Understanding Communication and Audiences in General - Articles - Andrew Schwartz

Products - Articles

ReadySetPresent Articles can be purchased for $15.00 and are reproducible for a $1.00 royalty fee per copy. Once purchased, download instructions will be sent to you via email. (PC and MAC Compatible). You can purchase all additional royalty copies by clicking here or visiting the reprints page.

Understanding Communication and Audiences in General
by Andrew E. Schwartz

You can order food in a restaurant, debate an issue of intense controversy, or train a company in time management skills. All of these human communication situations have certain aspects in common. Understanding these similarities allows a presentor to analyze their own presentations more effectively.

Don’t Over-Isolate: Many presentors, however, tend to over-isolate specific interchanges between themselves and other people and ignore these very similarities. As a result, they frequently use the wrong words or language or speak in a tone which is inappropriate to the training situation. They think they have to avoid the use of language which is unfamiliar to the audience, thus possibly oversimplifying what they say.

Two People: No More, No Less: Think and deal in terms of individual persons. You may be speaking or writing to ten or a thousand people at the same time. Yet, you are always communicating with only one person. People in a group may be very much alike in terms of mutual interests, but they think and react individually. People gathered together in groups are much more easily influenced than when alone. If one person in a group laughs, cries, refuses, agrees, or hates, the others are much more likely to do the same than if they were alone. But when you analyze what really takes place in such situations, you realize that each individual in the group has been communicated with and led to his decision to act at the individual level.

In training, a presentor seeks to accomplish specific changes in specific people. Your whole aim is to reduce your training attempts to the problem-solving level, which includes measurement of your accomplishments. Not only does remaining individual-oriented helps you to do this in an effective and conclusive way. It also helps you to retain your own confidence and to place your failures to communicate in proper perspective.

As a presentor, you will be able to see a single change in a single person, out of perhaps a hundred tries, as a success. That is a good percentage. Obviously, the more successes the merrier, and the smaller the number of tries, the more critical becomes the necessity to increase the possibility and probability of success through a strategic, problem-solving approach.

The Other Person is Always Subjective: No matter how he appears or what he says, your safest assumption always will be that the trainee is subjective. They will interpret you, what you are trying to communicate, and most of the things that occur in the interchange primarily in terms of their own experience, language, understanding, etc. Remember, too, that this is just as true of you. You must constantly and consciously remind yourself to be objective.

The Other Person is Always Ego-Defensive: Most people are likely to become quite active in their reactions and responses, for psychologically, they are ego-defensive as well as subjective. Either consciously or unconsciously, they will actively try to counteract anything that they find aggravating or threatening.

For example, if you seem superior to them in any way, they will attempt to block the imagined or real superiority, perhaps by not liking you or disagreeing with you, as their own internal justification. Something as simple as your looking like someone else they know (who perhaps once did them wrong), a stereotype, or a preconceived idea could greatly affect your attempt to train them.

The Other Person is Usually Unaware: It is also important to be continually aware that a person usually will not be consciously aware of how and why they are reacting, yet even if they knew, they wouldn’t tell you. Society conditions people to hide their true inner drives and motives especially from those close to them (or even to themselves). Only when they are assured — both intellectually and emotionally — that it is safe to do so, will they reveal what they really need, want, feel, or think. A presentor’s job is to make a person feel as safe as possible in accepting, believing or doing whatever you want them to do.

Obviously, you cannot know all of the things that will set off an individual person. But you can know and base your actions on far more specific information about them than you probably now are using. Even if the reaction of the audience cannot be known, try not to do anything that will directly cause him to react negatively based on what you know to be generally true.

Always Three Dimensions: Human communication is always three-dimensional. No spoken or written message is ever just words or rational thoughts. Every interchange between you and another person has and takes place at the following three intimately related levels, or dimensions, of being: emotional, physical, and rational.

Any attempt to communicate will succeed if all of these dimensions are adhered to.

This knowledge is the basis for the use of practically any training device or medium you can name. For example, knowledge of the existence of and need for rational content is the elemental basis for outlining that attempt and understanding the various ways of doing so. Similarly, knowledge of the existence of and need for physical content is the basis and reason for the use of any form of audio-visual aid, graphics, illustrations, or other sensory communicative device. Finally, an underlying grasp of the existence of and need for emotional content is the basis for the use of what is commonly known as emotion appeal in communicating an idea.

Knowledge of this three-dimensional nature is the foundation of training. You can’t get much closer to real understanding without these realizations. Mastering and fully implementing this nature will help to understand and communicate with your audience better than any other technique.

Andrew E. Schwartz, CEO, A.E. Schwartz & Associates of Boston, MA a comprehensive management training and professional development organization offering over 40 skills specific programs and practical solutions to today's business challenges.

When ordering, if you need an extraction program to unzip the file please visit one of these sites below.
These programs all have free trials that can be used to unzip our files. Make sure you have your pop-up blockers disabled.

Winzip - http://download.winzip.com/winzip120.exe
Winrar - http://www.rarlab.com/rar/wrar380.exe

Purchase this article for $15.00.
Articles are Reproducible for a $1.00 royalty fee per copy.