6 Life-changing Tips on Message Delivering Change My Life
Communication leads to community, that is, to understanding, intimacy and mutual valuing — Rollo May
I get hooked up to Dragonforce’s (Metal) music and I found it super motivational to my daily work. Then I start to wonder, what triggers my emotions?
Communication comes in many forms, the most commonly interpreted would be speaking and writing. I believe everyone has once misinterpreted the message from texting (Writing) and as well as voice-recording (Speaking). Therefore, I look deeper and what makes a difference between good and bad communications.
Keep reading to learn the 6 tips I have boiled down on my research journey to improve communications!
- Learn from the best (Ideal) person to deliver the message
- The aspect of appearance is just as important
- Be mindful of your surroundings!
- Greeting/Check-in is SUPER important!
- Delivering the right message is key to communication!
- Consistent is key! Simple as being yourself!
Penfriend experience
When I look back on my younger time, I used to have a penfriend who is long distant somewhere in Europe. He and I were struggling to write English to each other(As English is our second language as well). It last almost a year until he mentioned in his last letter that he was going somewhere else that wasn’t easily accessibly to mail. After that, I never heard from him (And tried to search for him online but with no success).
Looking back I was amazed by myself who wrote so much at age 8, and not to mention there is other fun stuff I can do (Like watching TV). I felt excited whenever I head back home every Friday just to look for the letter he wrote to me. Even though with the broken sentences and poor penmanship, I can still interpret the message generally and as well as understand what was going on on his side. But that is not the reason I got excited, the reason is that I feel special!
I shared the letter with my family and friends in school, they are amazed that I got a friend from so far away (Again, back in the day the Internet hasn’t exploded yet). The way they look at me that I can already feel privileged.
And whenever I receive a letter, I start to draft my letter as well. I recall one or few memories of the recent and just wrote it out plainly. There are ups and downs but most important of all, the emotions I had in these memories echos and
I feel I am in-scripting them into the letter as well and share to my distant friend.
Now when I think about it, when he reads the letter from me will just be a plain letter with clumsy words all over the place.
There probably would be little to none of the “emotion inscriptions” is able to deliver him.
The Soft and Hard Messages
We usually think of Communication would just simply being writing and speaking. However, the context is much deeper that involves body movement, gestures and all the appearances through the communication process. is to deliver messages to one another. For ease of explaining, I would simplify and split communication into 2 parts, Soft vs Hard.
The words and letters are all hard messages from my Penfriend whereas the soft message is the emotional attachments or triggers that I have throughout the course of actions around the Penfriend interaction (Receiving the letter’s excitement, sharing I got a penfriend, writing the letter and revisiting my emotion rides)
A Soft message needs as much attention as a Hard message
The hard message is referring to the choice of words. The words we write or speak. It is fact and plainly interpretable through grammatical logic. Whereas, the soft message is referring to the surroundings around the hard message. It could be, the environment, appearance, body language and even fragrance.
When we are in an interview, the resume and our presentation wordings are all hard messages to present who we are. Whereas our dress codes, body language and intonation provide more contexts of who we are. Combining both would give an impression of us.
This analogy shouldn't be new nor surprising but yet, they serve a fundamental of my finding. The soft message is not something that can easily describe in plain wording. We often describe them as something like
“Oh he is just like John Doe from another day we interviewed”
“He seems to be stressed. How typical”
If you apply these sentences to someone who has NO experience in an interview or background, they have zero ideas of the message.
I, therefore, give a quick and simplified idea of a soft message, it is an emotional message and the intention of it is to trigger your emotion!
1. Learn from the best (Ideal) person to deliver the message
You would like to think of “If this speech is delivered by XXX. That would be awesome!” and to further interpret “If XXX talks about it, how and what would he talk about?”
The purpose here is to make your message relevant and connects with the audience. Thus, triggering the impression of the “Best Person” in the speech.
2. The aspect of appearance is just as important
There is a common quote regarding interviews,
“There is no overdress in an interview”
It is simply because any form of “Overdress” shows you are sincere to the job offer.
Similarly, appearances are the most obvious and tend to be an easy fix. It helps people to relate to certain emotions. A lot of startups (especially in IT) that decorates the office as “Google-like”, to the least that at least they tried to give the vibe of work-life balance just as Google (Even though it could turn up the other way), still it is a form of communication!
3. Be mindful of your surroundings!
Picking the right place for the right topic is an important lesson I learned in Sales and this shouldn’t be unfamiliar to anyone.
What I unsurface here is to provide a simple thought process for you.
If you can arrange/host the place, pick one that either can enforce certain attributes of yourself. Or even better you know the audience so well that the place can already be relatable to certain emotions/vibes.
If you can’t arrange/host the place, prepare yourself to be relatable to the ideal scenario of the location. Basically, if I am going to have a happy hour session with my potential employer. Even though I didn’t choose the bar, I would dig around movies or youtube if there is a scene in how one interacts. Thus, all I need is, to prepare to make myself as relatable to the scene as possible. Thus, empowers yourself of relevant to certain emotion triggering attributes.
4. Greeting/Check-in is SUPER important!
Nowadays communicating virtually is inevitable and being in an Asian traditional family, I don’t have the practice of “Checking in” (Open a conversation starts with “Hey Whatsup, What’s going on). However, the practice of checking in is so important that it reveals a lot of “relevance”
Specifically checking in virtually as to where is he/she at while the conversation takes place, or what is he/she doing. These give a context to the vibe setting.
If he/she is in the workplace and you want to trigger a certain emotion trigger, try to connect the dot from popular scenes and such. It tells so much and set the right message you want to deliver.
5. Practice and Improvise
When we take account of multiple factors, don’t be shy to try it out. At first, it might be acting as impersonating someone as he/she is. But I often find whenever I am impersonating, a certain sentences or words I would come into doubt,
“Do I really mean that?”
“It seems inappropriate”
I totally understand and its just like in a music there is an off-key. However, it is only considered as off-key if YOU think its off-key! Because you think this is not who I am, not defined to ourselves.
“I don’t want him/her think me as a dumbass”
“I think this is goofy”
By reversing the thought, you will understand yourself more that what kind of person of ourselves and what kind of people we want to be of ourselves.
We therefore can,
Establish a Goal (An idol of message delivering) Understand ourselves (Through Practice) Revisit the Goal (Refine who and how we deliver message)
6. A Motiff — A common thread to intercross all messages
Try to think of a central core value of yourself and that present part of yourself. This should be as generic and it could be something undescribable but an emotion or feeling.
Essentially think of it as a piece of music or performance can display a multiple messages including
Dedications (From 0 to stage performing), Excitement (The piece of music itself), Playful (Body Languages) …
Think of it the message trying to deliver is based on these assumptions that try to question/challenge yourself, what is the message’s core idea I am trying to deliver?
The hard message: facts and words are just tools for you to trigger emotions for audience.
The emotions are what trigger them to understand, remember, memorize the message
Thus, if messages are all being consistent, that will might as well reinforce our impressions bit by bit to the audience.
Conclusion
So here you go! These are the 6 tips I learned recently on Message Delivering. These tips are actually a framework that I am trying out on myself for how I prepare to deliver a message and how I learn continuously on delivering better message.
Hope this helps shred some inspirations to you, the Reader! And just to incites you to be able to relate! And think just a bit more when preparing and delivering message.
Thus, your brain might echo and recall about somewhere I have read about this on Medium!
If you would like to buy me a coffee or found inspiration here in Medium. You can directly support me via subscribing to Medium via this link,