Even the class clown knows that when a conversation is important, you prepare for it. Preparation is to effective communication like loud is to rock concert—it’s just plain obvious.
But something funny can happen during the preparation phase: We end up falling in love with our message. Once we get the introduction just right, line up our evidence perfectly, and conduct a few flawless rehearsals, we can end up falling head-over-heels in love with our message. U + message = luv 4 ever.
But before we run out and scratch a proclamation of our love into a tree we should know about two big problems that come when we fall in love with our message:
Problem #1: Your message is not the most important part of a conversation; your goal is most important. Your message serves your goal—what you want to accomplish in the conversation—and how you communicate your goal is mere packaging. Choose from among a multitude of packaging styles, but keep a steady focus on your conversational goal. In the immortal words of Stephen Covey, “The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing.”[i] And your goal, not your message, is the main thing.
Problem #2: When you have googly eyes for your message, you lose focus on the other person. When a conversation starts, you need to be paying close attention to the other party. You need to monitor feedback cues so you can determine how your message is being received—are they buying what you are selling—but also more fundamentally: Do they understand what you are saying?
Smart communicators help people understand, right from the beginning. And being in love with your message won’t help because if you only have eyes for your message, you won’t be able to see what’s happening during the conversation. And you will be tempted to cling too tightly to your lovely message, even when the conversation reveals that you need to go in another direction.
Only a knucklehead would suggest that preparing for important conversations doesn’t matter—of course it does. But don’t fall in love with your message. Have eyes for the other person so you can see how the conversation is unfolding and check their comprehension. And don’t cling so tightly to your message that you fail to make adjustments for what is happening during the conversation.
To modify a quote from the Drill Sergeant in Full Metal Jacket: Your heart may belong to your message, but your [behind] belongs to your goal.
[i] Steven Covey, Robert Merrill, and Rebecca Merrill (1995), First Things First, p.75.