#SYDWAC - The #1 Communication Skill

All right. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to start your day. Great. Start your day with a coach. I am your certified high performance coach, Sean Butner. And today we on the show that helps you live your life to its fullest every day, live into your full potential so that you can build the life that you want and live the meaning every day that you need. We're going to be talking about the number one communication tool that all of the best communicators, all of the best leaders have in common. And why do I say that? And I'll get into. It's going to be a little bit counterintuitive because if you're thinking right now like what actually makes a great communicator, like what are some of the things that are coming up in your head? Is it that they listen? Is it that, you know, they are very good at debating? Is it like when you think of people. Oh, like, you know, lawyers are really good at it, High end business folks or customer service people or, you know, what is that for you? And what skills do you think really make them great? Right? That's kind of the high performance angle right now on communication, right? Is like, who can you imagine right now that are at the top of their communication game? And what is admirable about that that you could then emulate? Because I think, start thinking about that, you start thinking about how you're communicating out in the world and what, that's what you're role modeling for other people, what that says about you. And you start to get into this idea that, hey, we need to communicate better. And it's something that has been a theme in my career in tech and as my career as a coach the last couple of years is how do you communicate better? How do you connect with people? How do you inspire people to take action in ways that help themselves, help their families, help their organizations, help their communities? So as we're talking or as we're thinking about that and as I, you know, hopefully you're continuing to think about what makes a good communicator, I want to tell you a quick story back from my tech days, right? So I was a business analyst for Walmart for a while. And what that means is I was basically a liaison between the tech people and the business folks and tried to help them communicate better so that we could, you know, implement software projects a lot more effectively, a lot more on time, under budget, all that kind of project management stuff. And so, you know, my role primarily was to gather requirements from the business folks and translate that into stuff that the engineers can very clearly follow and help them both groups work through problems. Right. And on that team I had a co worker and we'll just call her Sarah, right. Protect the innocent here. And so Sarah was on my team. We had a really good rapport. We're buddies and you know, we worked on the same project area at. And I was at Walmart at the time, which was the global logistics system, right. So basically the software that runs in all the warehouses. And so she was on a more international focus. I was on the dot com business at that time back in like 2010, 2012 ish time frame. And so one day Frances comes up to me and what's important to know about this project is we had a big contractor from India. So there's a lot of folks from India that were here doing a lot of the technical stuff. We outsourced and partnered with them. And so a big part of our job too was to kind of manage that relationship with our counterparts in this consulting organization so that everyone's on the same page, right? So you know, my job gathering requirements, making sure the business and tech people talked and also that we were, you know, kind of managing that relationship with the supplier. Right. Or the consultant. And so my friend Sarah comes up to me one day completely just livid, right? And you know, she's. I can't believe this guy said this. Can you come read this email? Right. Just always should be the warning sign if anyone is like, hey, could you just read this email? Say, okay, there's, there's going to be some type of emotional thing coming next. And it wasn't completely evident that she was super pissed off if it wasn't, you know, how she talked about this email that basically said from this manager from the consulting group, hey, just wanted to say your notes were very exhaustive today, so. Thanks. And so her interpretation of it is that he, the notes were so thorough that he got tired and was being passive aggressive and letting her know that. And she was like the warpath. Like, you know, she's like, hey, Sean, I'm going to like talk to his manager. I'm gonna go up to the account manager. I'm gonna make sure that this guy gets fired for being such a jerk. To me, I just completely seeing red. And you know, knowing that the guy that we were talk, talking about was from India and spoke British English, my thought was like, hey, actually I think he's saying he did a really complete, thorough job and it's a compliment. I don't think he meant to insult you personally with an email just to you to thank you for, you know, having complete notes. And she's like, you know, she wasn't hearing it right. Hey, just go, just talk with him before you blow up the world before you. You make a big mess of this. If he really did mean it in a snide way, like, go for it, but just find out, you know, and so, you know, he said that a couple of times. She walks away, you know, and, you know, working at my little pod or whatever. And a couple hours later, she comes back. So it's like, hey, I just wanted to say thanks for kind of talking me down down there. I went and talked to this gentleman, and he was paying me a compliment, and it actually turned out to be really sweet. So I'm not, you know, I was able to not, you know, basically bring a bunch of pain out of him for paying me a compliment and, you know, save my skin. Right? And so what's the takeaway here? Right? There's a couple, and I think the first one, and this is the number one skill that most amazing communicators and leaders have, in my opinion. And it's just curiosity, right? You have to want to understand the communication coming in. You have to want to understand how other people work, the context around it. Because if you understand that and you verify it, right, by directly asking people like, hey, you know, are you mad right now? A question I should have asked her instead of just kind of piecing it together. But it was pretty evident. But even then, like, I could have been like, hey, are you really upset right now? She's like, yes, I'm really upset. Because, you know, sometimes you don't know, like, if you ever had met a person that's quiet and you're like, hey, are you angry? It's like, no, I'm just quiet. You know, I got a lot of that growing up as an introvert. So, you know, but just being curious and directly asking people like, hey, are you okay? Or, hey, hey, did I get this right? Or hey, this is what I'm hearing. Did I? You know, does that sound right to you? Just to kind of close the loop on communication so there's not misunderstanding, right? I think that's the first thing. The second thing that's a really good takeaway from this is outside of being curious, it's realizing that how you're feeling and the things that have happened to you, your experiences are going to be overlaid on any communication you get, whether that's face to face like this, whether it's in person, whether it's on the phone, whether it's in a text message or email. The text and email, I think are the worst at. You don't have that rich kind of context of like somebody like smiling when they say, hey, you know, you idiot, you know, you know, sometimes it could be a friendly thing where it sounds like it's teasing, sometimes it could be an insult. And you can't really get the tone of it in text, which is why, like, FaceTime is so important. Video conferencing and all that stuff. So, you know, realizing when you don't have that context, you really need to be curious. You really need to think, like, what am I missing here? What are maybe the best possible outcomes here? And also, you know, to then be aware of how you're gonna show up and how you're gonna role model. Because if you were the person that wrote that and you had a good intention behind it and somebody got really upset about it, you'd feel pretty cruddy. But you're also role modeling that. You know, these types of communications are going to get you yelled at, right? So people stop complimenting you, stop trying to talk to you, you know, start to avoid you, and you can have a whole litany of problems because you weren't curious. You didn't say like, hey, did you mean it to sound this way? Like, oh, no, no, no, no. Totally. Not totally, you know, so that's the importance of being curious when you communicate and when you lead. Right? So if you like this video, guys, thanks for being here. And you can always either subscribe, like do the social media thing wherever you're watching this video. I also on the link below this video or in my bio, you can sign up for my weekly newsletter. Start your week with a coach. We talk about stuff like this and other things to help you live a meaningful, fulfilled life and to help you overcome any type of struggles you have. So as a high performance coach, that's what I do day in and day out. So if I can help you, please let me know. All right, that's it, guys. Thanks for being here. Thanks for this awesome show. You guys inspire me. So if you have any questions, put them in the comments. Again, do the social media thing. Share it with three friends if you can. That would help me out quite a bit. If not, no worries. I'll be back here on Friday at the same time, same place with the weekly recap which we've been doing on Fridays now. So hopefully I'll see you guys there. Thanks again. And go out there, live with more joy, more personal growth and more impact in your communities.