Last 24 hours, I’ve had the privilege of coaching three high-level businessmen as part of my coaching regime. And coaching one of these individuals, it dawned on me, and I actually saw this across the whole line. Well, I shouldn’t say it dawned on me because it was something I already knew and I see if often.
What we do in one thing, we do at all. And this is especially true I find in the business. What we do in business, the issues we have in our business lives, especially interpersonal communication, with employees and staff, also can be spilled over into our personal relationships with our friends and family.
I had the privilege of talking to one business owner, who is highly successful, a great person. And they were telling me about a problem that they were having with one of their staff members, a problem they were having with their employee. Their employee was argumentative, their employee didn’t listen to them, and their employee wasn’t motivated. Now during this conversation, I came into effect where I tried to imagine, I had them imagine their employee being a teenager. And this applied to this individual.
Now during that, they said great, this is easy for me because I have teenagers at home. I said, “Oh, that’s very interesting. How do they behave?” “Well, they’re not motivated, they’re argumentative.” The exact same things he was saying about his staff, he was saying about his kids. And so when he talked about his kids, and he had three of them, talking about his three children, they all seemed to not listen to him, they all seemed to not be motivated. And so what I was talking to him about was how you directly communicate to one individual, you’re probably doing it to most. Unless you’ve learned to adapt, and over time, learned to make sure you’re communication skills aren’t rapid fire right at one individual person, but actually can lob and land directly on the individual with the communication that you actually want to give. In other words, the impact that you want to give.
Now I’ve heard before in my sports career, playing sports my whole life, is that when you see somebody in a sporting event, the way they act during sports is the way they’re going to be in business. In other words, if they cheat in sports, whether it be gold, soccer, tennis, what have you, they’re probably going to cheat in business and other areas of their lives, because they’ve set that standard. The same can be said in business as it relates to interpersonal conflict, right, or interpersonal communication in some senses. But how are you dealing with other people?
Now how you deal with people in your business is probably how you’re going to deal with people in your personal life and vice versa. So what I want you to do today is consider, as I know most of you are business owners, is I want you to consider what you’re doing now in your business, the problems that you’re having with your employees, with staff, with vendors, are you having these problems in relationships? Are you having problems, instead of vendors, is this your in-laws, or is this your family? Instead of your employees, is it your kids, your spouse? What is it?
What I want you to do, is write down exactly what’s going on. Where are you seeing these correlations? Now if you’re not a business owner, I want you to look at other areas of your life. If you’re an employee, how do you treat your boss? Is that the same way you treat your spouse or your parents or another authority figure? Do you have problems communicating at work? In other words, no one’s listening to you. When you go home, do you still say, “No one’s listening to me.” Is it the same thing? Because the chances are, it is you and that’s what you need to fix.
Now business people come to me all the time asking for business advice. And all too often, they want tips, tricks and tactics. They’re not looking for insights. And often times I have to fix the outer layer, what’s going on in their family, how they’re communicating with people before I can actually the fix the issue that they’re hiring me for, which is typical to grow their business. They need to fix themselves first.
So again, I want you to grab your journal today, and I want you to write out and list those roles in your life, whether you’re a business owner or an employee, where are you having conflict? What do you feel about your communication skills? Are things not landing on the people you’re trying to talk to? And now I want you to say, okay, is this happening at home? Is there a correlation here? And if you find that correlation, even if you can find one or two points of correlation, just realize, it’s not these two separate people, it’s not these two separate groups. It’s you.
And that’s a great knowing. Because when you know it’s you, you can make the change, you can make the shift towards your own story, to creating something greater. And now it’s just learning tactics. Now that you have this insight, you simply have to learn better communication skills. That’s it for me today, as always go to authorofyourownstory.com where you can get more tips, tricks and techniques delivered right to your inbox. Also, join us in our community, we can have deeper discussions, just like this. I’d love to know what your communication skills are and where you’re seeing this gaps being bridged, and where they’re being taken apart. Let’s jump on a Facebook live, we can talk about it, but we can also run over into one of our webinars.
Take care, and remember, go out, inspire somebody and be the author of your own story.
If you like these daily growth hacks, it would mean the world to us if you would take a moment to subscribe and review us on iTunes!
Loading...
