMUNICATION

Definition of Business

Business is an organization or economic system where goods services are exchanged for one another or for money.

Every business requires form of investment and enough customers to whom its output can be sold a consistent basis in order to make a profit.

Business can be privately owned, not for profit or stated owned. An example of corporate business is PepsiCo, while a mom and pop catering business is a private enterprise.

At Good Business, we believe that the most successful organisations are those that are both of their times and contributing to their times. These are progressive organisations: open and outward-looking, ready to embrace change not fight it, thoughtful and respectful. People both want and need them to be around.

We work with organisations that want to ensure they are always a valuable part of our society, as it changes. We help them to understand where the world is moving and what this means for them, so that they can actively create their place in the future and thrive in it.

2. Definition of Communication

Communication (from Latin commūnicāre, meaning "to share") is the activity of conveying information through the exchange of thoughts, messages, or information, as by speech, visuals, signals, writing, or behavior. It is the meaningful exchange of information between two or more living creatures.

Good communication will be held if we take the right step, such as:

1. Listening

Listening is one of the most important aspects of effective communication. Successful listening means not just understanding the words or the information being communicated, but also understanding how the speaker feels about what they’re communicating.

a. Effective listening can:

· Make the speaker feel heard and understood, which can help build a stronger, deeper connection between you.

· Create an environment where everyone feels safe to express ideas, opinions, and feelings, or plan and problem solve in creative ways.

· Save time by helping clarify information, avoid conflicts and misunderstandings.

· Relieve negative emotions. When emotions are running high, if the speaker feels that he or she has been truly heard, it can help to calm them down, relieve negative feelings, and allow for real understanding or problem solving to begin.

b. Tips for effective listening

If your goal is to fully understand and connect with the other person, listening effectively will often come naturally. If it doesn’t, you can remember the following tips. The more you practice them, the more satisfying and rewarding your interactions with others will become.

· Focus fully on the speaker, his or her body language, and other nonverbal cues. If you’re daydreaming, checking text messages, or doodling, you’re almost certain to miss nonverbal cues in the conversation. If you find it hard to concentrate on some speakers, try repeating their words over in your head—it’ll reinforce their message and help you stay focused.

· Avoid interrupting or trying to redirect the conversation to your concerns, by saying something like, “If you think that’s bad, let me tell you what happened to me.” Listening is not the same as waiting for your turn to talk. You can’t concentrate on what someone’s saying if you’re forming what you’re going to say next. Often, the speaker can read your facial expressions and know that your mind’s elsewhere.

· Avoid seeming judgmental. In order to communicate effectively with someone, you don’t have to like them or agree with their ideas, values, or opinions. However, you do need to set aside your judgment and withhold blame and criticism in order to fully understand a person. The most difficult communication, when successfully executed, can lead to the most unlikely and profound connection with someone.

· Show your interest in what’s being said. Nod occasionally, smile at the person, and make sure your posture is open and inviting. Encourage the speaker to continue with small verbal comments like “yes” or “uh huh.”

2. Nonverbal communication

When we communicate things that we care about, we do so mainly using nonverbal signals. Wordless communication, or body language, includes facial expressions, body movement and gestures, eye contact, posture, the tone of your voice, and even your muscle tension and breathing. The way you look, listen, move, and react to another person tells them more about how you’re feeling than words alone ever can.

Developing the ability to understand and use nonverbal communication can help you connect with others, express what you really mean, navigate challenging situations, and build better relationships at home and work.

· You can enhance effective communication by using open body language—arms uncrossed, standing with an open stance or sitting on the edge of your seat, and maintaining eye contact with the person you’re talking to.

· You can also use body language to emphasize or enhance your verbal message—patting a friend on the back while complimenting him on his success, for example, or pounding your fists to underline your message.

a. Tips for improving how you read nonverbal communication

· Practice observing people in public places, such as a shopping mall, bus, train, café, restaurant, or even on a television talk show with the sound muted. Observing how others use body language can teach you how to better receive and use nonverbal signals when conversing with others. Notice how people act and react to each other. Try to guess what their relationship is, what they’re talking about, and how each feels about what is being said.

· Be aware of individual differences. People from different countries and cultures tend to use different nonverbal communication gestures, so it’s important to take age, culture, religion, gender, and emotional state into account when reading body language signals. An American teen, a grieving widow, and an Asian businessman, for example, are likely to use nonverbal signals differently.

· Look at nonverbal communication signals as a group. Don’t read too much into a single gesture or nonverbal cue. Consider all of the nonverbal signals you receive, from eye contact to tone of voice to body language. Anyone can slip up occasionally and let eye contact slip, for example, or briefly cross their arms without meaning to. Consider the signals as a whole to get a better “read” on a person.

b. Tips for improving how to deliver nonverbal communication

· Use nonverbal signals that match up with your words. Nonverbal communication should reinforce what is being said, not contradict it. If you say one thing, but your body language says something else, your listener will likely feel you’re being dishonest. For example, you can’t say “yes” while shaking your head no.

· Adjust your nonverbal signals according to the context. The tone of your voice, for example, should be different when you’re addressing a child than when you’re addressing a group of adults. Similarly, take into account the emotional state and cultural background of the person you’re interacting with.

· Use body language to convey positive feelings even when you're not actually experiencing them. If you’re nervous about a situation—a job interview, important presentation, or first date, for example—you can use positive body language to signal confidence, even though you’re not feeling it. Instead of tentatively entering a room with your head down, eyes averted, and sliding into a chair, try standing tall with your shoulders back, smiling and maintaining eye contact, and delivering a firm handshake. It will make you feel more self-confident and help to put the other person at ease.

3. Managing stress

In small doses, stress can help you perform under pressure. However, when stress becomes constant and overwhelming, it can hamper effective communication by disrupting your capacity to think clearly and creatively, and act appropriately. When you’re stressed, you’re more likely to misread other people, send confusing or off-putting nonverbal signals, and lapse into unhealthy knee-jerk patterns of behavior.

How many times have you felt stressed during a disagreement with your spouse, kids, boss, friends, or coworkers and then said or done something you later regretted? If you can quickly relieve stress and return to a calm state, you’ll not only avoid such regrets, but in many cases you’ll also help to calm the other person as well. It’s only when you’re in a calm, relaxed state that you'll be able to know whether the situation requires a response, or whether the other person’s signals indicate it would be better to remain silent.

a. Quick stress relief for effective communication

When stress strikes, you can’t always temper it by taking time out to meditate or go for a run, especially if you’re in the middle of a meeting with your boss or an argument with your spouse, for example. By learning to quickly reduce stress in the moment, though, you can safely face any strong emotions you’re experiencing, regulate your feelings, and behave appropriately. When you know how to maintain a relaxed, energized state of awareness—even when something upsetting happens—you can remain emotionally available and engaged.

To deal with stress during communication:

· Recognize when you’re becoming stressed. Your body will let you know if you’re stressed as you communicate. Are your muscles or your stomach tight and/or sore? Are your hands clenched? Is your breath shallow? Are you "forgetting" to breathe?

· Take a moment to calm down before deciding to continue a conversation or postpone it.

· Bring your senses to the rescue and quickly manage stress by taking a few deep breaths, clenching and relaxing muscles, or recalling a soothing, sensory-rich image, for example. The best way to rapidly and reliably relieve stress is through the senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. But each person responds differently to sensory input, so you need to find things that are soothing to you.

· Look for humor in the situation. When used appropriately, humor is a great way to relieve stress when communicating. When you or those around you start taking things too seriously, find a way to lighten the mood by sharing a joke or amusing story.

· Be willing to compromise. Sometimes, if you can both bend a little, you’ll be able to find a happy middle ground that reduces the stress levels for everyone concerned. If you realize that the other person cares much more about something than you do, compromise may be easier for you and a good investment in the future of the relationship.

· Agree to disagree, if necessary, and take time away from the situation so everyone can calm down. Take a quick break and move away from the situation. Go for a stroll outside if possible, or spend a few minutes meditating. Physical movement or finding a quiet place to regain your balance can quickly reduce stress.

4. Emotional awareness

Emotions play an important role in the way we communicate at home and work. It’s the way you feel, more than the way you think, that motivates you to communicate or to make decisions. The way you react to emotionally driven, nonverbal cues affects both how you understand other people and how they understand you. If you are out of touch with your feelings, and don’t understand how you feel or why you feel that way, you’ll have a hard time communicating your feelings and needs to others. This can result in frustration, misunderstandings, and conflict. When you don’t address what’s really bothering you, you often become embroiled in petty squabbles instead—arguing with your spouse about how the towels should be hung, for example, or with a coworker about whose turn it is to restock the copier.

Emotional awareness provides you the tools needed for understanding both yourself and other people, and the real messages they are communicating to you. Although knowing your own feelings may seem simple, many people ignore or try to sedate strong emotions like anger, sadness, and fear. But your ability to communicate depends on being connected to these feelings. If you’re afraid of strong emotions or if you insist on communicating only on a rational level, it will impair your ability to fully understand others, creatively problem solve, resolve conflicts, or build an affectionate connection with someone.

a. How emotional awareness can improve effective communication

Emotional awareness—the consciousness of your moment-to-moment emotional experience—and the ability to manage all of your feelings appropriately is the basis for effective communication.

Emotional awareness helps you:

· Understand and empathize with what is really troubling other people

· Understand yourself, including what’s really troubling you and what you really want

· Stay motivated to understand and empathize with the person you’re interacting with, even if you don’t like them or their message

· Communicate clearly and effectively, even when delivering negative messages

· Build strong, trusting, and rewarding relationships, think creatively, solve problems, and resolve conflicts

a. Effective communication requires both thinking and feeling

When emotional awareness is strongly developed, you’ll know what you’re feeling without having to think about it—and you’ll be able to use these emotional cues to understand what someone is really communicating to you and act accordingly. The goal of effective communication is to find a healthy balance between your intellect and your emotions, between thinking and feeling.

b. Emotional awareness is a skill you can learn

c. Emotional awareness is a skill that, with patience and practice, can be learned at any time of life. You can develop emotional awareness by learning how to get in touch with difficult emotions and manage uncomfortable feelings, including anger, sadness, fear, disgust, surprise, and joy. When you know how to do this, you can remain in control of your emotions and behavior, even in very challenging situations, and communicate more clearly and effectively.

3. Definition of Business Communication

Business communication is the sharing of information between people within an enterprise that is performed for the commercial benefit of the organization. In addition, business communication can also refer to how a company sharesinformation to promote its product or services to potential consumers.

The seminar by Dr. John Lund on communication where he gave some amazing advice on how to better communicate with others. His input was simple and easy to follow, yet powerful. The best quote of the entire event was this: “Don`t communicate to be understood; rather, communicate so as not to be misunderstood.” What a great way to put things in perspective regarding our efforts on how to improve our communication. Here are some of the notes I made from his presentation:

1. How to successfully begin a conversation in business:

Dr. Lund shared that men in general and women in business settings (so men all the time, and women mostly in a work setting only), want to know three things before they are willing to enter into a conversation with you:

a. Is what you want to talk about going to be painful?

b. How long is it going to take?

c. When you are done talking, what do you want from me?

If they don’t know these three things up front, they will make excuses to avoid your call or to avoid talking to you on the phone. The same applies if you come into contact with them in person. He shared that your manager or boss in a work setting will always want to know those three things in advance of agreeing to a conversation as well. The reason he gave was that men and executive women always want to know the exit to the conversation before they feel safe engaging in it.

So for example, if you are calling a client, the very first thing you may want to say is: “I realize how busy you are so I will only need one minute of your time to let you know about __________.” This way the other person knows it will be quick and painless and that you just want to give them a few facts on the call that will only last a minute. Now they can relax and listen to you as you share the requested info. Otherwise, without knowing if the call will be long and painful, they may try to make an excuse that they can’t talk right now, etc.

Same thing goes for a sales team. They call a prospective client and the first thing out of their mouth needs to be something to the effect of, “I realize that your time is very valuable so I will only need two minutes to schedule a time for a second call where I can do a 10-minute demonstration of our ___________.”

Same advice applies for approaching your manager or boss to set up a meeting. Let them know if it will be painful, how long it will take and the end result you are asking for – they will be much more apt to schedule a time for you.

2. How to successfully conduct a conversation in business:

Dr. Lund shared some amazing tips on how to better understand the way we interpret communication from others. He also revealed some very interesting statistics on this topic. He said that when someone else communicates with us, the way we interpret their message is based on the following three things:

a. 55% is based on their facial expressions and their body language.

b. 37% is based on the tone of their voice.

c. 8% is based on the words they say.

Dr. Lund said that these percentages above are the averages across both men and women together, but that if you looked at women alone they would even give greater weight to the facial expression and body language and even less on the words. This tells us that it is critical that we become very self-aware of how our body language is speaking to others as well as the tone we use. One thing I always recommend to people is to keep a small mirror by your office phone so that when you are on the phone talking to people you can look in the mirror because it makes you more aware of the facial expressions you have, which makes you smile more, which in turn ends up coming through in your tone of voice overthe phone. It works wonders on how well you come off on a phone call, trust me!

Success in business is greatly impacted for better or worse by the way in which we communicate. Happiness in our personal lives is also greatly dependent on this very same skill. If you don’t believe me just ask any married couple! Becoming a good communicator takes practice and consistent attention and effort on our part, and it is a skill that we cannot afford to overlook. There is no doubt that we can all benefit from Dr. Lund’s tips on how to better approach people when we begin a conversation, as well as his advice that we “don`t communicate to be understood; rather, communicate so as not to be misunderstood.”

~~ Amy Rees Anderson (@amyreesanderson)