In this post I’m going to provide you with a general approach that should help you improve your overall communication skills, no matter what your role is. These tips will also be relevant to your personal life, so feel free to forward them to whoever is relevant.

Creativity & communication

I would like to start from an angle that may seem a bit irrelevant. I’d like to talk for a second about ‘creativity’.

What comes to your mind when you think about creativity?

Writing books?

Famous art?

Drawings & paintings?

Innovation and inventions?

Those are all creations and the result of creativity, of course. But the fact is that creativity is a much broader and commonly used concept.

Even if you don’t consider yourself a highly creative individual, you are being very creative each day and engage in creativity directly for a significant part of your day.

How so?

Well, each time you’re talking to someone and each time you’re writing a message to another person (on Whatsapp or whatever) – you’re engaging in a creative activity.

You see – communication is about delivering a message or an idea to others. When considering how this message should be structured & delivered, your brain needs to construct sentences which are made of words, and these words need to be selected very carefully.

There are thousands, if not ten thousands, of options to choose from, and your brain is very skilled at processing these options and laying down the words in an order that makes sense. It usually does this within a friction of a second and it comes very natural to you, like breathing. Still – each sentence that you write or comes out of your mouth – is a creation. It’s probably not something you’ll hang on your wall, but still – it’s a creation and you were involved in a creative process when doing so.

So even though you may never have thought about it this way – congrats – you are a very creative person!

And now that we’ve established that communication is a creative activity, let’s talk about what affects this creative process.

Your intent

When you are about to engage in communication with another person, you are most likely to have some kind of intent in your mind.

• It could be that you need this person to help you with something.
• It could be that you wish to congratulate someone.
• It could be that you want to share your feelings with that person.
• It could be that you need to extract some information from this person

And of course, there are plenty of other possible intentions.

However, sometimes, we’re not very aware of our true intent or are simply not being honest with ourselves.

Let’s take an example:

Let’s say that you want your spouse to clean the garage because it’s been a mess for quite a while. And let’s say your spouse has promised to do this for more than a week now, but there is still no progress.

You really want to get it done, so you plan to talk about this with your spouse.

Now, your official intent might be that you’re trying to motivate your spouse to do this as fast as possible.

However, your true intent might be a bit different – 

1. It could be that you’re furious that this is taking so long and you feel like you need to beg to get it done. Additionally, this is not the first time such things have happened. Because of this emotion and past experience – your true intent becomes to force your spouse to do it right now.
2. It could be that you’re frustrated because you can’t stand this mess. Therefore, your true intent is to express your frustration, hoping that it will get your spouse into motion.
3. It could be that it really bothers you, but you understand that your spouse has other things on their mind. Therefore, your true intent is to get it done as fast as possible, even if it requires some collaboration from your side.
4. It could be that although it bothers you, you’re willing to wait a bit longer, and therefore your true intent is to provide just a kind reminder.

Each such intent will result in different words coming out of your mouth. The creative processor in your brain only listens to your true intent and based on that generates the words and sentences that will eventually be communicated to the other side.

Hence, the cases described above may result in the following communication:

1. Forcing your spouse to do it right now: “Listen, I’ve asked you again and again to clean the garage and as always, you just ignore me when it doesn’t suit you. Enough is enough – I want you to do it right now”.
2. Expressing your frustration: “What would it take for you to go and clean the garage?! I’m practically begging here and it makes me feel really bad. Can you please do it already?”
3.  Collaborative spirit: “Honey look, the garage is still messy and it really bothers me. Is the amount of work the reason you postpone this over and over? Because if so – I can help. Tomorrow’s morning works for me. Can we agree to take care of it then?”
4. A kind reminder: “Honey, just a kind reminder to take care of the mess in the garage. I’d appreciate it if you could take care of it sometime soon. Thanks.”

Similar scenarios can happen at your workplace. For example – let’s say you have an employee who is constantly late for meetings. You already provided her with this feedback, but she’s still late to most meetings. You want to have another conversation with her about this topic.

Your ‘formal’ intent to make her stop getting late to the meetings. But your real intent may be:

1. To humiliate her
2. To threaten her
3. To educate her about the implications of her actions
4. To nudge her again but avoid confrontation

Corresponding communication may be:

1. [During the meeting, when she finally joins] “Again you are being late. This is not respectful to all other participants of this meeting. Maybe you can make a bigger effort next time…”
2. [After the meeting, when you’re 1:1] “Listen – I’m starting to lose my patience with your attitude. I expect to see a serious improvement in the coming weeks if you don’t want it to be reflected in your next review.”
3. [After the meeting, when you’re 1:1] “Do you have a minute? I’d like to talk about the meeting which just ended. We already discussed this, but this meeting was a great live example of what we talked about. Have you noticed how many people have waited for you to show up, before we could start? How do you think they feel? How does it make you look?”
4. [After the meeting, when you’re 1:1] “Hey. Today you were late again, and it doesn’t reflect well on our team, as we already discussed. I kindly request that you make an effort to show up on time next time. Ok?”

What have we learned from all of this so far?

1. Your ‘formal’ intent is usually your true goal (what you want to achieve from upcoming communication)
2. There is often a gap between your ‘formal’ intent to your ‘real’ intent.
3. The words which are chosen for your communication are driven by your real intent, as you can’t fool your brain.
4. If you wish to have better control on how you communicate with others – you need to align your ‘real’ intent with your ‘formal’ intent

This diagram summarizes how communication is being generated with regard to your intent:

Lack of alignment between official intent to real intent

Official intent and real intent are aligned

Ok, so how can I create a better alignment between my ‘real’ intent to my ‘formal’ intent?

Great question.

In order to achieve such an alignment you need to better understand what parameters affect your real intent. 

According to my observations, your real intent is affected by the following:

1. Strong emotions, if present, regarding the people and cases involved.
2. Past experience with the people involved.
3. Your level of self awareness.

Positive emotions and past experience with the people you’re about to interact with will most likely result in a natural, positive interaction, which is aligned with your goals, so we won’t discuss those.

It’s when the emotions you feel towards the incident and/or the people involved are negative, or you had past bad experiences with this person or people that things are more likely to go south.

Your real intent in such cases is usually quite distorted, leading your brain to create an overly aggressive or just ineffective communication, which most likely won’t help you achieve your goals from that communication.

Self awareness can greatly assist in such cases. If you are flooded with negative emotions and/or you assume that the people you’re going to interact with are not friendly, due to negative past experiences – your self awareness will reflect it to you, forcing you to pause for a second and re-evaluate your approach. That is if you know how to ‘consult’ it.

If you are not used to listening to your ‘inner forces’ and emotions – then you can start doing so ‘artificially’. Meaning, each time you are about to write or say something which is not purely positive – force yourself to stop for a second and evaluate your ‘official intent’ versus your ‘real intent’.

Or in other words – stop for a second, take a breath, and ask yourself – ‘what am I trying to achieve from this conversation/correspondence?’

Once you answer yourself, ask yourself this second question:

‘Is what I was planning to write/say truly aligned with my goal?’

Most of the time, if you have strong, negative, feelings and/or you don’t like the person you’re about to engage with – the misalignment will surface, and you can take a step back to relax and adjust your intent.

But sometimes we need to deliver feedback which is not positive or discuss sensitive matters. Then what?

True. Reality can definitely put us in situations where a non-positive feedback or statement needs to be said. That is ok.

In such cases, your ‘official intent’ is to deliver this unpleasant feedback to the other side, because they need to hear it (for whatever reason). If you are fully aware of this – then you can still align your real intent with it.

Strong feedback, assertive conversation and critics can still be delivered in a respectful manner.

If you are making sure to properly align your ‘real’ intent and tell yourself – “I really need to deliver this message, however, I don’t want to hurt this person or make him/her feel bad. I have no desire for humiliation or revenge. I just want things to work better between us.”

If you ‘calibrate’ your intent – your brain will follow and kick in the creative process that will generate the proper words for you.

Ok. But I feel like my brain is still incapable of finding the right words. I feel like my creative process is flawed.

Relax. It’s ok.

Once you’ve aligned your ‘real’ intent with your goals – you already did the heavy lifting. Now you just need to ‘train’ your creative process of generating the best words for each case.

For some – it comes naturally, for others – it requires practice.

Here is my best advice as for how to improve this:

1. Listen to US politicians talk (no matter the side you support). They usually speak very well, even though their communication is not always authentic nor sincere. It doesn’t matter though, because you’re not here for that. You are here to feed your brain with communication lego blocks that it can later reuse.
2. Listen to podcasts (preferred) or watch Youtube videos where great masters are talking (on any topic that you’d like). Listen carefully with the intent to absorb their lingo. My personal recommendation is Tim Ferris’ podcast where he interviews ‘top-class performers’, as he puts it.
3. I will teach you some phrases you should definitely adopt and some that you should definitely avoid in a follow up post (I wanted to do it in this post, but it already turned out to be quite long). This should give you a head-start.

When listening to natural speakers – pay special attention to the phrases they use and the words they choose. Your brain will eventually learn to adopt it and increase its vocabulary and its communicative ‘templates’. And if you are serious about this – the creative communication process of yours will improve.

That’s it for today.

Wishing you effective communication!

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