Creating Connections
I’ve been considering our various ‘comms’, recently. How we communicate internally and externally: within our team, with our clients, our suppliers, and other stakeholders. The opportunity to have a positive impact on someone else is best achieved by inspiring them. So much has been written about building teams and relationships, by people far more educated and knowledgeable than me.?
People will forget what you said. People will forget what you did. But people will never forget how you made them feel.
The framed words of Maya Angelou, the American poet, memoirist, and civil rights activist was given to me as a gift a few years back and it takes pride of place in our practice.?
When I sit back and become lost in my thoughts, a recurrent theme is analysing how and what our team communicate, whether face to face, by email or through social media channels. I’m constantly trying to improve these messages so they have more relevance and impact.
I’ve always viewed Hearing Healthcare Practice as an outlier in the world of retail audiology (a term coined by others which we don’t recognise in ourselves). It’s incumbent on us then to see things differently. To be the round peg in a square hole. To constantly challenge the status quo. We don’t adhere to the worn-out principle that marketing the brightest, latest, shiniest technology should be the focus of our external comms (more of that in a future post).?
Technology is an end to a means. It is ineffective without the personal intervention of a knowledgeable audiologist providing their intellectual property, gleaned through a university education and coupled with extensive practical experience to draw on. It’s not trite to claim hearing aids only work well if they’re brought to life by a damn good audiologist whose job goes so much further than switching it on and programming it up. Never has the saying “the whole is greater than the sum of its individual parts” had more relevance.
Hearing aids are brilliant, technically advanced devices and in the hands of a competent clinician they can facilitate you in building relationships?with other people which helps form our life experiences. Our experiences create memories.??And our memories enact our emotions. Like the crease in the corner of your eye evoked by a smile or the gradually growing tear as your eye waters as you recall a happy time. So one of the cornerstones of our emotional reaction is linked intrinsically to our memory of sounds or conversations we have heard.
Our client Maureen shared how her emotions were tied to her sense of hearing.
领英推荐
"I am so grateful for the care you show. I promised a few comments which, with hindsight, I should have done at the time I first discovered Hearing Healthcare Practice."?
"I never realised how much more was involved in supporting my hearing. I now appreciate that quality hearingcare is so much greater than just having hearing aids. I wish I’d appreciated that at the outset when my hearing began to trouble me. The technology you have provided me is wonderful but without your enthusiasm, help and guidance, I wouldn’t have embarked on this adventure.?"
"After my last visit, when I left the practice, I was immediately aware that everything sounded 'normal'. There?was no intrusive background noise which I had grown used to (reluctantly) everything sounded as, as it used to, which I described as 'magic'."
?"I feel that this is next best thing to perfect hearing. I am reminded that when I first had hearing aids I was told they merely amplify sound. How far we have come since then."
"I was lucky enough to have been taken to the Last Night of The Proms. As I stood there engrossed in the wonderful music and atmosphere, I realised I was hearing so very well, and was so much ‘in the moment’ that tears started to roll down my cheeks.
"Simple words can never convey how grateful I am for your regular care. When I left today, I told the lovely ladies on reception you need to change your company message to ‘We Change People’s Lives’.?"
?"Thank you from the bottom of my heart."