I had stated in my blog post on "being bold" that boldness is the bedrock of all other values. After carrying out some research on communication, I have come to the realization. that I was wrong.
The most important of all value concepts is communication. Why? Because it applies to everything that we must do.
Yesterday whilst I was penning down a post on personal branding, read here https://bit.ly/2BMu12X. I realised that personal branding itself is a form of communication because it explicitly explains who you are, and why people should engage with you whether on a business, professional or career level.
The key to all good relationships and even the bad ones is communication, the latter being the failure of the speaker/writer to pass their messages in as succinct a manner as is required.
Communication is often categorized into about four types, namely verbal; non-verbal; written and visual. In this post, I am going to be writing on what I believe are the essentials of good communication.
My late grandmother about 20 years ago had this maid from the Republic of Benin. In my family, we are Yorubas from southwestern Nigeria, and our communication mostly consists of contexts, nuances and cultural connotations.
What does this mean? Every thoroughbred Yoruba person knows what each facial expression means. Failure to decipher an expression could very well land you in ‘hot soup’ (a euphemism for trouble).
A typical Yoruba person would say you must understand "nonverbal facial communication". It is written in the Yoruba constitution, every true Yoruba person knows this.
Back to my grandmother and her maid. On this fateful day, her maid helped her cook some vegetable stew. After we had eaten, she then approached my Gran to ask what she was to do with the remainder, whereupon my Gran replied: "put it on my head".
Amazingly, the young lady took several steps towards my grandmother with the pot of soup intending to actually put the soup on her forehead. I was with them in the living room at the time, and I just burst into laughter. 😀😀😀
This is communication and how it should not be done. If I was the one who was helping, I obviously won't be asking that kind of question because I already know that I have to put the remainder of the soup in the freezer, telling her to put the pot of soup on her head was a sarcastic way of telling her that you should know what to do, but the girl did not understand the nuances and was fully intending to do exactly as she was instructed.
It was so hilarious that I wish we had camera phones at the time so I could just take a picture of the shocked look on my Grandmother's face.😊😊😊
Communication, as I'd said, is nuanced. It is contextual, and it is cultural and these three things must be taken into consideration while trying to pass a message to others.
A lot of people have said that when communicating, clarity is very essential, but if the person you're talking to is not putting into consideration these three things I have mentioned before, then there's no way the message sought to be passed would be clear to the listener. Just like in the case of my grandmother and her maid it was clear that she needed to do something with that pot of soup but it wasn't clear to her.
As lawyers, we are taught that words are to be interpreted in the context in which they are used, and this is why I said communication is also contextual. I am glad that we now have emojis, they sometimes help to put messages passed into context.
Communication is cultural because a word in a language means something else in another. And sometimes in translating from a native language to perhaps English, a lot of nuances are lost, for instance, Arabic to English or even Yoruba to the English language.
To make it more relatable, a black person might call another black man a nigger as a form of salutation, it would be offensive, coming from a white man. This is what I mean by communication being cultural.
Let's also not forget that there are some people who are committed to misunderstanding you, and so no matter how crystal clear your message is, they will never understand because they do not want to understand. (Okay, that was an aside, I just needed to say it). 😀
Something else to note, communication is about encoding and decoding. When you are speaking or writing, you want to be sure that the person understands the context in which you're speaking/writing. Face-to-face communication is a tad easier but when you are writing you have to be very careful to communicate in such a way that your reader would understand what you are saying.
I see a lot of people say "it is not my responsibility to make you understand what I am saying". This is an anomaly, in every communication, you must ensure that the person that you're speaking to understands and comprehends (you encode, and they decode) what you are saying, because what is the basis of the communication if your listeners or reader cannot decipher properly or comprehend what you are saying. It is very important to be unambiguous and avoid speaking in generalities in order to communicate effectively.
Back to how communication as it ties in with Personal Branding. I see personal branding as a pizza where several slices come together to make a whole.
The way you dress, the way you speak, your actions, your leadership skills all come together to make your pizza box of Personal branding.
If you read that post (congratulations😅), you might be wondering, now that you understand what personal branding is, how do you effectively brand myself?
First thing you must do is to become self-aware. How? I'd like you to pick up a piece of paper and list out the values that resonate with you and your personality.
Once you are done with this list, marry them to your interests. You see a lot of times we think we're interested in one thing but we're actually not.
I have a hack for you, if you have Instagram, go to your settings, there's a place where you can download the stuff you spend your time on every time you are on Instagram.
The algorithm stores the things that interest you and this is how adverts are shown to you. Take a look at that portion, therein lies the things that you are passionate about because you spend a lot of your time consuming those pieces of information. My interests include public speaking, communication skills, leadership development, yoga, fashion and food 🤣
After you have done this, you marry both, decide on a course of action that you want to pursue and begin your branding from this standpoint.
Personal branding is not static, it is dynamic. It evolves because you are a human being, we are always in a state of becoming.
Personal branding is simply showcasing your values to people and this for me is communication.
Bibireosefowora 💕💌
(Neither Pedigree nor Class can be bought with Money)
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