When coaching teams or training individuals I never start by talking about their barriers to good communication.
All good communication begins with engaging your audience.
This should be a positive and action focussed start.
At some point though I guarantee I will need to support clients with navigating, mitigating or eradicating their barriers to communication.
You may think that you have no barriers.
You may feel that you have too many to ever communicate well.
In my experience 2/3rds of people will be in one of these camps. The other 33 per cent are more realistic about what is holding them back.
Here are three potential types of barriers to better performance that I’ve seen and helped clients with recently.
Use your self-awareness and see if you recognise these in you too.
Psychological
Earlier this year I supported a globally significant high performer who has achieved more in her life before she’s 40 than many of us ever will in a lifetime. Yet she is held back from communicating at a top level by her negative experiences with social media.
Like many she shares her life online and unfortunately has been scarred by people’s reaction to her success. I’m not (yet) a trained psychologist but could see this was creating a barrier in a lack of trust and confidence.
I got her to focus on and visualise who her audience is and the difference she is aiming to make with her new charitable and philanthropic efforts. It allowed her to do a good job in the Communication Moment I was supporting her with but ultimately it will take longer to properly eradicate this barrier.
Physical
How we feel can affect how we perceived by others. And how we move around and carry ourselves effects how we feel.
But it is possible to reverse engineer this, so we take control of our behaviour and, in turn, the outcomes of our communication.
It may be that you are scared as hell, but you can still look confident with a strong, tall and open posture. It has been proven that when you stand tall and use big, open, sweeping gestures (think of a sprinter winning the Olympic 100 metres) you feel, as well as look, more confident.
If you get an adrenaline rush when feeling anxious it can cause you to shake. If you concentrate on this then it will likely only make it worse or lead to another signal of anxiety such as shallow breathing. And then it quickly multiples. So, if you’re somebody who shakes with nerves, get yourself moving with big gestures or walking while you speak which will move that adrenaline around and stop your shakes.
Practical
Bizarrely a major barrier to good communication is putting in the time and effort to practice and prepare. Something as simple as putting into your diary sufficient preparation time when the event itself goes into your diary will help. Then there is doing the right preparation and making your practice deliberate such as actually delivering a speech out loud and to other people before it is time to do it for real.
But there is something else you can do for yourself.
Start to see every small Communication Moment like team meetings or networking coffees as opportunities to build your skills ahead of a big Communication Moment such as a pitch or presentation in the future.
Consistency will build sustainable progress in a way that rushed last minute efforts never can.