Why miscommunication is so common

Miscommunication is one of the most common reason why people argue, fight or disagree. And one of the major reasons why miscommunication is so common is because people do not really listen actively to each other. They might be hearing each other but not necessarily listening to each other. Instead they behave in egocentric ways doing most of the talking and getting their words heard as opposed to letting others talk.

Unfortunately, in social context, communication has been synonym to talking, which constitutes only half of communication activity. There is so much focus on teaching others how to talk, speak, articulate their ideas, that the whole aspect of listening has been nearly overlooked.

Talking is egoistic

In fact, listening is much more important than talking. Talking is often an egocentric behavior centered around the need to impose on others thoughts and ideas. On the other hand, proper listening puts the focus and attention on the other person, not only making them feel important but also allowing them to freely express themselves and articulate their thoughts.

What is a good way to listen?

Active listening means focusing exactly on what the other party is really saying, without assuming you already know what they mean just by listening to the beginning of the sentences. It means remaining silent while the other person is talking, focusing on understanding what they are saying.

Be an active listener

A very effective yet simple way to train on active listening is to try repeating in your own words what the other person has just said to you. As easy as this sounds, as surprising the results are. This simple exercise can reveal how much of a good listener you are, and if practiced properly can really make a big difference both personally and professionally.

So, are you really a good listener?

The negative restaurant experience

You go to a restaurant, you are starving, you need to eat, you are not sure what you want, you hastily open the menu, and to your surprise, you are annoyed to find dozens of pages listing what seems like 100s of food choices and items. You are lost, you skim through the pages, back and forth, trying to find something to appease your taste. While this big long menu was designed as an attempt to suits all your tastes,  all it does is confuse you and irritate you. You are getting hungrier. You lost your patience, get feisty, throw the menu aside, call angrily for the waiter, and ask for their most popular meal.

This is pretty much the same impatience and irritation users experience when landing on a website filled with tons of features, cluttered with buttons and links. However, unlike the frustrated guests who are already seated on a table and who feel socially obliged to remain in the restaurant, users can with a  click of button navigate away and close down your website..

Users are impatient

Users are impatient, have tons of alternative options on the web, and have very little time when browsing your site. very few minutes if not seconds actually. Do not make them think or look for information. Keep it very simple. Identify the most important actions you expect a user to do on a specific page, and lay them out intuitively on the site. Remove everything else that only clutters the page.

So, do you need to trim the menu?

It is amazing how certain tunes can affect your mood. I have personally experienced that countless times. Music can transport you to a world that only you can experience, a world of your creation, where you feel utmost peace of mind. Music can be the perfect escape from the mundane, irritating, and stressful environment that surrounds you.

In your deepest sorrows, music can just heal your mood, it can lift it up. In your hyper mood, music can fill you with even more energy. It has therapeutic and psychological benefits that seem to act on your body like magic.

So, how often do you listen to music?

“Tell me what you do and I tell you who you are.” Can this be the whole truth about your identity?

We tend to label people according to their job titles or their biggest achievements. He is the CEO of so and so company, he is the digital marketing manager for x company, he is former champion of so and so competition. While this makes it easier in social context to refer or even introduce people, it is in most cases a label that does not really describe who the person really is.

Are you in control?

Career and life choices seem to be more subject to luck and opportunity, rather than personal choices and careful planning and crafting ones life. To give you an example, take Stella, she is looking for a marketing job. Naturally, she applies to many companies, and then luckily lands on a job as a brand manager for Pepsi with the most attractive offer. Boom, among people, Stella will now be referred to or even introduced as the brand manager of Pepsi.

But is this really who Stella is? Is this really what she wants? Isn’t her new identity now a result of events that are beyond her influence? What if company x offered her a better offer with a totally different title? Wouldn’t her identity consequently be totally different?

Do you know yourself well?

Think of yourself. where you are now, the title your holding and consequently your identity and label in society, is it really who you wanted to become? Is it really who you are? In fact, do you really know who you are? How would you define yourself? Granted, each one of us has different personas depending on different context (mother at home, best manager at work, most loyal friend among her friends…), yet are we fully aware of such identities that define us?

Ask yourself these questions, and try to answer them!

this summer, and after 3 years of no holidays, i finally managed to take 10 days off, traveling in Europe, visiting new countries i have always wanted to visit. During these 10 days, I have discovered myself behaving in certain ways that relate so much to startup founders.

Observe with tourist eyes: as a tourist, everything looks new to you, everything seems unfamiliar. You notice little details that even locals don’t notice anymore. Your mind has not yet been conditioned to overlook the small elements of your surrounding, your critical eyes analyze every color, every detail, every pattern.

As a startup founder, you live and breathe your product. It has become so familiar to you, that you stop noticing the little details that make up your product. This sense of familiarity blocks your mind from thinking critically about your business, from discovering the flaws, the imperfections that mark your product.

Take a break from your product, take some holidays, refresh your mind, your thinking, your ideas, do something completely distant from your startup. This healthy interruption allows to put on the tourist eyes, and experience again the product as if you saw it for the first time, discovering details that seem hidden behind the familiar face of your product, much like a tourist visiting a city for the first time.

So go ahead, put on tourist eyes and start discovering.

The importance of focus in a startup should never be underestimated. Laser-sharp focus is directly correlated to increase in productivity. Focus means simply putting all the team effort and energy behind a carefully selected 2 to 3 choices (be it set of features, a business model, target audience….) and rejecting other choices no matter how appealing they seem.

But have you ever attempted to measure the productivity level of your team? Consider this: a typical founding team consists of 2 – 3 people, working on average 12 hours a day. This is 36 hours of productivity per day. To put this in perspective, this is equivalent to having a 1-hour running session 36 times per day (or conversely, having 36 lunch breaks per day – with no belittling to employee lunch breaks, they are important and essential.). And we all know how productive and effective a 1-hour run per day can be.

Now imagine your team invests 36 hours of work, behind only 3 choices, every day, for a whole month. This is almost equivalent to 1,000 hours of productivity per month (at 6-days workweek) or equivalent of non-stop work 24 hours/day for 6 consecutive weeks.

At the end of each month, write down what you have achieved as a team, and assess the productivity using the above benchmarks. You will be amazed how much more you can achieve simply by focusing all the team energy on 2 or 3 choices per month.

Happy productivity.

What is common between you, Einstein, Madonna, and Leonardo Da Vinci? Stop for a moment and think of it… You could probably identify several common traits between yourself and all these people, I want to point out to only one obvious, yet important common factor that many take for granted. All of them, including yourself, have exactly the same number of hours in a day, 24. Yet, what made them different, unique, successful is how they filled every hour of the day, each day, over months and years.

It is simple: It is what you do in your 24 hours that determine eventually who you become. You can waste valuable hours every day watching TV, or instead, you can decide to invest the same hours learning a new programming language, experimenting and creating new products, practicing your favorite sport, writing a paragraph for a new book, practicing and acquiring new skills, meeting new clients… Each day, you are granted 86,400 time units. You can either waste them or instead invest them in accumulating skill set that will set you eventually apart from others. Those who invested these time units in creating something useful, meaningful, hour by hour, day by day, month by month, year by year, are those that we consider successful.

While it requires more than just that to become really successful, keep in mind that it all starts with a sense of awareness about how precious time is, and a conscious decision to invest it day in day out in matters that, when accumulated, can eventually lead you to success. I remind people around me about this time consciousness and whether they are investing in valuable matters by asking them to “Do the 24″.

So, are you doing the 24?

You are browsing the web, and you land on an idea that you think is very relevant to your business. The idea takes over your mind, you can’t stop thinking of it, you lose sense of reality, imagining the possibilities of what this could mean for your business, a sense of excitement embraces you, and you feel an urgent need to jump on this seemingly unique opportunity before anyone else nabs it and build it. You call for a quick ‘ASAP‘ meeting, run the idea through your team, reshuffle their priorities and project list to implement this idea immediately, leaving your team baffled and perplexed.

This common syndrome of excitement is among they key reasons many business people fail. This reactive mode of operation not only creates confusion among colleagues, but elevates the stress level and decreases the motivation in the team who seem to lack any sense of direction and purpose.

To avoid it, spend quality time to analyze your business needs well, articulate a very specific set of business choices (called your business strategy), then channel all your team effort and energy on those choices, and only on those choices. If the excitement remains, articulate the idea, drill yourself questions why this idea makes sense, sleep on it for a while, then, and only then take proper action. Don’t worry of giving yourself time to analyze it, no one will steal it, remember ideas alone are worthless, it is proper execution that matters.

Naturally, you need to remain nimble and flexible to adapt quickly to the market dynamics, and iterate your business accordingly, but beware of jumping on a seemingly exciting idea, out of excitement, without doing due diligence and assessing whether this idea really fits in your overall business strategy or not.

Don’t confuse passion and excitement. Passion can build your business, excitement can break it.