Workplace Communication –

is your language clean?

If you wish to achieve good results at work, effective communication is a good place to start.  You may be inadvertently undermining yourself in your use of language.  There are three dirty little words in the English language which should be used with great care!  They are ‘don’t’, ‘try’ and ‘but’.

I might say to you ‘Don’t think of a blue tree!’  What are you thinking about?  Probably a blue tree!  Your mind cannot process a negative.  It has to produce a blue tree first before it can delete it.  It’s not logical, it’s psychological.  So when you say “Don’t forget to log off when you leave”, chances are that people will subconsciously take on the message to forget to log off, rather than do what you think you have communicated.

‘Try’ is a treacherous little word. If someone says that they will ‘try’ to do something, they probably won’t actually achieve it as they are giving themselves a get-out right from the start.  So watch out for your language when you say ‘I would like you to try to reach this deadline’.  As Yoda said in Star Wars “Do, or do not. There is no try."

‘But’ is a word that creates barriers to effective communication. Take a look at this statement – ‘That was a great presentation, but you lost them a bit in the middle.’

What is your colleague going to take from this?  They will probably delete the praise and concentrate on the message that they messed up. Although your intention is to help, you have inadvertently had an impact which will prevent them from performing confidently.

Start to listen out for these words and where they crop up in your conversation.  You will also quickly become aware of how much other people use them!  Once you have spotted them you can decide when it is appropriate to make another choice – to clean up your language! - and observe whether this has a better response.