00:00:00 Welcome to episode 689 of the inspired stewardship podcast from soul patch, hippo success coaching. I want to serve your journey to be the next version of you to be inspired, to become the most authentic. You listen to this, the inspired stewardship podcast by my friend, Scott Mader every day can help you keep the focus that you need. No, This leads us to the second point.
00:00:36 You have to confirm understanding the truth is if you want to have clarity of communication with other people, whether it's your spouse, whether it's your children, whether it's your clients, whether it's your friends, it doesn't matter. If you want to have clarity, you have to perform a step where welcome and thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast.
00:01:00 If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, and you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling in the inspired stewardship podcast, you will learn to invest in yourself, invest in others, and develop your influence so that you can impact the world. And today's episode about developing your influence through stewarding your talent.
00:01:33 I talk with you about why, what you say doesn't matter as much as how you say it while you have to confirm understanding and what that even means and how even the simplest of communication can be undone. You've heard me talk about developing your talent and what are the best ways to do that is through books. But if you're like most people today, it's hard to find the time to read.
00:01:58 And that's why today's podcast is brought to you by audible. Go to inspired stewardship.com/audible to sign up and you can get a 30 day free trial. There's over 180,000 titles to choose from. And you can pick one and listen your way to developing your talents via audible. That's inspired stewardship.com/audible to get your free trial and listen to great books the same way you're listening to this podcast.
00:02:30 So I live in the, in the South, I live in South Texas. And one of the jokes that we have is you can use an expression, like bless your heart. And it might mean, bless your heart something good. And it actually might mean, you know, you're a complete idiot and please leave me alone. The truth is that oftentimes the words that we say doesn't convey the full meaning,
00:02:59 and what's more the way we communicate and what we say and the directions we give. And even when we think we're being perfectly clear and fully explaining everything often don't come across that way. And today I want to talk a little bit about communication. And first off, I want to start with that idea of kind of bless your heart, meaning multiple things.
00:03:25 If you think about it, the tone of voice that people use, the way they stand, when they say it, the expression on their face, the look in their eye, all of these things convey meaning. And one of the exercises that I used to do, and I encourage people to do this. If you're interested in learning more about communication is go to something like YouTube or some other place where there's lots of videos and filter and look for videos that are not in your native language.
00:03:56 So if you speak English, look for videos done by somebody in, in French or German or Japanese or Korean or some other language filter out those that have the spoken word in words that you would understand, and then watch the video of the speech. Don't listen to the meaning of the words, but listen to the tone, watch how they stand, watch the expression on their face.
00:04:24 As they tell stories, I used to do this a lot with motivational speakers where I would go and I would watch motivational speaker speakers delivering their speech in foreign languages because watching the nuance of how they held their body, how they moved across the stage, the expression on their face, the look on their eyes, the tone of voice that they used allowed me to begin to dissect things that they were doing that conveyed meaning without me actually understanding the meaning of the words,
00:04:56 you know, the truth. Is that what you say in terms of the context of the words at, at one level is probably not as important as how you say it. I mean, think about it. We, if you're a parent, you've said that to your child, it's not what you said is how you said it, that got you in trouble.
00:05:15 If you have been in a situation where there was a lot of stress going on, you reacted probably as much to the undercurrent of tone, as you did, to the content of the message that people were delivering. The truth is we read into the way people hold their body. The people hold their eyes. The way people hold their lips or their,
00:05:40 their face. We read into their expression and their body language. We do all of this because that's part of communication. And yet all too often, we focus just on the words that we say, or the words that we write. That's one of the, that email, for instance, or text messaging or any other written communication, oftentimes can be very easy to misinterpret.
00:06:05 We read feeling into the words that may not have been there because we don't get any of those cues of body language and tone. And so we just have to guess, we have to read into it. The tone of the email may not be what you intended it to be. You'll say something sarcastic or jokey, and someone will take it very seriously and get their feelings hurt.
00:06:30 You know, this leads us to the second point. You, you have to confirm understanding the truth is if you want to have clarity of communication with other people, whether it's your spouse, whether it's your children, whether it's your clients, whether it's your friends, it doesn't matter. If you want to have clarity, you have to perform a step where first you communicate and then you check for understanding.
00:06:57 And what's funny is even checking for understanding can come across different ways. Because if you think about it, if somebody, if it feels like somebody going, you know, basically you're stupid. And so I got to make sure you understood me well, now that's condescending. But if they're trying to make it clear that they've communicated clearly, and they're not sure that they have,
00:07:19 and they want to check and make sure that everything was communicated clearly and correctly, then all of a sudden that's a much nicer thing. We actually have to do this step of confirming understanding. And even then, it's not perfect because the truth is when somebody else says back to you, what they heard you say, you still don't really know that they understood the meaning behind what you said as much as they just understood the words and can translate it into their own words.
00:07:50 It's why one of the ways of confirming understanding is actually seeing what happens. But depending on the nature of the communication and how critical understanding is this is something that can sometimes be a problem. I want to use an example To illustrate how even the simplest of communication can really be undone. So I used to do an exercise when I was a school teacher where I would have the students write out the directions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
00:08:25 And I, and I told them I was very explicit. I'm going to take your directions, literal word for word, exactly what you say to do. So you need to be very clear and fully write out all of the steps that it takes to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. Think about it for a minute. How many steps would you?
00:08:47 You have five, 10, 20, 50, a hundred. Well, the truth is of the students would end up with between five and 15 steps. And if you actually write out five to 15 steps of making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and then you actually follow them, literally word for word, you end up with a mess. You end up with bread.
00:09:13 That's been smushed. You end up with peanut butter that has been smeared onto both sides of a piece of bread. No matter what, it's almost impossible to. The only students I've had that have successfully done. It ended up with something like a hundred to 200 steps to making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. And yet we all know how to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
00:09:35 It's not hard it's that if somebody doesn't understand the meaning behind it, if you deliberately ignore the context and the unknowing things, then even the simplest of communication can be completely derailed. And the truth is that oftentimes we think people understand context. We think people understand the meaning behind the words when in reality they may not, but we make assumptions instead of checking for understanding and making sure that we're all understanding each other clearly,
00:10:14 instead of making sure that the words that we use are defined and perfectly clear, we don't understand at that level. And we don't communicate at that level. And so I want to challenge you to think about your communication. Think about the clarity that you have and begin to work to make even the simplest of communication clear for all of those people around you.
00:10:41 Thanks for listening. Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast. As a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you like this episode on the stewardship of talent, you can go over to inspired stewardship.com/talent and sign up for our five week series on the stewardship of talent.
00:11:18 Or if you're in the U S you can text four, four, two, two, two talent tips, that's talent tips to four four, two, two, two, and get those tips until next time, invest your time, your talent and your treasures, develop your influence and impact the world..