Читать книгу The CommFlow System - Christian Horak - Страница 9

Let’s assume that Key One (Community) has been successfully used to unlock the first gate of understanding and agreement. You have established rapport with your audience (they are at ease, they are not using aggressive or rejecting motions, there is a level of mirror body language, etc.) and you have a good handle on where they are coming from and where they are going.

The second key to understanding and agreement (Note: this does not imply an order in terms of which gate has to be opened first) is the gate called "Intent".

What I mean by intent is that we should be crystal clear on what we are trying to get out of the communication. It can be a mix of any of the intentions listed below:

 Relax .. calm the waves, smooth tension and take aggressive potential out

 Socialize .. have a interaction without agenda or pre-set goals

 Interview .. try to obtain as much information as possible from the interaction

 Inform ... provide the audience with information relevant to their context

 Give feedback .. provide the audience with feedback on a program, paper, idea

 Challenge .. be a devil's advocate or a critic and find loopholes in a line of thinking or writing

 Moderate .. be a coach or moderator to help others communicate better

 Educate ... transfer knowledge to the audience (this implies practical examples / testing)

 Inspire ... provide the audience with a vision for excellence and inspire them to follow a cause

 Motivate .. provide the audience with reasons to act or behave in a specific way

 Convince .. provide the audience with compelling reason to make a decision or change their mind

As you can see from the list above, there are many different intentions in an interaction, and certainly, we can move from one intention to the next in the same conversation. We should be aware of the following factors when dealing with the key of intention:

 Make sure both parties are informed about the intention. Maybe you can see the conflict when one person seeks to convince, when the other person seeks to socialize, or when the intent of inspiration meets an audience primed to challenge.

 Make sure that you understand the different communication models involved when setting up the communication, for example, when you are trying to educate, make sure you have means of checking if the education has actually been effective. When you are trying to motivate, make sure you have a clear call to action that you can check on later, etc.As an audit, for example, after you have tried to convince someone, you can even follow this checklist to see what you can do better next time:

( ) Audience relaxed and settled in?

( ) Enough time given to socialize and establish rapport?

( ) Question asked up front to establish flow?

( ) Relevant information given about purpose and context of interaction?

( ) Feedback given to a response of the audience (Active Listening)

( ) Challenged the assumptions / information given for logic / consistency

(in a non-aggressive way)

( ) Moderated a conflict by looking at both sides of the argument and focusing

on an outcome

( ) Transferred useful knowledge to the audience including practical examples

( ) Provide the audience with a vision for excellence or inspires them to follow a

cause or ideal

( ) Provide the audience with reasons to act or behave in a specific way

( ) Convince the audience with compelling reason to make a decision or

change their mind

Try it out. I bet you will discover that many times when we experience a communication break-down, it was because we failed to unlock the "Intent" gate to understanding and agreement.