Few would debate that sales and other business endeavors boil down to relationships, which are built with healthy communication.
We’ve been “communicating” since birth, right? Yet it is as though we loiter beneath the Tower of Babel at times. Why? – Because we too often take communication for granted. We get lazy.
Effective communication is not innate; it’s an ever-evolving craft that must be persistently honed. This takes effort!
One of my pet peeves is when professionals use jargon in “communicating” (tongue in cheek) with folks outside their industry. The outsider often feels like a cross between Charlie Brown and Barney Fife – The speaker being Chuck’s teacher (“Fwah, fwah, fwah, fwah, fwah.”) . . . The listener wanting to shout, “What we have here [Andy] is failure to communicate!”
Who could expect a relationship to flourish in a make-believe world of conversing?
I work hard to avoid the antiquated jargon of my trade – legalese. During my first week at law school, a professor warned, “You will leave this place a different person; you’ll no longer speak the same language nor will you view things as you once did.” Was he ever right! People I had known all my life soon regarded me a strange man with an even stranger vocabulary. Who would blame them?
Here’s a sampling of what they must have “heard” when I began to utter my attorney words:
•Attractive nuisance – Kim Kardashian;
•Counterfeit – what an irate customer pitches at the returns desk in Wal-Mart;
•Cross-appeal – Pastor Bob’s Sunday altar call;
•Ex parte – what someone throws the night after his or her divorce becomes final;
•Gross misconduct – public nose picking;
•Heir apparent – not bald;
•Joint venture – a road trip with marijuana;
•Loco parentis – what all 16-year-olds think of their mom and dad;
•Testator – that first French fry you put in the pan to see if the grease is hot enough; and
•Wanton injury – what happens when you try to consume Chinese appetizers before they’ve cooled sufficiently.
On the silliness could go . . . not just with us stand-ups in legal land, in every trade and profession. But if we truly want to succeed in business (heck, in life), and if prosperous relationships are the prize, we must endeavor to actually relate. No short cuts. We must be communication scholars.
© 2012 Russ Riddle. All rights reserved.
