3 posts tagged “sales”

You may have heard the Easter Ham story as it has been passed around for many years. I am going to reference here as it is so indicative of today’s subject. To refresh your memory, it goes something like this… A mother and daughter were in the kitchen getting preparing things for Easter Dinner. The mother pulled the Ham out of the refrigerator and just as she always did, cut the ends off of the ham before she put it into the pot.

Perplexed as to why the mother always cut off the ends of the ham prior to cooking, the daughter asked the mother why. The mother’s response was “because you’re supposed to”… As far as the daughter was concerned, the answer was entirely insufficient. The ham looked like it fit in the pan just fine and the ends of it kind of dried out as a result. This just didn’t make sense… As she pressed the mother further, the mother let her know that her mother (the grandmother) had always done it and she learned from her…

Not to be denied, the daughter decided to call the grandmother to find out the culinary rule that was dictating this dissection of the ham prior to baking. After a few pleasantries the granddaughter asked her grandmother… “Grandma, why do you have to cut the ends of the ham off before you bake it?” The grandmother’s answer was “Well honey, back when we were younger and didn’t have a lot of money we couldn’t afford the proper size pan to bake the ham. Since the one we had was so small, I always had to cut it to make it fit in the pan…”  So, in effect the mother was unnecessarily caring out a now useless act…

We will dispense with the moral of the story as that isn’t what we are going after. This little illustrates what is known as a Value Based Judgment. In a literal sense, a Value Based Judgment is a claim of “right” or “wrong” in the objective sense and is based on a value system. In the story above the judgment is that it is right to cut the ham.

Now, although right and wrong are usually matters of subjectivity, it can often be misleading to make these statements without citing the source of the judgment.  I think we can all agree that one source may be more credible than another. For instance a professor versus a student in a respective field. When a statement like this is made, one it which the person making the judgment is removed from the judgment itself, it is called a “Lost Performative”.

The psychology of how these types of beliefs are formed is subject matter for another day. What is important for our purposes hear is to recognize these types of statements when we hear them. “Boys shouldn’t play with dolls” or “good girls shouldn’t cry”… These statements represent a major gap in the foundational information and beliefs that the person is holding mentally and the actual information they are communicating. This gap is not only responsible for perpetuating misinformation, it can cause havoc on a conversation.

There are a number of ways to spot and rectify these types of statements. To learn more, please visit my website.

David J. Parnell | Communication Expert

In following yesterday post on The Culprits of Miscommunication, we will begin by addressing our linguistic or non-verbal “distortions”. The actual distortion per se is not necessarily in the original message or information that shows up in your speech as much as it is in the translation of your message. Keeping in mind that your brain is constantly, relentlessly trying to establish pattern and predictability in your surroundings, it is no wonder communication distortions occur.

“Mind Reading” is one such distortion and can occur in your communication partner’s translation of your message. For instance, let’s say you are out on a date and things seem to be going swimmingly… Your date seems to be really into you, but as usual your starting to run out of things to say. Searching your mind you remember a story that a friend told you earlier that day about a date gone wrong for them. All though it is a bit racy, you go for it anyway… What the heck, things seem comfortable enough.

Well as you get to the end of your story, your dates demeanor changes suddenly and once the check comes they split… What the heck happened? You only told a story about a friend of yours… More on this is a bit, let’s get to the science of it.

The mammalian population has been gifted with what are known as “mirror neurons” in our brains and their sole responsibility is to mimic or imitate the person/animal that we are engaged with. When I say mimic, this doesn’t necessarily mean actually performing the same action as them, but at a minimum internally/mentally mimicking them… the result is the ability to “feel” internally what they are feeling/experiencing at the time. The benefits to this are evident. If we choose to do so, we can learn and implement skills we see. This also facilitates powerful socializing and networking tools we have such as compassion, empathy and teamwork.

Along with this network of mirror neurons, we have a hormone running through us called oxytocin that, although much more prevalent in women, has shown in experiments to greatly increase our ability to “mind read”. Oxytocin is much more concentrated in women as one it’s main functions surrounds the facilitation of reproduction and birth bonding. We are not referring to ESP here, but oxytocin does aid in our ability to more accurately predict what someone is feeling based on our own sensory acuity. This is our reading of their facial expressions, body language, verbiage, etc…

From a psychological stand point, we can only view and understand messages through our own frame of reference. Our frame of reference is analogous to a mental filter through which we “see” the world. When we receive linguistic and nonverbal communication alike, our brain instantly compares that information to our stored knowledge and experience. In this way and only in this way are we able to “understand” the messages we are receiving. As a result, we have an inherently limited capacity to interpret our surroundings. All three of the above mechanisms combine facilitate our capacity to “mind read” during our interactions. Unfortunately, we are only correct a certain percentage of the time… and if it isn’t 100%, we can run into problems.

OK, back to the date… Now, you were only telling a story that you thought was funny in hopes to prevent the weird awkward silence that both of you have been dreading. You were hoping to simply get a laugh out of her… Let’s look at it from your date’s point of view.

Earlier that week she had been on another date with some creepy guy… right before he tried to grab her and make out with her he told her a story very similar to yours… In fact, his facial expressions kind of looked like yours while you were telling that story… So what does this mean? In short, she “felt” like you were going to try something more than simply telling a story. She performed a mind read... Although it was inaccurate, it inevitably happened and your left holding the check and nothing but a bruised sense of self… Less than ideal?

Worthy of note is that this does NOT happen consciously, these are all messages and interpretations happening at the nonconscious level. Without top-down executive control, this will simply “happen” and people (including you) will react automatically and  turn the rest of your communication into history…

How do you fix this? Good question and this is something that I get into specifically in my series “The Evolved Communicator”. Please visit me to learn more...

David J. Parnell | Communication Expert

Following yesterdays post on your brain’s processing function, we will begin to delve further into the “reality” that these attentional processes create in your own world. Now, while the focus of your attention is being directed per se by the two major processes we discussed yesterday, it is not necessarily being dissected, evaluated acutely and then purged of unwanted “material” for efficient communication. In other words, a great deal of information is stored that is by no means necessary or even relevant for your survival or thriving success for that matter. So although there is a great deal of purging going on during the initial attentionally biased processing, there is still a massive information glut stored in your brain on a daily basis.

Now our brain has developed and implemented an AMAZINGLY efficient and effective storage, retrieval and re-presentation process in what is known as LANGUAGE. This may seem less than epiphanic, however most people do not know the extent to which language literally constructs their internalized mental world. When I tell you to think of a tree, you will hear the word “tree”, you will say the word “tree” internally, your brain will call upon all of the thousands or millions of concepts surrounding the word “tree” and create a mentally constructed image of a “tree” and then a mental check will occur verifying that “yes, this is indeed a tree”. There is much internal dialogue and communication occurring during this process and the entire movement per se is facilitated and directed by the word “tree”.

Now, let’s extrapolate that out… How about I ask you to guide me in making a decision as to whether or not my significant other and I should have a baby right now… Oh boy is there a lot going on inside your head… The amount of constructing going on internally is huge… You will internally represent a baby, child rearing, schooling, disciplinary challenges, feeding, driving them to soccer practice, etc… Along with all of the visual, auditory and kinesthetic representations will come all of your values, rules and belief systems that surround child rearing. These especially my friends are EXCLUSIVELY represented in language based terms. These rules, values and beliefs are the literal glue that hold your world together… allowing you to make sense of things. Well you get the point here, there is a ridiculously large amount of informational processing occurring that is language based and all of this will be done almost instantly to provide an answer to the question I posed.

Rules, regulations, values and beliefs for the most part are subject matter for another time. Here we will stay focused on the gaps if representing your mental world to the others you are interacting with. Let’s revisit the tree… Now if I ask you to tell me “what a tree looks like”, you will most likely say something along the lines of “well it is tall with green leaves and a brown trunk”…

In adhering to the least energy principle (which we will evaluate in another post) you will give me just enough information to answer the question… as it (the question) has been presented by me (which may very well have gaps of it’s own).

Now, does this accurately represent all of the knowledge you have of a tree? Hardly… There are differently shaped leaves, with different colors, or needles instead of leaves and some have hard chunky bark where as others have almost skin and some are white at the base whereas others may be gray and the leaves have a vein like structure to them and so on…

So what does all of this mean? In the large crevasse between the comprehensive battery of knowledge you have stored internally and the actual representation of that knowledge to another human being whether written or orally, stands three categorically problematic systems.  They are generalizations, distortions and deletions… These three gremlins per se are almost exclusively the culprits of every unintentional miscommunication on face of the planet… Our only defense it the ability to recognize them and defeat them with inquisition.

Moving forward we will begin to look at the micro components of each system and how we can effectively recognize and sterilize these gaps for effective and clear communication.