Entrepreneurs, freelancers and small businesses spend lot of energy and their time in communication with their clients or audiences. Communication is yet another factor that affects business success. In a business, an entrepreneur should have communication for various functions.
Consequently, communicating affects how the work is done and its outcomes. There’s no doubt that communication plays an important role in one’s effectiveness. Ability to identify the appropriate communication patterns in a given situation and to achieve goals by applying the same is essential for every interaction with the client. Entrepreneurs with high proficiency in the communication will behave better in his/her task while clients will receive better work.
Philosophical background of communication
Reality & Words: We started mentioning reality right away, since reason must be attached to reality in order to construct your ideas. Otherwise, you simply cannot construct your ideas if you don’t know the facts of the reality.
Every word is a symbol of a concept. Concept is a mental symbol, which allows us to take couple of entities and store them in our minds as a single unit. Those concepts can have all kinds of characteristics and they are stored in our minds by one word. If we learn about the concepts from other people and not from the actual facts of the reality, we create a mess, since these concepts don’t have a connection to the reality.
Clarity: Clarity can be accomplished by paying attention where do you start, where are you going and where are you going to end with your communication.
What is the purpose of your talk? What is the essence of your words? Your listener (clients) needs to know where did you start and where you are going to end.
To present your ideas with clarity, it’s important to stay within one context. So during your dialogue (either through email, messaging, a call or in person, in one sequence, mention one part of your work e.g. creating a moodboard. Otherwise, you are creating a confusion for your listener and not that he won’t take you seriously, your talk is out of his perception. When talking you should say the words that are paving the way to the next words so that what’s coming next will be clear and understandable.
Pay attention that A is A, that is, that all entities you are talking about are connected with reality. People can deal and hold only with which exists — and since human consciousness is limited, don’t mention too many points. It becomes boring for the people who are listening to you and they will give up. I think that applies to all communication. Listener has a tension when you speak or when you responding to a message, so try to reduce number of units and try to make the other person feel comfortable. Be economical in your talk but also direct in the human way.
Simple steps to follow for effective objective communication
The question then arises is how to enhance entrepreneur’s communication competence? Research has established that entrepreneurial actions such as to choose an appropriate time for the conversation, and be descriptive rather than evaluative will improve effectiveness of the communication with clients. The next ten commandments of good communicating may also help improve an entrepreneurs communicating effectiveness:
- When you address someone, focus on the contexts separately.
- Motivate the speaker to be interested in what you are saying. If people can’t give you time, attention, focus, thought you shouldn’t force them to listen to you. You should tell them why they are listening to you — why they are spending their time.
- It has to be in the terms of listeners’ self-interest. You can’t force them. They will go at the first hardship.
- You must show why your talk advances their values.
- You have to attach your subject to what they care about so that they will see that following you will benefit them.
- Before starting a talk, you should have a clue whether the listeners will be interested and what kind of attitudes they have towards your ideas. If you find out that ideas do not mean much to the listeners you have to combat that and show them how you are different.
- Whenever possible, communicate something which can help, or is valued by the receiver.