Tag: communication

Crisis of Consideration

They were supposed to be a juggernaut.

The 2012-2013 version of the Los Angeles Lakers had it all, from a professional basketball context. An all-time great in Kobe Bryant. A former Most Valuable Player in Steve Nash. A former Defensive Player of the Year in Dwight Howard. And a supporting cast of players that were mostly in the prime of their careers.

It was an accumulation of talent that many considered among the best of all-time in the National Basketball Association.

While another ballyhooed superteam across the country — the Miami Heat — was still celebrating their championship run from the season prior, the Lakers seemed poised to win the next title. All they had to do is show up.

Or so everyone thought.

The team lost four of its first five games, costing the head coach his job. But the coaching change did little to change the team’s fortunes, as the Lakers continued to lose more games than they won for several more months.

It took a late-season surge to push the team’s record over the breakeven mark. Los Angeles didn’t clinch a playoff spot until the last day of the season. And the San Antonio Spurs made quick work of them in the postseason — winning four straight lopsided games.

What on earth happened to the Los Angeles Lakers?

There are plenty of explanations. The team struggled to learn a new offensive system, which led directly to the coaching change. Many of the team’s best players — who were on the wrong side of 30 years old — battled through injuries.

But less talented teams than the Lakers had encountered these setbacks before. And they’d persevered anyway. So why did the Lakers fold like a paper tent in a breeze?

The answer can be summed up in one word: Ego.

Too many members of the 2012-2013 Lakers were in it for themselves. They sought to play their game, rather than buy into the team dynamic. Tension built in the locker room, most notably between Bryant and Howard. And the Lakers never seemed to be all that cohesive on the basketball court as a result.

Yes, the Lakers suffered from a crisis of consideration that doomed their season. But they weren’t alone.

There’s a scourge on our society. A pervasive ailment that festers.

Coast to coast, in big cities and small towns, we must deal with people being wholly inconsiderate.

This takes many forms. It might be a driver who clogs the left lane while keeping their vehicle at a snail’s pace. Or a self-anointed VIP who cuts the line to get served first. Or a biker who revs his Harley engine in a residential neighborhood at 11 PM on a weeknight.

In all cases, the offender is thinking me, not we. They zone in on their own wants and needs, without a single thought to the disruption they cause others.

For a long time, this crisis went unaddressed. The inconsiderate continued with their shenanigans, while those aggrieved by their actions quietly fumed.

But recently, things have started to change.

Going through a public health crisis has raised the stakes of inconsideration. Now, one self-serving action can put countless lives in the balance.

With so much on the line, we feel emboldened to call out inconsiderate behavior. And laying out the dire consequences helps us demand change.

Sometimes, this leads to tangible improvements. Sometimes, the targets of our ire see shame in their oversight and vow to be better.

But other times, there is blowback. Those who act boorishly respond with aggression instead of change. And the intense backlash only helps to deepen the fissures omnipresent in our society.

Of course, we’d prefer the first outcome to the second one. But either result is better than the status quo.

You see, inconsideration is about more than bucking rules and customs. It also represents a failure of common understanding. A gap between perceptions of the world around us.

To emerge from this quagmire, we need to bridge that gap. But how?

I lay in bed in the middle of the night, unable to sleep.

Insomnia wasn’t the culprit. Neither was anxiety.

No, the cause of my sleeplessness was a constant barrage of death metal cascading through the wall from the apartment next door. The music was persistent, and it was unavoidable.

Enraged, I marched out to the hallway and knocked on my neighbor’s door. After getting no response, I called the apartment’s courtesy officer and alerted them to the issue. Finally, I abandoned my bedroom, resigning myself to a night on the couch.

After this hellacious night, all was well for a while. As the days went by, I nearly forgot that the incident even happened.

But about a month later, it returned. I once again woke up in the middle of the night, tortured by the angry tones of death metal.

This time, I emailed the apartment’s community administrator to alert them of the situation. I didn’t want to rock the boat too much, but I knew my neighbor was flouting the community’s noise rules. I wanted that neighbor to get fined.

I never did hear back from the administrator. But the death metal once again went away the following evening. Normalcy seemed to have taken over.

But then, a few weeks after this, the music returned. By now, I was at my wits end. I took out a pen and a Post-It note, and wrote:

Please be a good neighbor and stop playing death metal at 11 PM on a Monday night. Some of us are trying to sleep.

I taped the note to my neighbor’s door, retreated to my apartment, and slept on the couch again.

The next day, I was greeted with the following note on my door:

Sorry, fell asleep while it was playing. Moving out next month, so it won’t be me next time.

I can’t verify if my neighbor did, indeed move out in the subsequent month. But I never was woken up by death metal again.

This whole saga was unpleasant. No one likes to see their sleep patterns disrupted.

But its resolution shows the way out of the crisis of consideration.

That way out is through communication.

Now, Post-It notes are admittedly a clunky way of achieving that objective. But regardless of style points, they did the trick.

Maybe we can all take a page from this book. Maybe we can focus on communicating, instead of fuming about the behavior of others. Maybe we can stop pining for the end outcome and start thinking about the journey needed to get there.

It’s the considerate thing to do. So let’s get it done.

On Communication

At first glance, the situation seemed normal.

I was on the floor of an apartment bedroom, with another kid on the other side of the room. Between us lay some toys — miniature dinosaurs, trains, and cars.

It was the kind of scene that was commonplace when children spent time together. But this was no normal encounter.

For one thing, this apartment was in China. The place was comfortable enough, but still rather rudimentary.

And that kid I was hanging out with? He was the nephew of a family friend. Just like me, he was 10 years old. But he spoke no English. And I spoke no Chinese.

We stared at each other in silence for what seemed like an eternity. Both of us were perplexed by the situation we were in.

Then, the boy took one of the dinosaurs from the floor and guided it across the bed. As he did, I made dinosaur noises.

Of course, I didn’t really know what a dinosaur sounded like. The real ones predated me by millions of years.

But it didn’t matter. My sound effects made the boy smile, and then chuckle. Soon enough, we were having a blast, without sharing a single word.

Much has been made about the keys to success.

Some have pointed to talent and opportunity. Others champion focus and grit.

These are important attributes. But I think they all play second fiddle.

Communication is the most skill there is. And yet, it seems to be the most overlooked one.

We have all kinds of acronyms to describe our performance — IQ (Intelligence Quotient) for smarts, EQ (Emotional Quotient) for social acuity, AQ (Adversity Quotient) for resilience. But all too often, we fail to assess our CQ — or communication quotient.

Perhaps we struggle to quantify the benefits. After all, the smartest people can solve the most pressing problems. The most socially affable people can draw a crowd. And the most resilient people turn setbacks into triumphs.

What awaits the best communicators? It’s hard to come up with concrete examples.

And yet, we know the devastating impacts of poor communication all too well. Failed communication can torpedo even the most promising venture. It can damage relationships, corrode trust and vaporize goodwill.

These are major issues. But we like to pretend we’re immune to them.

We’re not.

Not long ago, I went back to school to earn an MBA (Master’s degree in Business Administration).

My business school coursework gave me several new talents — the ability to read financial statements, to understand economic theory, and to enact pricing strategy, for instance. But the most impactful course I took was on business presentations.

At first glance, this seems strange. I already had a college degree in communications, and I’d spent three years working in the news media. Plus, I’d put together several PowerPoints in my marketing career and I’d written plenty of articles here on Words of the West.

But even with all this communication experience, I knew I had room for improvement. There were plenty of times where I had been called to the carpet for a work email that didn’t land the way I intended. And I often struggled to make the desired impact when speaking up at staff meetings.

This course wasn’t designed to address any of that. It was simply a primer on how to present to business executives. And yet, I found it transformative.

For the course didn’t just address the all-too-common fear of public speaking. It delved into the intricacies of eye contact. It established guidelines for speaking cadence. And it provided instructions on how to create a slide deck that tells a story.

These tips were more focused on the audience than the presenter. They were meant to ensure that the message landed properly.

That, of course, is the most important aspect of communication. Messages are only effective if others can decode them in the way we intended. The audience reaction is everything.

I had learned that skill, by necessity, on that day in China. Even with a language barrier in my midst, I’d managed to forge a friendship with a boy my age.

And yet, I had seemed to forget what I’d learned over all the intervening years. But that changed once I took the business presentations class.

I left the course on a mission to be a more effective communicator. I wanted to ensure that my messages landed with precision moving forward, no matter the medium.

This mission is still ongoing. But I’m encouraged by the progress I’ve made thus far.

Still, I wish this wasn’t a solitary quest.

For millennia, humans have evolved their communication techniques.

We started by making standardized noises, which evolved into language. Oral storytelling, cave paintings, and hieroglyphics came next, followed by the written word.

The advent of the printing press and — much later — the microphone spawned mass communication. Radio and television spread these messages ever wider. And ultimately, the Internet made communication both global and simultaneous.

Communication has never been more convenient. Today, we literally have the tools for it at our fingertips. And yet, we fail to use those tools properly.

This is particularly noticeable at our current moment of strife.

A health crisis has cost the world millions of lives. And an economic crisis has cost America millions of jobs. But it’s an ongoing communication crisis that is perhaps most profound.

A world connected as never before has, paradoxically, never seemed further apart. And as the dialogue breaks down, polarization only deepens.

I understand the temptation to eschew open lines of communication. Engaging with others can be tough work, particularly when we have little in common. And the risk of a blunder seems to outweigh the rewards of avoiding communication altogether.

But this laissez-faire attitude has its costs. We’re seeing these broadly now, through the radicalization of society. But we’re seeing them individually as well.

No, not all of us will end up in a room with someone who doesn’t speak our language. But many of us will find ourselves outside our depth at some point. Perhaps we already have.

Basic communication skills can aid us in these unsettling circumstances. But if we’ve let those skills atrophy, there’s no guarantee they’ll come back to us in time. We could quickly find ourselves up a creek without a paddle.

Fortunately, the power still lies in our hands. But it’s our obligation to do something about it.

So, let’s give communication the priority it deserves. Let’s make a choice to engage, even when it seems inconvenient. And let’s ensure our messages stick the landing.

The challenges we face are substantial. But if we communicate with precision, we stand a better chance of rising to the occasion.

Let’s get to it.

The Quiet Roar

The loudest message often comes from the quietest origins.

This might seem surprising at first. Especially since our culture lionizes the boisterous.

But those with the loudest voices all too often fail to win our hearts and minds. The sheer force of their vocal pitch causes us to take heed of what they have to say, but only for a moment.

In the long term, the loudest among us don’t win our attention. All that bravado eventually comes off as white noise, about as memorable as our morning coffee from three weeks ago.

This is surely not what those vociferous speakers want. But all too often, they confuse commanding the room for creating influence. And when they fail to capture hearts and minds by projecting their voice, they generally overcompensate by talking even louder.

These actions send these booming orators into a dark spiral. One where they’ll get a reputation as a loudmouth with nothing of substance to say.

It’s a reputation that fully undermines any remaining chance they have of causing influence.

There are a couple reasons why this paradox occurs.

One reason is that we’re poorly equipped to handle continual shouting. Our bodies act defensively when we encounter large bursts of noise. While it might seem as if a loud talker has captivated the room, a more likely explanation is that they’ve startled others into momentary silence.

Some of us do handle noise better than others. For example, some people are comfortable hanging out at large concerts or crowded bars. And if those of us who live under an airport flightpath — as my grandparents did for six decades — gradually tune out the sound of the high-pitched jet engines overhead.

But regardless of how well we acclimate to a noisy environment, loud noise is still a shock to our system. Our bodies just don’t handle it well.

If you don’t believe me, watch the late R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket. Consider how you’d feel if you were continually getting yelled at by someone standing six inches in front of your nose.

So yes, our defensive posture to noise is a barrier that prevents the loudest speakers from meeting their objectives. But there’s another reason why more noise does not equal more results. One that can be defined in six words.

Volume is the enemy of rhythm.

Yes, the key to resonance is not only knowing how loudly to speak. It’s also knowing when to speak.

Our attention follows cyclical rhythms. We are more likely to remember a massage when it’s part of a mixed pattern of silence and noise.

This silence most frequently comes in the form of a well-timed pause. Storytellers use these pauses to build dramatic tension. Great communicators use them to underscore their point.

Why? Because pauses illicit wonder in an audience. They allow minds to wander and silently ask What if? questions. They unlock a world of possibilities.

By the time the communicator is ready to share their message, the audience is waiting for them with anticipation. The captive audience members are wondering whether the message will resolve the stream of questions running through their mind.

If it does, the audience members will feel accomplished. They’ll feel as if they unlocked the mystery that floated through the silence.

If it doesn’t, the audience members will feel awed. They’ll feel as if they learned something new and unexpected.

Either way, the message resonates. The communicator wins.

All without lifting their finger or raising their voice to a full shout.

It’s an art form, for sure. So, what’s needed to master this art?

A hefty dose of patience and observation.

It takes the ability to read the room and chime in at the appropriate time. It requires the contextual chops to understand a situation and respond in a thought-provoking way. It demands context over bluster, wit over brute force.

And it favors those with a quieter disposition.

Think about it: Those best at this art must listen before they speak. They must recognize patterns and understand how to leverage them. They must embrace the silence as an ally, not an enemy.

This is the realm of the quiet, the soft-spoken. It’s the domain of the thoughtful speaker, the empathetic communicator.

But even while this pattern skews towards those who say little, it’s not exclusive to introverts or the more reserved. We all can use the rhythm of attention to our advantage when sharing our messages.

In fact, we all should.

Adopting this practice might require a leap of faith for the most gregarious of us. But the results will benefit everyone.

White noise will fade away. And we’ll have more chances to captivate and inspire.

So, let’s leave the myth of loud voices behind. It’s time to embrace the quiet roar.

Adapting Our Expectations

Another Super Bowl has come and gone.

Our biggest sporting and television spectacle brings its quirks with it — commercials people actually pay attention to, a halftime concert featuring a bizarre mix of artists, political statements and semi-elaborate sets, and a hefty amount of overindulgence. It also brings us some memorable moments, and a newly minted National Football League champion.

The NFL’s Most Valuable Player, Cam Newton, was not that champion this year. But after the confetti rained down and the Vince Lombardi Trophy was raised up by his opponents — the Denver Broncos — he became one of the game’s memorable moments.

Meeting with the hordes of media — as is his obligation after the game — Newton looked morose. So often bold and outspoken, the 6’5” quarterback seemed to be hiding under his Carolina Panthers hoodie, quietly giving one or two word answers before storming off.

It was not what anyone was looking for from the new face of football. Even in his early days in the league, when struggles and frustration were commonplace, Newton spoke candidly about his need for self improvement. Now, on the game’s biggest stage, Cam let his emotions get the best of him. And he got roasted for it.

I don’t believe that’s right.

It’s easy for the media to demonize those who don’t play by their rules or expectations. I know this innately, because I used to be in the media. But what I don’t know is what it feels like to fail in front of 115 million people and then candidly answer tough questions about how I’ve failed.

I can’t imagine how brutal that would feel — even though I have a folder in my inbox filled with 150 job rejection emails I received three years ago during my career transition. I was out of work for 3 months back then, living week by week in a hotel in a strange city, with no friends nearby to keep my spirits up and job rejection after job rejection eating into my soul as my savings were slowly depleted.

Needless to say, it was a low and frustrating time for me — but I didn’t have to answer pointed questions about it in full view of half the country.

Think about it. We all have times where we felt like that, where we wanted to be left alone. So did Cam. But he couldn’t be left alone, so he did what he could to power through the situation and move on. And he damn sure did a better job than I would have done in that situation.

It’s time we adapt our expectations. Not everyone can be like Newton’s Super Bowl opponent, Peyton Manning — who, after a brutal double overtime playoff loss in 2013, answered every question thrown his way before quietly going to the opponent’s locker room to congratulate Ray Lewis (who would retire after winning the Super Bowl weeks later). That’s the standard the media sets, but it really should be considered above and beyond.

Cam Newton is an amazing talent, a phenomenal athlete and a heck of a football player. He’s a leader, an inspiration and, by all accounts, a great person. He’s brash and flamboyant, but also strong and determined. He’s the face of football for years to come.

We caught him at his lowest in the aftermath of Super Bowl 50. He’ll learn from it, he’ll adapt and he’ll grow.

When it comes to our expectations, it’s high time we did too.