Dear On-Demand Leadership readers,
Geoffrey Tumlin, President of On-Demand Leadership, will be blogging every Monday morning (central time zone) in 2012 about issues and challenges relating to our hyper-communicating era over at On-Demand Leadership’s sister company Mouthpeace Consulting. Since communication skills have an enormous impact on leadership effectiveness, we will reproduce these entries here at On-Demand Leadership every Monday morning in 2012.
We hope that you find the entries helpful; below is the first one.
Best wishes for a wonderful 2012.
Sincerely,
On-Demand Leadership
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The past few years have brought forth revolutionary changes in the ways that we can—and do—communicate with each other. Our remarkable ability to connect cheaply and easily with people across the globe has been, on balance, enormously positive. But the implications of all of our hyper-communicating and all of our hyper-connectivity are far from clear. In the year ahead, this blog will explore the promise—as well as the pitfalls—of so much communication. In this, our first blog entry of 2012, let’s briefly discuss three pieces of profoundly positive communication news.
First, and most obviously, communicating with other people is cheaper and easier than ever before: I can call my 94-year-old granddad in Canada for free over the Internet (or for peanuts on my cell phone) when only a few years ago, a long-distance phone call was pretty expensive; today I can easily maintain contact with people all over the globe who I worked with many years ago; and I can keep up with the real-time growth of my niece and nephew over a thousand miles away through Facebook, text messaging, and email. Our revolutionary power to communicate and connect with other people has surely enriched our lives and brought us a great deal of joy.
Second, hope springs eternal in human communication because (almost) no matter what happened yesterday, most of us wake up each day with a renewed desire to connect to other people. Even better, the most important people in our lives also wake up wanting to connect with us. This primal urge for connection is important because although each day is not a blank slate—we carry our previous conversations and our interpersonal “body of work” around with us—there is a tireless, determined little flame that rekindles every morning and motivates us to seek out meaningful connections. It is possible to extinguish the flame over long periods of neglect, but our primal desire to connect is pretty durable, and it provides a source of optimism for our communication. We simply desire, at a fundamental level, meaningful connections with other people.
Finally, it really doesn’t take much for our words to be a source of happiness, and our powerful communication devices make spreading kindness easier than ever. I can quickly and easily text message a note of support to my wife, email a compliment to a coworker, call my niece to ask about her day (and talk about ice cream), or send a note of thanks to a colleague about a recent job well done. Ten seconds of kindness can make someone’s day, and it’s never been easier to deliver a kind word or a sincere compliment.
Our communication has an enormous impact on our overall quality of life. Three pieces of good news to start the year are that it’s never been easier to communicate, people have a primal urge to connect, and it doesn’t take much to spread kindness with your words.
Here’s to making 2012 a year when our words are a force for goodness.
Next week, we will turn our attention to some of the communication challenges that we all face in our hyper-communicating and constantly changing world.
Best wishes for your health, happiness, and serenity in 2012.