DO THEY UNDERSTAND?

The goal of communication isn’t simply getting someone to hear you; you want them to comprehend your message. Many years back a poster that graced dorm walls said: I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant. It raised the question: how can I be certain I’ve been understood? Here are some helps towards this end.

1. Provide Summaries
A good way to promote fuller understanding is to pull all the threads of the conversation together in order to check whether your message and its implications have hit home or your case is being made. If the message being delivered is an important one, with serious implications, then summaries are almost essential. Summaries often have a ‘winding things up’ aspect to them but do not necessarily signal the end of the dialogue. They invite the team members to have a dialogue in order to get clarity and move on to problem solving.

2. Ask for Summaries
Instead of merely providing summaries, you can also ask those listening to give you a summary. You do this, not as a challenge to test their understanding, but to check your own success at communicating your ideas and to help them understand. If your hearers would feed back highlights as a matter of course, asking for summaries would not be as necessary. But in complicated matters, they are usually very helpful. Asking for summaries is also a way of inviting the other person to dialogue.

3. Check for Clairy
If misunderstanding is frequent and perhaps the norm, it's important for you to know that your hearers are clear about the main points of your message or the central factors of your case. Summaries help a great deal, but even summaries can be misunderstood. You need to confirm your clarity..

Look for clues­ – Good communicators look for clues in the other person's reaction to what they are saying, especially their body language. Some common warning signs are: wandering eyes, fiddling fingers, shuffling feet, a secret glance at a watch, and a slumping posture.
But Looking for clues goes only so far. You might have to check directly.

Check directly – Another way of confirming whether you’re getting your key points over clearly and that your conversational partner has understood, is simply to ask one way or another. Things like, "Does any of this make any sense?" Or, "I'm not sure if I've made myself clear. I'd like to know what you've picked up from what I've said."

If you check directly for understanding either too often or too blatantly, the other person could well think, "She must think I'm stupid." So reserve your requests for confirmation for the bigger points, or for the end of a chunk of conversation. It's better to take a preventive approach. If your conversation partners are not ‘spontaneous dialoguers’, bring them in early on and more frequently.

George Bernard Shaw, Nobel Prize for literature winner, said, “The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” Do your best to make sure you’re not just heard, but understood. That’s real communication.

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By: Joe Fairchild