People often ask, “What should I do to make my communication better?” In almost every situation, from problems at work to conflicts at home, the fastest way to improve your communication is to stop doing something.
And bad communication habits are the most important behaviors to stop.
Repeated conversational errors are the telltale sign of a bad communication habit, and a single bad habit can make it seem like you are a pervasively poor communicator because one bad habit often causes a staggering amount of trouble.
There are four main categories of bad communication habits.
1. Conversation-Stopping Habits. A cluster of behaviors, like giving unsolicited advice, criticizing, contradicting, responding with sweeping certainty, or belittling often cause people to abruptly eject from conversations. These habits can be easy to identify because a conversation that is going along smoothly will suddenly hit a brick wall. Behind most conversations that end abruptly is a conversation-stopping bad habit.
2. Bad Listening Habits. It is not enough to listen—your conversational partner has to believe that you are listeningas well. Behaviors such as failing to incorporate new information into a conversation, frequently losing your place in a conversation, or repeating yourself too often can make it seem like you are not listening. And if this perception takes hold—in spite of the fact that you might actually be listening—your conversation will falter.
3. Habits that Distract or Confuse People. Many issues cause conversational distraction or confusion, such as a disconnect between your nonverbal expressions and your words, too many inconsistencies in your message, overloading someone with information, or reflexively reacting to an incoming email or text message in the middle of a conversation. Distracting body movements and eccentric verbal tendencies (like excessive or insufficient pausing between statements) can also disrupt a conversation and lead to problematic, error-prone interactions.
4. Bad Questioning Habits. Bad questioning habits can easily make a conversation feel like an interrogation, and cause your conversational partner to either clam up, or to push back aggressively against your loaded, leading, and occasionally loathsome questions. Bad questioning habits often cause apprehension, anxiety, and mistrust to bloom in a conversation, and can lead your conversational partner to conclude that your questions are rigged against her. Bad questioning habits give rise to lopsided and hesitant interactions.
Pay attention this week to any conversations you have that are awkward, erratic, or otherwise problematic, and see if they were caused by one of the four categories above. Note also how often the problem repeats. Next week, we’ll discuss ways to eliminate your troublesome communication habits.
The good news is that extinguishing a single bad communication habit often wipes out a series of repeating communication errors. The swiftest route to better communication runs right through a stop sign.