May 7, 2009

3 Secrets to Effective Communication

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Photo by magicmarie People won’t buy something until they understand it. It doesn’t matter whether it is a product, a service or an idea.

You have probably come across people who refused to take action even after you clearly and concisely laid everything out for them. They just didn’t seem to get it. And, because they didn’t get it, they were be unable – or unwilling – to move forward.

Here are 3 principles that will help you become an expert communicator. If you apply them, others will ‘get it’ and will be more decisive. I can’t guarantee what they do will be what you want them to do, but it will normally be what they decide is best for them.

The first principle of effective communication is this: To help people get it, you must involve them. You must talk with them and not just at them. The easiest way to do this is to ask questions.

Why is this so important? If you just throw information around – even accurate information – it is very hard to know if others understand what you are saying. But ask even a single question and you’ll immediately know if they are with you. If they are not, slow down and go at it from a different angle until their answers to your questions show they do understand.

The second principle of effective communication leading to action is to motivate people by telling stories. While you want people to understand, your job is not just to educate. Instead, you are helping others get to the point where they can make a decision. What product best meets their needs? Which service? Which of the competing ideas?

People don’t act just because they have the facts needed to make a decision – though they often will not act until they do. People make decisions that cause them to do something only when they are motivated. Motivation comes from emotion, not intellect. People may think with their heads, but they act from their hearts. So do yourself and bypass the head – at least until they want to do something.

The best way to do that is to tell stories. Stories engage people. People follow from one part of a story to the next. They want to know what is going to happen next. And stories speak to the heart more than the intellect. Stories do convey information but often do it without directly engaging the reasoning parts of the brain. When people feel the answer more than they know it, they become motivated to do something instead of just understanding something.

Finally – and this is the hardest of the 3 secrets to effective communication – you must turn the abstract into the tangible. While people may intellectually understand wills and trusts and unified credits and family limited partnerships, it is rare that they understand them deep down. I ask people to turn off their minds for a few moments and try to understand without thinking. That’s not to say that I do not want them to intellectually understand and to rigorously analyze and consider. It’s just that I want them to understand at the gut level before they begin their foray into a mental analysis.

I wrote The Moving Company back in the early 1990s to help people understand estate planning and things like wills and trusts. Those are all very abstract and, therefore, intangible concepts that appear to be understandable (and therefore explainable) only at an intellectual level. (I’m currently working on the 3d edition to bring the book up to date with changes in the law over the past couple decades.)

I felt that for my clients to best understand why they should be concerned about this thing we call estate planning, I first had to find a way to turn wills and trusts and probate and unified credits and all the other words and concepts we normally use when we talk about estate planning into things that people could touch and feel and physically relate to.

It took some time and an epiphany or two, but I think I did it. In the world I asked clients to explore with me, trusts became warehouses. Trustees became the security guards who stood outside those warehouses. Trust agreements and wills transformed themselves into letters to the guards. Unified credits became rebates – everyone understands you need to pay before you get a rebate – and that helped people understand the importance of funding a credit shelter trust. Estate taxes were magically turned into the costs of moving what you own from one generation to another.

Those tangible expressions helped my clients understand, many for the first time after hearing about estate planning for decades, what they were really trying to do as they engaged in planning their estate.

So, the next time you’re talking with a client or a customer (or a family member or friend) about matters of importance and you see the stone walls of lack of comprehension start to appear, think about those 3 secrets of effective communication. See what happens when you use those principles to help others turn off their brains long enough so they can understand.

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