Drinking with the Invisible Man & Woman

I feel old this week!  Three incidents in the last six days have really made me realise which side of the technological generation gap I’m on!

 

The first was a conversation with a twenty-something member of the team at one of our strategic partners – about ‘sociable robots’ of all things!  (That’s not as random as it sounds; we’re working on a programme on the subject).  I can see the potential for robots which can become carers or companions for the most vulnerable people in our society; but I also agree with Sherry Turkle at MIT, that we shouldn’t lose sight of their limitations.  One of the most important of those, in my view, is that machines can only be programmed to act out human capacities like empathy.  They can’t actually experience them.  My young colleague said he thought a convincing performance could be good enough.  I don’t– but that’s the point of making the programme.  There are strong views on both sides and it’s a question which needs debating.

 

The next day, I was in another associate’s studio.  I was working with a producer who is of a similar age to me, as well as a young woman not long out of college.  She took an active part in the session – although through most of it, she had her phone in her hand and was constantly interacting with absent friends.

 

The third incident is the one that gives this post its title.  It’s a  news story – or rather, the reaction to it.

 

Steve Tyler is Landlord of the Gin Tub, in Hove, East Sussex.  He’s so fed up with customers talking to invisible friends via social media, rather than the people they’re physically drinking with, he’s installed a Faraday cage to stop mobile signals.  He’s done it, he says, because he wants to give people a break from being connected – and he wants to stop all the atmosphere in the bar being drained away into remote locations.

 

Now, all this sounds perfectly reasonable to me.  In my quaint, old-fashioned world, the whole reason for going out for a drink is to catch up with the friends you’re out with.  When 5 Live covered the story, though, a straw poll of drinkers in Salford made me feel like a lone voice in the wilderness!

 

One man admitted to clutching his phone and feeling quite ‘twitchy’ because he knew he couldn’t look at it during the interview (which would have lasted no more than a few minutes).  .  Others made comments like:

 

‘But I might get notifications!  People might be trying to message me!’

 

‘How would you play Pokemon Go?!’ and (most depressing for me)

 

‘I reckon he’ll go out of business pretty soon’.

 

I really hope the last contributor is proved wrong.  Yes, some customers might leave, but there’s a massive marketing opportunity here – a chance to attract a whole new clientele; people who still appreciate the chance for a face-to-face chat, without the constant threat of being interrupted by a phone – their own or anyone else’s!  There are parallels here with the smoking ban.  Yes, I know a lot of people abandoned their local; but others who previously avoided the pub etc were drawn in by the promise of being able to have a drink without a compulsory secondhand smoke chaser.

 

Steve isn’t advocating being completely cut off from the 21^st century.  There’s an area outside the bar where people can use their phones as much as they like (described on the radio as similar to the provision pubs make for smokers); and there’s a landline inside, for emergencies.  All he’s saying, as I understand it, is that as much as we might love our technology, it’s good to have a break sometimes.  One of the reasons I love studio work is that the phone either has to go off or stay outside – so no-one can get to me in there!

 

It’s too simplistic, of course, to say this is just a generational issue – that all young people are unconditionally pro tech and all older ones are anti.  I have friends who buck the trend on both sides of the divide; but a divide certainly does exist.  When it comes to technology, that will always be the case.

 

The late Douglas Adams summed that up brilliantly in a programme for Radio 4 in 1999.  I don’t have the exact quote to hand, but he said something like:

 

The technology that’s around when we’re born is just a normal part of life.  Anything invented before we’re thirty-five is interesting – even exciting; but anything that comes along after that is ‘the devil’s work!’

 

That’s obviously not a hard and fast rule, but it’s not a bad guideline.

 

As time goes on, increasingly sophisticated tech is bound to become even more deeply interwoven into everyday life.  That will open up some amazing opportunities for all of us – as it already has; but my message, as always, is that to get the best out of those new opportunities, we need to keep hold of some traditional human skills.  We have to  maintain a balance between the physical and the virtual.  To do that, we need to keep talking – in every sense of the word.

 

We’ll go on with the theme of talking in the next post; specifically, the words we use to label one another.  In the meantime, if you have any:

 

Questions

Comments or

Feedback

 

come and talk to me – maybe over a drink at the Gin Tub?!  All the details (for me – not the bar!) are on the website.

 

‘When did you hear that?’ – the relatinship between sound and our basic needs

I need to start with another apology – for another unscheduled gap. This will be the last post for 2015. Normal service will be resumed in the new year!

 

I chose the title for this part of the programme to emphasize the relationship between sound and time. That’s highlighted on the show by Michael Proulx and Julian Treasure. Here, though, I want to pick up on another relationship – between hearing and our basic needs, as set out in Abraham Maslow’s five-level hierarchy.

• Level: 1 Biological/physiological
• 2 Safety/security
• 3 Belongingness/love
• 4 Esteem (including self-esteem) and
• 5 Self-actualisation (fulfilment of potential).

 

In terms of biology/physiology, I mention on the show that evidence is growing of a strong link between hearing and health. When it comes to safety/security, our ears are the first line of defence against invisible threats. I ran across a powerful illustration of that a couple of weeks ago.

 

I was listening to the radio when I suddenly noticed an odd noise in the background – odd because it was out of place. Within a couple of seconds, I realised it must be a fire alarm. One of the presenters didn’t spot it, because she has significant hearing loss. Under normal circumstances, thanks to hearing aids and impressive lip-reading skills, you’d never know; but in this situation, it was just as well she was working with a fully hearing person.

 

Ok, so as far as I know, it was nothing serious – and if it had been, and she’d been working by herself, someone would have told her; but it’s not hard to imagine a situation where a deaf or hearing impaired person could be left behind in an emergency.

 

On Friday (4th December), in another studio, I was reminded of the part hearing plays in our higher level needs – from inclusion to fulfilment. This time, I was the presenter – interviewing Brendan Magill for The Wireless from Age UK.

 

This year, Brendan turned seventy – and celebrated fifty years of unbroken employment. His career has taken him from trainee computer programmer (in the early days of the technological revolution), to a ‘Business, Employment and Disability Consultant’ (since the mid-nineties); but the reason for talking about him here pre-dates all that. It goes back to something he said about his primary school education.

 

As a partially sighted five-year-old, he started at the ‘school for the deaf, dumb and blind’ in Belfast. (The word ‘dumb’ was dropped in 1956 – not a moment too soon!). He said the education ‘wasn’t bad’ and that overall it was: ‘A good experience, because I learnt to communicate with people who are deaf’.

 

Despite the fact that we live in a culture obsessed with the visual, hearing loss often creates more physical, psychological and social barriers than sight-loss. Why? Well, very simply because it makes it difficult or impossible to access the spoken word – which is a far more powerful communication tool than we tend to realise. It’s the fastest way to express complex ideas and emotions – and to tell the stories which bring us together and bind us together.

 

Yes, it’s descendant (written language) is generally quicker to consume, but it takes much longer to create. The average native English-speaker produces around a hundred and eighty words per minute, while even the most competent typist struggles to reach a hundred.

 

No, I’m not overlooking the vibrant culture developed by deaf people who sign; but that’s a response – a fantastically positive one – to being excluded from hearing society.

 

Since I started studying human communication, I’ve found it interesting that while ‘deaf culture’ is a definable entity, there’s no blind equivalent – for the simple reason that we don’t need one. Everything from music to conversation relies primarily on sound. Even things like cinema and video are accessible, on the whole, through the common language of sound in general – and speech in particular.

 

It’s fairly straightforward to translate vision into sound, but standard gestures etc aren’t up to reversing the process. Signing is a rich language in its own right – which too few of us master. While everyone who is able learns to speak, very few of us learn to sign. In the field of relationships, be they social or professional, it’s worth remembering that just because a person is hearing doesn’t mean they’re listening!

 

That’s one of the issues I’ll be looking at in the next programme, in January.

 

In the meantime, have a great Xmas and New Year. If you have any:

• Questions
• Comments or
• Communication issues you’d like to chat through…

 

…come and talk to me! All the contact details are on the website. I’m around til next Friday (18th December), then back on 4th January.

‘How can I help you?’ – Value

Two weeks ago, I talked about inclusion. Last week, the theme was negotiation. This week, I’m looking at one of the results of adding those two together – value. This topic also ties back to the last because that was about the importance of asking questions and this is about one of the most important questions we’ll ever ask if we want a professional contact to grow into something more enduring and productive. In fact, this week’s title question is an ideal follow-up to last week’s!

Actually, this week’s title was nearly:

‘How can you help me?’

because that’s often the real starting point; but either way, the fact is that help is at the heart of every professional interaction we ever have.

Reception staff ask callers or visitors:

‘How can I help you?’

At interviews, we ask candidates:

‘What do you think you can bring to the company?’ (in other words: ’How can you help us?’).

Marketing is about identifying and solving the customer’s problem.

Pr involves us asking journalists etc for their help in spreading our messages.

Wherever we look, across every area of operations, someone needs help from somebody else. When there’s a one-off, one-way match, we make a connection. When the roles of ‘helper’ and ‘helpee’ are switched back and forth over time, the result is a relationship founded on equality – which is central to the common ground on which the healthiest, most productive relationships are built. (No, I’m not sure ‘helpee’ is a word – but it serves our current purpose, doesn’t it?!).

I’ll be honest with you: I’ve never been completely convinced that ‘a picture paints a thousand words’
– but after putting this post together, I’m a believer!

My ideas quite often start as mental images, which I then translate into words. This one proved a trickier translation than I was expecting. If I could have just drawn you the picture in my head, with a few explanatory notes, I could have saved us both some time – and myself a lot of effort! Unfortunately, my drawing isn’t up to the job – so here goes with my best effort at a description!

Imagine, if you will, the classic ‘circles of intimacy’ diagram – five concentric rings:

• The smallest represents our five to ten most intimate relationships
• Around that, a slightly larger circle contains another twelve to fifteen people we’re close to but less intimate with
• In the next largest circle are approximately another twenty-five individuals we’re in regular contact with
• Beyond that are an additional hundred people, or thereabouts, who we feel personally connected to, although we keep in touch less regularly and
• At the outer edge of the largest circle are those we identify with because we share a group membership, although we won’t know them all personally –such as people who speak our language.

This graphic representation of our social relationships (which includes professional connections) often ties each level of the hierarchy to frequency of contact – which roughly translates into how much:

• Time
• Attention and
• Energy

we spend on the people within them.

That makes sense as far as it goes. Those three interdependent resources are vital to every relationship worth the name – and they’re all finite. We have to budget carefully, so (in theory at least) we allocate the biggest share to the most important people in our lives; but I’d argue that where we invest our resources is only a secondary cause of someone’s position in our circles; an effect of the primary cause.

The fundamental reason why one person sits in the centre and another is lucky to make it within the outer rim comes down to need – specifically, the type of need we have, which they’re able to fill.

In the first of this series, I mentioned Maslow’s Hierarchy. That isn’t usually shown as a set of circles, but while the numbers involved might be different and the boundaries may not match perfectly every time, it can be mapped on to the ‘circles of intimacy’.

Now imagine that:

• The ‘intimate’ centre circle represents the few people who can help meet our biological needs – including food and procreation. Our immediate family (partner and kids, if we have them) would be in the same position in both versions of the diagram;
• Next, there are those who help with our survival needs – shelter etc. Whether we have employers or employees, they should be in here, along with clients/customers – because they all help us earn the money that pays for our day to day survival. In theory, they also fit into this circle in terms of their share of our resources – although in practice, some of us see more of the boss, or the staff, than the people we live with, don’t we?!;
• Next come the people who give us a sense of belonging. In each case, the larger circle includes the smaller – so this is all of the above, plus friends outside work;
• The next largest circle includes anyone else (not in any of the smaller circles) who we’re able to help because that feeds our self-esteem.
• Finally, in the outermost circle, we can place the individuals, personally known to us or not, who help us reach our full potential – including those who help to spread positive messages about us.

If I haven’t made your head spin, there are three key points to pull out of all those imaginary circles:

1 As I’ve said, time, attention and energy are vital to every relationship

2 Provided nothing disrupts the natural process, the more of those resources we share with another person, the closer we become and

3 To find The best route to a bigger share of someone else’s resources – the path to their inner circles – we just need to look behind the question:

‘How can I help you?‘

An investment of time etc in identifying the answer generally yields healthy and consistent returns. For example:

Astute PR people find out what a journalist needs and how they can supply it –
• feeding the journalist’s ability to realise their own potential and
• increasing the chances of the favour being returned in the form of coverage;

Switched-on marketers involve customers in helping to plan campaigns –
 fostering a sense of belonging
• making the customer feel good about themselves and so
• maximising the chances of fulfilling the potential of the individual relationship and the campaign as a whole; and

Smart managers engage their teams in planning their own way forward and even the way forward for the organisation – helping them
• secure their practical survival
• feel safe in their position within the group
• build their self-esteem
• fulfill their own potential and so
• benefit the organisation by increasing their commitment.

Those are just three of the many illustrations I could have given you.

There are some implicit assumptions about power and status attached to the role of ‘helper’ and ‘helpee’.

Asking for help – even admitting we need it – can be seen as a weakness; a concession of power to whoever can meet our need. If nothing else, the helper can usually decide whether or not to help and they normally get to set the terms (if someone’s doing me a favour, I’m in no position to dictate how, where or when it’s done, am I?!). So if one person is always giving and the other is always receiving, the balance of power will be unequal, which strains dynamics and stunts growth.

If you’ find yourself caught in that cycle, in a particular interaction, or more generally, the trick to breaking it is to flip your usual opening question, whether that’s:

‘How can you help me?’ or
‘How can I help you?’

The second is usually the safest starting point – but if you always start from there and it doesn’t always work for you, it’s worth remembering that sometimes, you can support someone else by letting them support you. By showing you value somebody’s assistance, you might actually be giving them the validation they need to boost their self-esteem and reach their full potential! It’s a thought to ponder next time you’re struggling with something and don’t want to shout:

‘HELP!’

It’s all about exchange – which is next week’s theme. On that subject, if you have any:

• Questions
• Comments or
• Feedback

come and talk to me! All the contact details are on the website.

What do you really want? – Negotiation

Back in my days as a law student, one of the optional modules I took was negotiation.

Our tutor, David, liked to err on the side of the less conventional in his teaching style. I may have told you before that at the beginning of his first lecture on another subject, he jumped up on the desk and shouted:

‘Imagine I’m a Martian!’

In that moment, to be honest, it wasn’t too hard …

His methods, which included storytelling and some slightly off-the-wall exercises, certainly broke down barriers and brought his subjects to life though. It was in his advocacy class that I beat my fear of public speaking. I’ve said before that without David – and a helping hand from Little Bo-peep – I wouldn’t be doing this job.

During the first negotiation tutorial, he told a little story – which you may have come across?:

‘There was a mother, with two children – and one orange. She had a problem, because both kids wanted the orange. She tried giving it to one, with the promise that the other could have the next one; but that didn’t work – the one who had to wait just screamed! So she tried suggesting they cut it in half; but that didn’t work either – this time, both screamed!’

At that point, he paused and asked us:

‘So what could she do?’

Various suggestions were put forward – from buying another orange, to telling them they both had to go without, because they were behaving like brats!

He let the discussion run for a while, before calling it to order:

‘You might all be right,’ he said, ‘but what she actually did next was ask the kids a question:

‘”What do you really want the orange for?”

‘One said:

“I’m hungry!”

‘And the other said:

‘”I’m thirsty!”

‘So there was her answer. She squeezed the orange and gave the thirsty child the juice and the hungry one the pulp – and peace reigned!’

Throughout the rest of that course – and my later legal career – I saw that principle in action time and time again.

Back in 2008, I made a programme called:

‘Everybody Wins’ through Collaborative Negotiation.

In any deal, each party has a starting point and an idea of where they want to end up. They’ll both have results they ‘absolutely refuse’ to compromise on and other aspects of the outcome where they might be prepared to give a little – usually in return for something from the other side.

In commercial deals generally and legal scenarios in particular, both parties tend to keep their aces up their sleeves – while trying to catch a peep up the other side’s sleeves, to see what cards they’re holding.

Attempts to reach agreement can go round and round in circles, especially when one or both of the negotiators is competitive. When there are two competitors in the room (as you’ll know if you’ve been through this), the result can be complete stalemate – expensive stalemate if the alternative to a negotiated settlement is court. If one of the negotiators is too cooperative, on the other hand, the result is likely to be all one way – in favour of the competitor.

The idea behind collaborative negotiation is to save a lot of that time, effort and money by finding common ground early on and then working towards a solution that will suit both.

To do that, the question has to be asked and answered – of themselves, if not of each other

What do you really want?

The top-level answer might be:

‘The orange!’,

but by drilling down, we get to:

‘Food!’ or
‘A drink!’

So many legal clients started our first consultation by telling me they wanted to sue the pants off of someone who had breached a contract or some other civil right; but when I drilled down, it usually turned out that what they really wanted was their money back, some work put right etc – which, in 99% of cases, we were able to achieve without even issuing a summons. Sometimes, it was even possible to repair the original relationship.

So often, they hadn’t given too much thought to what they really wanted, until they were asked the direct question. Someone had done them wrong and was refusing to be reasonable, so they’d sue – ‘because that’s what you do, isn’t it?!’ (a justification I heard more than once!).

Equally often, the other side had become entrenched in their position because my client had been issuing demands, rather than asking questions.

That’s where this little trip into my past ties back to my present.

Whether we’re talking about law, business – or any other kind of relationship – there’s negotiation involved, isn’t there? Not just to settle disputes, but to set or reinterpret the ground rules as things naturally evolve, with a view to avoiding disagreements.

When I met Sophie Scott at UCL to record the third programme in the last series, she told me before the interview:

‘We’re the only species that asks questions. Others can communicate – some can even tell us what they want; but only we ask questions’.

Investing some time and effort in asking the right questions to get a collaborative negotiation going, on any topic, not only saves that time, effort and money I mentioned earlier – it also moves us towards the common ground on which solid, productive relationships are built.

So, dare I say it? – everybody wins!

Being asked what it is we really want, rather than having someone lay down the law about what they want, in any situation, is an important part of the topic I was talking about last week – inclusion. It’s about even more than getting to the truth. It makes us feel acknowledged; respected; valued – and it’s possible to do it without compromising authority, even where the balance of power is uneven – as between boss and employee.

Value is the subject of the next post.

In the meantime, what do you really want? – no, I mean it – tell me!

If you have any:

• Questions
• Feedback or
• Communication issues to discuss,

come and talk to me! All the details are on the website.

What can we say about the future?

The third and final section of the last show in this series:

‘What can we say about the future?’

is made up of tips from Programmes 7, 8 and 9.

My hope is that all the information and advice in this show, and in the series as a whole, will be relevant for a long time to come; but I do think these three snippets are especially important to hang on to as patterns of human communication change.

If you think the title of Programme 7:

‘Who is this foreigner?!’

is a bit rude, it’s actually something my guest said about himself.

It comes from the opening of an audio biography which business coach and speaker, Hugo Heij, recorded with me earlier this year. Hugo knows a thing or two about feeling like a foreigner – and how learning another language (several in his case!) can bridge the gap. On the original show, he even talked about how his second language (English) eventually came first – so that he found himself struggling to present in Dutch to a Dutch audience!

His tip is about working in another country; but it’s equally relevant to crossing the language barriers we were talking about last time – and plenty more besides …

The first step, as Hugo said on the programme, is to be aware of differences. Awareness takes us into Programme 8:

‘What can we see through our ears?’

In this show, Dr Michael Proulx of the University of Bath made sense of our senses – debunking a few myths in the process!

As I told you when I first released the conversation with Michael, we met because we’d both been working on the potential of being able to translate one kind of sensory information into another. He came at it from the academic perspective, while I came from the commercial angle – but by happy accident, we arrived at exactly the same conclusions. Michael’s tip in this show sums up the underlying prinnciple …

Putting that principle into practice has major benefits, including allowing us to build better rapport, especially across physical distance.

Rapport and its foundations were the subject of Programme 9:

‘Why should we care?‘

My guest was Graham Music, Consultant Psychotherapist with the Tavistock and Portman NHS Trust.

Graham talked about the most constructive kind of caring in a professional, and often in a personal, context – empathy. The tip I’ve chosen is about the workplace, but like Hugo’s advice earlier, it has much wider application …

The last word on this show, so on the series, is mine – presenter/producer’s privilege! It’s about why I had all these conversations and why I hope I’ve started one with you …

It’s also why I’m hoping to go on talking to you in 2015.

I’ll be blogging again from January and there will be a new six-part audio documentary series starting in May. We’ll be revisiting some of the topics we’ve dealt with this year, looking at them from different angles and we’ll be hearing again from some of this year’s guests; but there will also be brand new topics and voices.

For now, I must just say thanks again to:

• Rob
• Julian
• Sophie
• Ann
• Chris
• Colleen
• Hugo
• Michael and
• Graham,

for their time, expertise and support across the series.

Last – but by no means least! – thank you, for reading and listening.

As I’ve said on the programme, have a great Xmas and new year, if you’re celebrating – and if not, just enjoy the time off! If you’re working – and I know plenty of people are – I salute you!

Personally, I’m making the most of the break – next year looks like it’s going to be a busy one!

If you have any:

• Questions
• Comments or
• Communication issues to discuss,

you can still come and talk to me – although you won’t get much sense between 19th December ‘14 and 5th January ‘15! That said, if you want to leave me a voicemail or email in that time, you’re very welcome. All the details are on the website.

Thanks again – and ’bye for now!

Why should we mind the gaps?

The second section of the final show in this series asks the question:

‘Why should we mind the gaps?’

The quick answer is:

To avoid falling into potentially frustrating, embarrassing, or even destructive communication traps, which can be costly in every sense!

This part of the show brings together tips from Programmes 4, 5 and 6.

In Programme 4:

‘Do you speak Martian or Venusian?’

I spoke to Dr Ann Moir of Brain Sex Matters about some of the challenges of cross-gender communication and what we can all do to meet them.

As I said at the time, I thought very carefully about every single topic tackled over the past year – but I thought especially carefully about this one.

My work in general and this project in particular is about taking stereotypes apart, not reinforcing them. When I first saw Ann on TV in the wee small hours of a sleepless night, what she had to say looked really interesting – but if I asked her to get involved in the series, would I, I wondered, be in danger of perpetuating a simplistic myth?

At our first meeting, though, it was obvious that Ann’s work is about much more than men being from Mars and women from Venus! Ok, so a mix of:

• pre-natal environment
• Social conditioning and
• Adult hormones

means that generally, men tend to be more reductive communicators and women more expansive; but like so much in life, it isn’t a binary ‘either/or’; it’s a spectrum, with as many degrees as there are individuals.

The tip I’ve chosen from our recorded conversation sums that up …

Ann was a completely new acquaintance; but in Programme 5:

‘What’s that in English?’

I got to chat to someone I’ve known for several years – Chris Arnheim of Arnheim Solicitors.

We talked about the issue that gave us the first piece of common ground on which to build a professional relationship – jargon.

The tip I’ve picked from Chris’s show isn’t the obvious one. Yes, he did talk about how lawyers – and other professionals – can ensure they don’t blind their clients with science; but he also blew a common assumption out of the water – which is, as I said earlier, what this is all about! …

We talked a lot about assumptions being blown out of the water in Programme 6:

‘They speak English, don’t they?’

The other half of ‘we‘ in this case was Colleen Jolly of The 24-hour Company, which specialises in visual presentation – and the water was the Atlantic ocean!

We were looking at how geography can leave us divided by a common language.

I was spoilt for choice when it came to choosing a tip from Colleen’s show. I’ve gone for one which illustrates a central point of this series – that what we see from a distance is only an impression. It doesn’t give us the full picture …

If you listen to the whole show, you’ll find at least one other invaluable piece of advice – ’Don’t believe everything you read!’ ..

In the next post, I’ll take you through the third section of this show, which is the last:

‘What can we say about the future?‘

In what will be the last post this year, I’ll pick tips from Programmes:

7 ‘Who is this foreigner?!’
8 ‘What can we see through our ears?’ and
9 ‘Why should we care?’

I’ll also give you a tip of my own and tell you what’s happening next year.

In the meantime, as always, if you have any:

• Questions
• Comments or
• Communication issues you’d like to chat through,

come and talk to me! All the details are, of course, on the website.

How can we build sound bridges?

In the final programme in the ‘Conversations with the invisible woman’ series, I’m revisiting the previous nine, to pull out a practical tip from each guest. The show is divided into three sections, rather than the usual four. Each section focuses on three programmes, under themes based on those I used here.

So in the first section, we’re looking back to progs 1 to 3 and asking:

‘How can we build sound bridges?‘

If you’ve heard the whole series, you’ll know that the first show:

‘What happens when the invisible woman talks to the invisible man?’

was a bit different from those that followed, because I was answering the questions rather than asking them – most of them anyway.

That gave me a chance to explain some of the principles and practical experience which inspired the project – and which prompted me to brand myself ’the invisible woman’!

The ‘invisible man’ of the title was Rob Jones, CEO of multi-platform media production company, USP Content.

We do an occasional series together called:

‘Turning the Tables’,

which runs on the Speak For Yourself website. It started in 2009, as a bit of background for the About section, but we’ve added to it since, as new projects have come along. All being well, we’ll be updating it again in the not too distant future, reviewing the first year of the ‘Invisible Woman’ project.

In the first show of this series, though, I turned the tables back in the last section, asking Rob to share a tip he gave me seven years ago, when I moved out of the legal profession, into communication – including podcasting.

As you’ll hear, he thought it was ‘obvious’ – but it wasn’t to me when he first said it – and it hasn’t been to a lot of people I’ve said it to since. It applies to so much more than radio etc. I’ve used it for every kind of long-distance communication, written as well as spoken. I’m using it right now …

In the second show, I asked Julian Treasure, founder and Chairman of The Sound Agency:

‘Are we losing consciousness?’

This was all about our consciousness of sound and our ability to listen.

The power of sound, positive and negative, is often under-estimated; but Julian and his team spend their working lives trying to put that right – helping organisations to optimise their auditory environments and create appropriate sounds capes.

The agency’s approach is very practical. So it didn’t surprise me that Julian had a practical tip for making communication in general, and conversation in particular, more productive. Apparently, we just need to extract the juice from the interaction …

Talking of conversation leads me nicely into Programme 3:

‘What is the power of speech?’

with Professor Sophie Scott of the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London.

I’ve seen and heard Sophie talk very entertainingly about the mechanics and neuroscience of talking. If you heard her programme or read the original posts, you’ll know she’s also done a lot of research into laughter – which she says has far more to do with bringing us together than telling jokes. She’s even done standup comedy about her work.

The clip I’ve taken from our conversation, though, deals with one of the biggest issues so many of us face when it comes to harnessing the power of speech. It’s one that would have stopped me doing a job I love, if I hadn’t found a way through it twelve or thirteen years ago. Self-consciousness about their own voices stops huge numbers of people reaching their potential …

In the next post, the question is:

‘Why should we mind the gaps?’

looking back to Programmes:

4 ‘Do you speak Martian, or Venusian?‘
5 ‘What’s that in English?‘ and
6 ‘They speak English, don’t they?‘

In the meantime, as always, if you have any:

• Feedback
• Questions or
• Communication issues you’d like to chat through,

come and talk to me!

All the details are on the website.

How can we all avoid getting lost in translation?

In the final part of the latest show, Hugo Heij shares his tips for avoiding translation traps.

His advice is, quite simply, to:

• Prepare and
• Practice.

Both obviously apply to any skill we want to perfect; but for reasons I’ll look at before the end of this post, we’re not always as willing to do either in relation to communication as we would be if we were, say, learning to drive.

No-one in their right mind would pitch up for a driving test with no previous road experience. The vast majority of people take some formal lessons and supplement those with several hours behind the wheel, with an experienced driver beside them. Yet we launch ourselves into all sorts of language-based interactions without a second thought.

We native English-speakers are especially prone to that, because we assume ‘everyone speaks English, don’t they?!’

Well, yes, as I said in the first post on this show, plenty of people around the world certainly do – and some of them do it to a much higher standard than we achieve ourselves!; but, as I also said in that first post, the assumption that everyone will speak our language, so we don’t need to go to the bother of trying to speak theirs, comes at a cost, in the form of missed opportunities.

If a goal-focused individual knows that a more relationship-focused person is likely to need a few minutes’ chat before getting down to serious business, both will be able to give more to and take more from a meeting.

Those whose professional lives are wrapped up in jargon, but who take the trouble to translate it into plain English whenever possible, open doors which remain closed to their more inward-looking colleagues.

A Brit who appreciates that an American who says:

‘I’m moving on now’,

Is simply saying:

‘I’m moving on now’, and not:

‘You’re boring and I don’t want to talk to you’,

will be far better placed to succeed in the States. On the other hand, an American who understands that British politeness really isn’t ‘passive-aggressive’ – we’re just trying to be nice! – will be in a much stronger position to take advantage of opportunities in the UK. It follows, of course, that if we Brits and Americans can get to grips with Australian humour – not to mention the more lethal members of the population – the sky’s the limit – and it’s a very big sky!

In light of all that, it should go without saying (so, naturally, I’m going to say it!): time and effort spent learning even the most foreign of foreign languages is an investment.

When we make the most faultering effort to speak somebody else’s native tongue, we’re saying so much more than the words we might be screwing up. The underlying message is:

‘I want to find common ground with you’.

Everything we say or write has layers of meaning. The deeper we can drill down into those layers, the more likely we are to find common ground.

On the show, we make the point – which I’ve made before and will no doubt make again – and again – and again! – before we’re done, that everything starts with awareness. If we can’t see an obstacle, or the opportunity lurking behind it, how can we remove the one to reveal the other?

I think awareness is at the bottom of why we accept the need for preparation and practice in relation to a skill like driving, much more easily than we do in relation to communication.

Both experienced drivers and learners are only too well aware that driving isn’t an innate human ability. It has to be learnt.

Although, as we heard in Programme 3, speech is an incredibly complex skill – or, rather, set of skills – it feels much more like an instinct, because we don’t remember learning. We don’t remember the journey from having to scream for attention, to being able to ask for it. All we know is that now, we speak. A qualified driver might have cause to think about life without a licence – and a learner may dread the thought of never getting one; but we rarely, if ever, stop and consciously think about life beyond the level of language we have. We can’t imagine how difficult day-to-day living would be without it, or how good it could be if we improved our skills.

In a purely commercial context:

The more effectively we can communicate, the more time and money we save, the more efficiently we operate, the higher the return on our investment, in human and technical resources, and so, the more successful we become.

Hugo proves that, personally and professionally.

In the next programme, we’re looking at other activities related to communication which feel more like instincts than skills – so we don’t always optimise our investment in them.

In:

‘What can we see through our ears?’

I talk to Dr Michael Proulx of The University of Bath, about his work on devices to help blind people access visual information – and how that research can help us all to improve our communications, by showing us how to make better use of our senses.

This is the first of three programmes on the theme:

‘Talking of the future’,

looking at innovative ways of turning obstacles into opportunities. It all starts, with Programme 8, on 1st October.

In the meantime, if you have any:

• Questions
• Comments or
• Communication issues you’d like to chat through,

come and talk to me. All the details are on the website.

Everyone in Holland’s got a gift for languages, right …?

The seventh ‘Conversation with the Invisible Woman’ is the final one on the theme:

‘Mind the Gaps!’

The last three shows have been about situations in which we find ourselves divided by a common language. This time, My guest and I look at more obvious communication barriers – created by working in a language which isn’t our own.

He’s business coach and speaker, Hugo Heij – and he has plenty of firsthand experience on this subject. Born and raised in Holland, he’s worked in Sweden and, for the last six years, the UK – well, Essex – which was still part of the UK last time I looked (although perhaps we ought to start pushing for independence? As you’ll hear in the second section, we already have our own lingua franca …).

The title of the first section and this post is the assumption a lot of Brits make about Dutch people. So many speak such good English, it’s easy to believe they’re all born with an innate gift for foreign languages; but Hugo blows that particular stereotype to bits on the show.

The advantage Dutch kids have over their British counterparts is that languages are a key part of the curriculum. In a section of our chat which I couldn’t fit into the programme, hugo explained how it works:

At secondary school, everyone starts studying three languages – generally:

• English
• German and
• French.

They’re allowed to drop one after the first year and another after the second – but the one language they have to persevere with is English.

That still doesn’t mean every Dutch school-leaver emerges as a confident English-speaker – as Hugo’s story of his first job illustrates!

During his time in Sweden, though, English was the common language within his multi-national team. The only people they struggled to understand, apparently, were the Brits!

As I said a couple of weeks ago, English is fast becoming the international language of business – if it isn’t already. According to Mark Pagel, a form of English is likely to become the dominant world language over time.

Personally, I’ve only ever lived and worked in an English-speaking environment, although I was really interested in foreign languages as a kid. My Dad spoke fluent – but definitely not schoolboy – German, which he learnt as a POW (an effort which kept him alive on at least one occasion we know of). When I had the chance to study it at school, I grabbed it with both hands; but when I was forced to drop it at O-level, in favour of French, I rebelled. I spent the obligatory minimum half an hour in the French mock exam, before walking out. All I left behind on my paper were two badly constructed sentences about ‘le weekend’.

These days, my German is rusty – but I love polishing it up again when I get the chance; and I have a smattering of Spanish … oh yes, and the remains of six weeks of studying Latin over thirty years ago …

As an Englishwoman, that makes me almost multi-lingual, doesn’t it?!

Yes, I know – that’s another stereotype, which hides the fact that some Brits really do get to grips with other languages.

What I have, though, really isn’t enough to do anything useful with.

Students of linguistics who follow the ‘formalist’ tradition talk about ‘language in society’ – keeping the two separate. ‘Functionalists’ prefer to think about ‘language and society’ – an acknowledgement that language and culture are inextricably linked – language performs social functions.

As an English-speaker, I can make myself understood almost anywhere in the world – without RAISING MY VOICE and – SPEA-KING VE-RY SLOW-LEEEE!!! I can communicate and share information quite happily.

What I can’t do so easily, with someone who is most fluent in a language I don’t speak, , is have the kind of conversation that builds understanding – of them and the society they live in.

Even making an effort to understand someone else’s first language – whether it’s their:

• communication style
• professional terminology
• physical speech –

or anything else – gives us a real advantage when it comes to truly understanding them. It’s a prime example of looking at life from their perspective.

In the next section of the show:

‘What happens when the second language comes first’

Hugo talks about how he came to think in English.

I’ll come back to that here next time. In the meantime, as always, if you have any:

Questions
Comments or
Feedback

Come and talk to me! All the details are on the website.

Can you make a killing down-under – if the animals don’t get you first?!

In the third section of the latest programme, Colleen Jolly of the 24-hour Company talks about her first business trip to Australia. In particular, she remembers the very first seminar she attended.

It was designed to introduce newcomers to the country, but it didn’t focus on:

• Language
• Culture or
• Business.

Oh no! It was all about the many and various ways Australia can kill you – the animals, of all shapes and sizes, which can really ruin a visit by:

• Stinging
• Biting or
• squashing

the unsuspecting foreigner.

As Colleen puts it:

‘Even the cute, fuzzy ones can crush your hand when you’re not looking!’

She says the presentation was delivered with a kind of ‘dark humour’ – and she talks about it with plenty of the less dark kind!; but there is a serious point here. It brings us back to the subject of the show – how culture divides a common language.

She says it was generally easier to deal with the transition from American to Australian English than from American to British English.

So what is it that unites the US and Ausie forms of the language and divides them both from the UK?

The answer to that question – appropriately in this series – is distance, in all three dimentions:

• Physical
• Temporal and
• Human.

Language is a living thing, so it evolves or dies. In its original, natural habitat, it grows and develops over time, influenced by interaction with other human cultures etc. When its users move away from their physical roots, some of the elements they take with them stop developing at that point, while others adapt to the new environment, evolving to meet new physical challenges and absorbing the influences of other languages and cultures. Over time, the result is a whole new branch sprouting from the original root – related, but quite different..

English was first exported, from Essex and Kent to James Town, Northern Virginia, in 1607. In 1778, it made its first trip to New South Wales, with the first transported convicts.

The form of English spoken in Britain in the early seventeenth century is now known as ’early modern’. By the late eighteenth century, it was well on the way to ‘late modern’ English – the form we speak today – although vocabulary, dialects and so on, have gone on changing over the last two hundred years – and will go on changing over the next two hundred.

So those two groups of early settlers took with them basically the same form of the language, albeit at different stages of its development.

At the end of their journey, they both found themselves in very alien environments – and they both came into contact with native populations, with their own languages.

Both were later joined by newcomers from other parts of Europe and the rest of the world.

Over time, each generation absorbed more and more of these environmental and human influences and became less ‘British’ and more ‘Australian’ or ‘American’.

The kind of English they took across the globe didn’t follow the same line of development as the British kind. Some words and phrases were preserved in their original seventeenth or eighteenth century forms, but many more were added, from other languages and cultures – or they were invented to deal with entirely new challenges.

Britain’s former colonies around the world are all quite different, but there are at least two things they all have in common – a strong sense of:

• Independence and
• Identity.

Both are reflected in how they speak this rich, varied language we all call ‘English’ – which (as we’ll hear in Programme 7) is fast becoming the international language of business.

Far from ‘home’, migrant populations had to learn to stand on their own feet and deal with whatever came their way – whether it was a member of the native population, angry at having their homeland invaded, or a ‘cute, fuzzy’ creature, out to crush their hands!

As a result, in the US, Australia, New Zealand etc, there’s what we might term:

• a ’can-do’ attitude
• a healthy view of risk and
• An openness to the idea of importing expertise, as well as more tangible products.

I’d say that’s a pretty good combination for successful business and other collaborations, wouldn’t you?

Those of us who speak ’British English’ need to remember two things:

1 some of what we think of as ’Americanisms’ (which certain people complain are ’ruining our language’) have just been on a four-hundred-year round trip – they started here; and

2 British English itself started life as an import – from across the North Sea.

In the last section of this show, Colleen and I share our tips for:

• Bridging the language gaps and
• Making the most of the resulting opportunities for collaboration.

I’ll talk about those here next time. In the meantime, as always, if you have any:

• Questions
• Comments or
• Other communication issues you’d like to chat through

Come and talk to me – in any form of English you like! All the details are on the website.