intimacy | Up Front Communication

Precious time

Aug 27, 2013 Posted by sergy@upfrontco.com Getting the message across Comments Off

Time is important.

We all know this. We lead busy lives. Our days fly by. Time is valuable. Time is precious. Time is money. We bill hourly and count down minutes.

The premium on time is what makes it so powerful. Time is a gift. It is respect. It is consideration.

You need to give time to get it. While we are constantly on the hunt for time savers, often what we need to do is give more time to the communication process. This is true for speaking, for teaching, for explaining, for convincing. We don’t need to speed up and jam our content into less time, we need to slow down and give the message the time it needs to be delivered.

Give your words space. It takes time to gather our thoughts, to put them into words, to speak them, for the listener to hear them and process them. Breathe. Time is a blessing. It enhances the most important part of messages and demonstrates that you value the conversation you are having.

Taking time may be as simple as slowing down how quickly you speak (contrary to popular belief, making speedy, quick, snappy retorts often does not make you seem more intelligent; in many, many contexts or situations it can make you appear panicky and reactionary or worse). It may mean keeping your mouth shut and giving the other person time to speak. It might require filling the air with silence instead of words – one of the hardest things to do. It may even mean giving a long chunk of time for your message to be digested. Step outside the room, sleep on it, give yourself or the other person hours or days to think about the conversation and build a calm response instead of blurting a fast reaction.

Time is one of the most beautiful communication tools. Make the most of it.

Communicating Intimately #4: Intimate cues

Mar 5, 2013 Posted by sergy@upfrontco.com Getting the message across Comments Off

Throw your audience a bone.

Really. Give them a clue, a hint, an indication that you are opening yourself up to an intimate exchange. All the heartfelt intentions in the world won’t tell the audience you are open to them unless you give them some form of physical cue.

Note what I said there: physical cue, not verbal cue. This distinction is important. We humans are very sensitive to the silent messages given through our facial and bodily expressions. Words are secondary; telling someone repeatedly that you are interested or open will not result in intimacy if your face doesn’t match those words. Actually, if your physical expression doesn’t match your verbal expression, the person you want to communicate intimately with will likely start to distrust you. Incongruence tends to set off our alarm bells.

What sort of expressions help create intimacy?

1) Those that indicate interest in the person or people you are communicating with: focused gaze, slightly widened eyes, and a slight forward lean or cocked head are all cues of interest.

2) Those that indicate sincerity: emphasis with movement and physical energy with slight body tension show that we are investing energy in what we are saying. That investment usually indicates sincerity; we mean what we say, otherwise we wouldn’t put so much effort into it.

3) Those that indicate vulnerability: an “open” position (chest unprotected by arms, books, etc.), shoulders down, head in neutral and throat exposed (as opposed to the chin tucked in, protecting the neck), hands visible, palms frequently displayed. Intimacy exists when we allow ourselves to be vulnerable. Physically demonstrating vulnerability instead of defensiveness invites people to be comfortable with us.

Being able to give these physical signals on cue is an exceptionally useful communication skill. Ultimately, your goal is to give these cues in a manner that is still natural to your own communication style. Get to know your own expressions: when you are interested, how wide do you open your eyes? When you are being emphatic, how do you move your hands? Do you always raise your right eyebrow when you find something intriguing? Stand in front of a mirror and chat with yourself out loud. Rehash a recent conversation that you wish you could have again. Deliver that witty reply you thought half an hour after the moment had passed. Deliver your Oscar acceptance speech. See what your face and body do. Then, re-create those expressions and practice them. Get to know how your face muscles work and how your hands feel. Now apply those expressions to new material such as a book you are reading. Read out loud and apply your personal expression style to the text. If you can only manage to do this in the bathroom with the shower running, go for it. That’s usually where I practice.

Remember: our bodies communicate so much. Intimate communication is free exchange; let your body demonstrate your desire for that freedom. Don’t tell your audience how you feel – show them. Even better, show them how they should feel. They’ll respond accordingly!

Communicating Intimately #3: Intimacy within a business

Feb 18, 2013 Posted by sergy@upfrontco.com Business behaviour Comments Off

Have you ever been in the desperately uncomfortable position of having a “buddy” conversation with your supervisor, or being in charge of an employee who treats you more like a therapist than a manager? I’ve never experienced the latter, but know several colleagues who have. The former has happened to me in a few situations, and each time was so writhingly awkward that I never wanted to repeat it again.

That’s the problem with intimate communication among employees within a business. It is its own type of intimacy peculiar to that environment. It matters where people are within the organization’s hierarchy. Even if the organization is relatively flat, there are still underlying pecking orders and relationships that inherently affect the types of conversations that can be held.* Generally speaking, intimate conversations within a business should be just about that – business. It isn’t that we shouldn’t learn about our peers or our supervisors or our employees; it’s that the power structure of a business affects the relationships up and down the ladder. That can change what we are comfortable discussing with our co-workers.

In one industry I worked in, “buddy” type relationships between managers and those working beneath them were encouraged. The idea was that if you could develop a fuzzy, cuddly relationship with your underlings, they would be more likely to be open and honest with you when discussing work.

Ha.

It was a nice idea in theory. In practice, it muddied working relationships and created a climate of agonizing phoniness. Get-to-know-you conversations with new managers were saccharine in the extreme and did not improve working relationships. People wondered why their managers wanted to know so much about them. Instead of creating stronger and more personal relationships, people began mistrusting the motives of managers acting like their buddy. Would private conversations be shared? Could something they said about their personal lives be used against them?

The difficulty with this approach was that the development of personal intimacy was forced. It was as though merely working with one another in the same industry and the same company meant that you had – or should have – a ‘friend first, manager second’ relationship. If that sort of relationships develops naturally between two co-workers, than that’s great. But it cannot be created quickly in staged situations.

I believe that intimate communication within a business should be about just that – business. You can have intimate conversations and not delve into your employee’s personal lives or play armchair counselor. Intimate business conversations involve discussions where people are able to express their joys, their irritations, and their passions about their work. Fostering this kind of communicative intimacy does not involve becoming your co-worker’s buddy. It involves developing your co-worker’s trust. They need to know that you will allow them to express their feelings and actual opinions without adverse impact on their job or your working relationship. This climate of trust doesn’t depend on your knowledge of their kids’ extracurricular activities or their fondness for off-hours geocaching. It depends on a climate of respect and consideration in which opinions are solicited and considered without fear of backlash.

The type of intimate conversations that happen within a business will change depending on the relationships of the people involved. Conversations held up or down the hierarchical ladder are naturally more constrained than those that happen between equals or peers. Managers are often concerned with revealing too much high-level information to their subordinates. Subordinates are worried about criticizing their managers. There is more opportunity for peers to express their actual opinions to one another, provided they trust the other to not mention those opinions to their supervisors. If the relationship changes, so will the conversations. It is not uncommon for friendships between co-workers to dissolve when one person gets promoted and moves higher up the corporate ladder than their friend. The risks taken when having intimate conversations change are amplified. Conversations end up changing along the same lines as the friendship itself, often becoming more cautious and less open than they were before.

If relationships within a business affect conversations, and conversations are affected by the relative power held by workers, how do you know when you are having an intimate conversation with a co-worker? Look for the degree to which they express emotion. Will they openly express excitement or nervousness? Consider the degree of risk they take when talking to you. Are they willing to challenge your opinions or ask for explanations of your decisions? Pay attention to the content of their statements. Do they make lots of “I” statements and use strong emotive words like “I believe” or “I feel”? These are markers that the person you are talking to trusts you to consider the meat of their points without taking personal affront to what they have to say. This is hugely advantageous; if the people you work with know that they can challenge and debate with you, and then listen to you in return, then you know you can have intimate business discussions with them. These conversations foster a worker’s passion and buy-in, and can result in productive and challenging exchanges that could hugely benefit the company.

Don’t try to force friendship. That won’t always result in intimacy. Try, instead, to create trust. Trust is the absolute foundation for intimate conversation with the people in your organization.

*Let me make the following very clear: when I’m talking about the kinds of conversations that can be had, I’m referring to conversations that are fairly “normal” in nature. If someone is having non-work issues of a nature that require them to have a serious, personal discussion with a peer, supervisor, or other colleague, than that conversation needs to happen. It should be treated with the utmost respect and discretion.

Communicating Intimately #1: introducing intimacy

Jan 8, 2013 Posted by sergy@upfrontco.com Style, Tactics Comments Off

A major goal that I assign to all my clients as well as to myself is that of creating intimacy with your audience. I’ve had people react to this instruction with everything from nervous eagerness to fear and apprehension. The difficulty with intimacy – aside from the fact that it increases our own vulnerability, which I will address later – is that it is a very complex concept. Over the next few blog posts, I’m going to attempt to break down and address the nuances of communication and intimacy.

So here we go – welcome to installment #1: introducing intimacy. Here is a run-down of some of the issues I’ll be exploring further in this series.

Intimacy in communication has nothing to do with romance, attraction, or with the communicating parties even liking one another. A sense of connection is what makes an exchange feel intimate. When this connection (or the perception of it) is achieved, your message will stick with your receiver with far greater strength than it would otherwise. If you really, really want to get through to someone, you need to seek intimacy in the communication, and different circumstances may require in different kinds of intimacies or different tactics to achieve it.

A sense of intimacy can be felt by only one person and still have a powerful effect. Because it is an individual feeling, it can be experienced by members of a large audience just as readily as people in small groups or in one-on-one conversations. When you are the primary communicator, the perception you should be most concerned with is that of your audience, whether big or small. You can feel all the warm fuzzies you like, but if you haven’t triggered a sense of connection among those receiving your message, than you have not created a sense of intimacy. It’s the opinion and the feelings of the receiver that matter.

While the experience of intimacy on the part of the audience is always genuine, a very adept speaker or performer can fake it for the sake of their audience. While demonstrating a desire for connection that you might not actually be feeling is mentally exhausting, there are many circumstances where you may need to fake it for the sake of your audience. There are some key physical, vocal, and facial expressions that demonstrate “reaching out” to an audience or receiver. Being able to realistically demonstrate these on cue when you are not feeling overly connected to an audience takes a great deal of practice. When we look at these skills further, I will yet again be railing at you to spend some solid practice time in front of a mirror.

One of the trickier issues with intimate communication is what level and type of intimacy is appropriate in which situations. The degree of intimacy in communication that is appropriate between co-workers is markedly different than that between managers and employees. Similarly, the type of intimacy that occurs with a motivational speaker and his audience is generally quite different that that between an academic lecturer and her audience. It is well worth taking time to think about what degree of personal connection you would wish to experience as both audience and speaker in differing social and business roles.

Language plays a key component in both the effectiveness of creating an intimate communication as well as keeping the intimacy appropriate to the situation at hand. At times, your audience needs to you be involved in the message at a personal level; sometimes they really need to you be more objective and distant. Language and vocabulary is the golden key that allows you to navigate these circumstances and still create the intimacy you need. Words have power, and discreet differences in meaning, context, and timing may result in massive differences in the level of trust, comfort, and connection between you and your audience. Know when to mince your words and when to leave them whole. Find authors known for extensive vocabularies and wordplay and read their works; your own word hoard and dexterity will grow. You will come to know which words will help create a feeling of intimacy with your audience and which will turn them right off.

Next instalment: your audience experience of intimacy and getting out of your own head.