The Communication Equation Newsletter

Issue #2: Find Your Finish Line, Then Start Running

The crowd begins to swell, its attention and vocal support gradually turning towards its selected?favorites.?

The runners gather near the starting line, awaiting their introduction as they channel their focus and go through a variety of mental and physical warm-ups. Methodically, they take their spots on the block.?

As they await the starting pistol to break what becomes a deafening silence, they crouch, tense and poised to explode off the starting line within fractions of a second.

While the flood of thoughts rushing through the runners' minds in these buildup moments is potentially endless,?some mild comfort can be taken from a likely fact: One of those thoughts is probably?not "Where exactly am I going again?"?

When it comes to your communication, you're usually not so fortunate. You don't have the benefit of a giant painted line with "FINISH" spelled out in bold letters.?

Without this luxury, how can you ensure that you approach your communication with the focus and determination necessary to impactfully deliver your message??

The answer can be found by using The Communication Equation. Specifically, by understanding and learning to perfect its very first element: Effective Communication.

That's where our discussion will take us today.

Let’s take a brief step back. Before we start discussing how to identify and assess “effective communication,” it’s important to understand exactly what “communication” even is, right? After all, there’s no way of comprehending the effectiveness of something if you don’t even know what that "something" is!

I’ll give you the definition I use. I like it because A.) It’s super simple, and B.) It addresses something that often gets overlooked in communication circles. Here it is:

Communication is a sustained loop of information between two or more parties.

Let’s break that down. The whole “sustained loop” thing might sound a little technical or scientific, but it’s really straightforward. It just means that communication is best viewed as a repeating system (see the diagram below for a good visual). Ideally, it goes around and around and around until there’s no more information to be shared.

Next, about that “information.” This includes anything really…it doesn’t have to be pure “information” in the fact-based, academic sense. Think of it as a slightly broader version of a message. It can include facts, yes, but also opinions, questions, requests, stories, or any other type of element you feel is important for the audience to receive.

As the last part of the definition, we’ve got “two or more parties.” Pretty self-explanatory, but it is important to point out that “parties” doesn’t have to just refer to singular human beings. If we’re viewing communication as a sort of “information loop,” let’s think about the different forms that could take, besides a standard “conversational” one. An internal monologue with yourself? Two parties: You and your psyche. A marketing pitch or an advertisement? Possibly many parties, although you could easily boil it down to two: You and your target audience, collectively.

Make sense? OK, now that we know what exactly communication is, let’s dive in to what makes it effective.

In a broad sense, an “effective communication” can be viewed as your goal or desired outcome as you enter into any communication setting. What are you trying to achieve? I’ve found it’s best to start off with a fairly broad definition, as it allows for much-needed flexibility as you craft your message later on. So, let’s look at an example…

Since we’re learning here, let’s make this example simple and straightforward: You’re a small business owner, just starting out. You’ve created an awesome website, full of all your useful information, sales links, and so on. You just need people to see?this website so you can start making some money. So, you do the sensible thing and sit down to create some content to promote your business, but primarily nudge people to go check out your website. You plan on posting this content to your various social media channels.

In this instance, what is the “communication” you’re delivering in general? If you said “My content copy,” pat yourself on the back. That’s exactly right - you’re communicating through the language of your content here, and your audience is anyone who might read it. (At this point, it’s OK that the audience is defined so broadly…you’ll narrow it down via the other components of the Equation. But don't worry...we'll get there in future newsletters!)

So now that you know what your communication is, what’s going to make it “effective?” This is where your work on this element begins. It’s a simple, two-step process:

1. State the ultimate desired goal, in broad terms.
2. Create your success metrics.

First, you’ll nail down the simplest, broadest statement that captures exactly what you want to happen in an ideal situation. If you put your message out there and it works perfectly, what does that look like? What happens as a result? In the above example, it might look something like this:

“I want this piece of content to increase the number of visitors to my website.”

Simple, right? A general, blanket statement of the overall result you want. It’s important to frame this statement in such a broad way, because in the next step, you’re going to drill down into exactly how you measure it. If you start out too specific, you don’t leave much room to measure success or failure, because you’re either going to achieve the desired result or not, with not much wiggle room in between.

With your broad goal in place, now you must identify what “complete success” and “total failure” look like. If you stated your goal in a sufficiently broad way, this should be easy, because the two extremes will be pretty far apart. That’s good! Communication rarely succeeds or fails completely, and trying to make it do so is setting yourself up for disappointment and failure. So, in our example, your endpoints might look like this:

1. Complete success: I get 100 website views over the next three days that are directly attributable to my content.
2. Total failure: You guessed it…same three days,?zero website views.

Notice in those two endpoints, there is a lot of specificity. We list out a concrete number, a time frame to hit that number, and a qualifier - the views are directly attributable to the content we created (which can be tracked through many different methods, but I’m not tech-savvy enough to even attempt to explain that here).

So that’s your pattern: Go from broad (your ultimate goal statement) to specific (your success metrics).

From there, it’s easy - we just sit back and see what happens! Let’s say we end up determining that we got 56 website views over our three-day period. Placing that on our scale of 0-100, we got over halfway to our goal. Nothing earth-shattering, but not bad! Since we were on the positive side of our metrics, we could rate this communication as “effective,” albeit moderately.

And therein lies the final point: What do we do with this information? The answer comes from a concept that?might be a little controversial, but you'll quickly come to find that in a lot of areas, I tend to stray from the pack when it comes to much of the communication advice out there. It all comes down to what I view as a primary, underlying principle of communication:

All communication is persuasion.

This may sound extreme, but let's pause to think it through. When any communicator delivers a message, what's the end goal, in its simplest terms? To get the audience to do something. Yes, that "something" is not always a direct, physical action, but we're looking at the simplest terms here. So, aside from the obvious "Ask the audience to take action" scenario,?let's look at some other examples:

• You deliver a lecture or presentation to an audience that was not previously knowledgeable of the topic. The goal: The audience learns the material and leaves with a knowledge of the topic.
• You strike up a conversation with a stranger at a networking event. The goal: The audience learns more about you, develops a comfort level, and bonds with you in a useful, meaningful way.
• You take the stage on an open-mic night and deliver a standup comedy routine or an original song you wrote. The goal: Your audience is entertained. They take joy from your performance, relate to it, and become aware and appreciative of your talent.?

So regardless of the form or purpose of your communication, the end goal is essentially the same: You're still asking the audience to do something. While it's true that sometimes that request doesn't take the form of the typical, physical act, it's still very clearly?persuasion.

Which brings us back to the question, "What do we do with this information?" Simply put, we learn. We adapt. And we improve. Framing "effective communication"?using The Communication Equation allows you to end each communication by asking a simple question:?Did my audience do the thing I'd hoped they would??

Any answer to that question provides you with valuable insight moving forward. If the answer was "Yes," you've learned a method of communicating that works for your particular purpose. Sometimes, it barely worked, and you can adapt it to become even?more?effective. And if the answer was "No," you can step back, examine?why, and adapt in a completely different direction.?

The key is remaining open-minded, and willing to learn and grow. It's one of the reasons communication is so universally applicable. With the right mindset and approach,?anyone?can improve.?

While you may not have the benefit of a literal "FINISH" line, evaluating your own "effective communication" sets you up for success in a way that's often overlooked. It provides the rest of your efforts within The Communication Equation with a crystal-clear endpoint.

That way, when that starting pistol fires, you'll be ready to run.

The next issue I'll release on here (#3) looks at the first of our three components: Audience IQ. If you don't want to wait, or if you want to browse other, newer issues, head over to www.dougtaylorcc.com/archive to view them all.

And if you want to make sure you always get the latest issue every Friday when it drops, get subscribed for real at www.dougtaylorcc.com/tcen. When you do, you'll get a FREE copy of my "15-Minute Messaging" guide!

Take Care,

Doug

[email protected]

(785) 431-3230