Communication is an interesting subject and a lot more complex than what people seem to think. Let’s look at this from a different angle so that we can start to understand how communication really takes place.

Within us, we have all our dreams and hopes and fears. We also have our values and beliefs.  We have our past memories, our future memories and what we want to do in this moment.  The only way that we can share any of this internal information with a friend, a colleague, the world, is through the use of language.  So we communicate our inside world by speech to the outside world.  This though alone starts to reflect how complex and how very important communication really is.

So here is what I have observed.  When we speak to someone with a foreign language, we consciously accept that we have a communication barrier. To overcome this barrier, we tend to heighten our listening skills and we start to pay more attention to the things we normally would take for granted.  So we observe their facial expressions, their hand gestures, their tone of their voice.  We listen for words that sound familiar and we mirror back what they have said so that we can be sure that we have correctly understood them.

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It’s often the last thing on your mind and the final thing you do (if you do it at all).  The holiday time can be a frenetic build up to the last day in the office and suddenly it’s handover time.   It’s really easy to either leave this important piece completely and ‘hope for the best’ or to do it in 30 seconds and think it’ll be good enough.

The ‘important piece’ I’m referring to is this.  How you decide (or if you decide) to manage your emails and inbox whilst you’re on holiday.

You’ll notice I said ‘how you decide’ because it is a decision you make and it’s one that affects the quality of your holiday and the ease of your ‘re-entry’ after your holiday.

If you’re travelling on business it’s different.  Keeping in touch via your phone/remote email is easy enough now and a gap in timezones is usually manageable.  There are still some steps you can take to make that easier and these are steps which buy you a huge amount of credit from those who are emailing you.

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“Now, what you should do is…” “Well, it’s obvious, you should do this, then you should do that and then you should tell them you’ve done it”.

Should do. What you should do and what you want to and actually do are often very different things. Even if the advice we’ve been given is spot on, the fact that we’ve been told we ‘should’ do it is often the very reason we don’t. So if that’s the reaction we have, it’s the reaction that others will have when we ‘should’ all over them. Hmmm.

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It’s important to be able to be direct.  There are times when it’s crucial to be direct.  There you are, I’m being direct with you.  It’s got your attention, you know what I’m saying and it’s a key piece to being a clear, confident communicator.

We’ll start with the ‘Why’ of being direct first.  I’ll be direct with you.  I promise – and before we start, being direct is very different from being rude.  That’s the key.

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According to a recent article in The Daily Telegraph, three in four employers now struggle to find people with the right skills to fill their vacancies, despite high unemployment.

Here are the jobs there are that have proved particularly difficult, according to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and Hays.

Much-needed specialist and technical skills have become harder to find over the past year, with sought-after staff staying put in their current roles for job security, the annual survey of 626 employers by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and Hays recruitment firm showed.

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It’s such a small thing to say ‘thank you’.  It costs you absolutely nothing and yet it makes a huge difference to how you are understood and remembered by people.  It’s often the difference that makes the difference as to whether people do what you want, it certainly affects the way they do what you ask them to and, crucially, how they respond to you – and –  if they respond to you at all.

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We’ve all been there, haven’t we? Either listening to or reading about someone telling you all the things they want, need, think, do. ‘Well, I went here and I said that and then I did this and then I said that.

Well, I mean, who do they think I am? I said ‘well, I want to introduce this now’ and I was adamant. So, I finally got what I wanted.’

Now as you read that back and notice that, in reality, whilst a fairly strident bit of dialogue, it’s entirely possible to hear that every day. Eleven times the word ‘I’ appears – and not once the word ‘we’, ‘you’, ‘us’, ‘our’.

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There are so many ways to say something and every way means something different to your listener as you say it. Imagine you’re in a meeting and someone asks if anyone is able to take on a new project or put some figures together. You think to yourself, I could probably do that but you may sit on that thought and say nothing and wait for someone else to offer or you may put yourself forward. The trick here is, if you do decide to step up and offer, it’s how you put yourself forward.

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“Oh, it’s so obvious, what you want to do is, blah blah.”  “Well, what you should do is xyz.”  We’ve all done it, said it and been told it, haven’t we?  “What you need to do is” or “What you should do is” etc.  Well, in fact, what we should do most of the time is ask a question vs tell our friends/colleagues/family what it is they should do.

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So often we either ask someone else – or say to ourselves -”How can I tell them that what they’re doing really needs to be better?” or “I wish I could tell them what I really want / think, without upsetting them.”

Well, it’s easy to do just that and – like most things that may seem a bit tricky at first – it takes a bit of practice. Once you’re tried it a few times and got great results; it becomes part of your toolkit. Assuming you have a range of tools in your toolkit?

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