Like, um, you know, Dealing with Those Bad Communications Habits, eh
We all know them. They’re those people who are skilled and intelligent, maybe even exemplary at what they do, but whose communications habits are so irritating and persistent that people would rather avoid the individual rather than sit through another excruciating conversation or meeting with them. I once had a colleague like this. She had great ideas, but they were weakened by her inability to make it through a sentence without saying “like” every third word or so. She spoke in a valley-girl style upspeak (an intonation when you’re saying something, such that it sounds like a question) and she had a tendency to share ideas in loud bursts punctuated by snorts.
One day she came into my office and complained that she felt she wasn’t taken seriously at work. She felt she wasn’t being heard. She was right —her habits were getting in the way. The good news is that they were just habits and they could be eliminated or changed.
Like the upspeak-riddled former colleague of mine, most of us have bad communications habits. The trick is to:
- Identify what they are. The thing about persistent habits is that many of us picked them up at some point in our life (just think about all the weird words, phrases, and speaking rhythms you pick up in high school) and have repeated them frequently enough that they’ve become natural to us. To figure out what really gets in the way of effectively putting across a message, you may need to ask someone you trust – someone who will tell you the truth. For many of our communications coaching clients we perform assessments where we interview their colleagues and hone in on the client’s communications habits. Often the client is relieved to hear about their habits because no one ever told them before.
- Eliminate or replace those habits. Some habits are triggered by emotion, stress, nerves, a lack of confidence, etc, so it’s important to consider when you hear the habits enter your speech. I have a client who would often speak up in business meetings and offer great comments and insights, but would constantly punctuate his comments with weakening statements like, “well, that’s just my opinion,” or the ever-meek “I don’t know,” or the approval-seeking “Right?” Once he realized that he was doing this, he quickly learned to punctuate his ideas and comments with a period. His comment and then silence. No qualifying afterwords. No apologies. Just the comment. Though he claimed that stopping himself from adding in those extra words was a bit unnatural at first, in the end he felt that it helped strengthen his comments and appear more confident to his colleagues.
Let’s face it, we all have annoying habits. Some of them are just idiosyncracies that flavor our communications but don’t interfere with our message. These ones we can hold on to.
Other habits can really get in the way. These are the ones we need to identify and quash.
