Connection Increases Influence

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Communications of every kind bombard us. Billboards, radio ads, Facebook News Feed, people talking, co-workers complaining, children fussing, phones ringing, TVs blaring, and on and on. I read that on average, we are exposed to 35,000 messages of some type each day. That’s an incredible amount of communication – and it’s little wonder our brain tries to filter out the “noise” in an effort to focus on the important. There would be no way to effectively deal with and respond to each of those 35,000 messages.

Your brain works much like the spam filter on your email, by automatically sliding some messages to the side in order to deal with the ones that don’t appear to be junk.

That works very well until we realize that sometimes we are part of the “noise” other people are tuning out.

Each of us wants to communicate. We want someone to hear and acknowledge our communications, because they are important to us. However, a huge challenge is to communicate in such a way that your message doesn’t become just another piece of the clutter.

Think of a connection as a multiplier for your communication skills. If your communication skills are a level 8 on a scale of 1 – 10, and your connection skills are a level 2, your effectiveness as a communicator will never be higher than a 16 out of 100.

However, if your communication skills are a level 6, but your connection skills are a level 8, your effectiveness as a communicator will be 48 out of 100. If you improve your connection skills, your effectiveness as a communicator will improve tremendously. And, you will gain more influence because connection and communication increases influence!

In order to communicate, we must be sure we are connecting. If we are connected, communication will be much easier and effective. If we are disconnected, it doesn’t matter what we are communicating because the message isn’t getting through.?And, we are losing influence if we aren't able to connect and communicate.

This has been an excerpt from my book, "Straight Talk: The Power of Effective Communication." Find the book HERE or download free sample chapters HERE.