Continue Learning to Keep Improving

Throughout this book, we have explored the communication essentials; learned how to apply the star framework for effective communication across myriad professional interactions; and gained implementable tools and strategies for navigating how to communicate into a job, out of one, and everything in between. In this final chapter, I trust you will conclude that communicating is a critical life skill, like eating or sleeping, that you can always be improving. Having a firm grasp of the essentials outlined in this book and applying them daily will position you to become a best-in-class communicator.

The critical next steps in your journey are to be gracious and continue learning.

First, be gracious to others because chances are they are humans who, like you, are doing the best they can with the cards they’ve been dealt. So, if you’ve got an annoying colleague who sends miserably long emails that seem to lack a purpose, you have choices. You can roll your eyes and move on with your day. You can respond matter-of-factly (e.g., I’m confused. What is this?). Or you could be a bit more gracious, assume best intent, and then go the extra mile. Perhaps give him a call or visit and say something like this:

“Hey, I appreciate you making the time to provide all this information, but honestly, I’m struggling to make sense of it. I’d love to get a better sense of what I am supposed to do with your email. As well, if you have the time and are interested, I’d gladly share some email tricks that I have learned, which have helped me and could potentially help you.”

When your colleague takes you up on your offer, you’d obviously share some pro tips from this book (e.g., the what, so what, now what framework described in Chapter 14). Now, it’s possible that your colleague may dismiss you, but that’s on that person. Your opportunity here is to be a good colleague who communicates effectively and hopes to help others do the same.

Another example of how you can be a gracious communicator and champion others is to look out for those who may be struggling to find their voice in meetings. You will recall from Chapter 3 that each of our communication styles has been impacted by our water jug, which is filled with the experiences and the memorable messages we have received throughout life. Within your professional network, there may be any number of individuals whose water jugs are a little muddy. Perhaps they’ve received some ugly or painful messages that are preventing them from communicating their best. You can be the one that helps, by encouraging them to speak (e.g., “Lauren, I’d love to know your thoughts, if you’d be willing to share”) and affirming their efforts to do so (e.g., signaling support nonverbally by strong eye contact, nodding your head, and perhaps even smiling). They may not love being put on the spot, but your interest in their thoughts and your nonverbal affirmations can have an incredible impact.

Communicating grace and championing others has potential to impact other people for good. It also has a high probability of making you feel good about yourself. But there are two additional benefits worth mentioning. First, every time you share your knowledge of the communication essentials with others, you are also relearning them for yourself. Second, when you champion someone else, you are more likely to make or deepen a relationship with that person, which is a critically important step toward enhancing your brand in the workplace.

That being said, while you are busy championing fellow communicators and extending grace to them, be sure to do the same for yourself. On days when I go for a long run and can hardly finish my route, it’s easy to feel defeated, like something is wrong with me. But when doing so, I fail to remember that there was a day when I could hardly run at all! The same can be true for elevating your communication skills. Eventually, it becomes second nature. And then one day, you trip over yourself during a meeting, get called out for a poorly worded memo, or maybe even bomb an interview. This doesn’t mean that all is lost.

As a strong communicator, when you experience a momentary blip, it’s not a sign that you have fallen; it’s more a sign of how high you have climbed! For example, I have this conversation regularly with Charlie, a vice president of marketing, who has been a client of mine for years. When we first met, his confidence as a communicator was at zero. Extremely intelligent and ready to excel in his role, he still second-guessed every email, struggled at leading team meetings, and sweated calls with senior leaders and clients. Within a few months of extensive work together, Charlie had become an extremely capable and confident communicator. He was promoted, his team was expanded, and he was receiving regular feedback from his manager and C suite about how impressed people were with him. I started hearing from him less frequently, which I took to be a good sign.

Then a couple of months went by, and I got a text that read, We gotta talk! For the next two hours, I listened and consoled, and then we hatched a plan going forward. The big issue was that no one was complimenting him anymore! Well, of course, they weren’t; his newfound communication skills weren’t surprising anyone anymore. He had established a new baseline standard that people now held him against.

This is a cautionary tale of what happens when you elevate your skills and people come to expect you to deliver as an effective communicator. When I met Charlie, he was reaching out for help because he was striking out regularly in his communications. Within months, he was hitting communication home runs consecutively. Just as he readjusted as a communicator, those in his professional network readjusted their expectations of him as a communicator. Now, a home run might get a high five and a base hit is hardly noticed.

As you elevate your communication skills, know that you will miss some shots and maybe even lose a game. That’s OK. Be gracious with yourself and just keep learning. I’ve heard a plethora of communication stories, some humorous and others not, from clients and friends who’ve learned some lessons the hard way. There is the one about the job applicant who was in a rush to get home following her interview and unknowingly cut off (and flipped off) the hiring manager on the interstate. There is the one about the guy who left his promotion meeting, called his college buddy while on the toilet, and detailed all the reasons he was shocked to have gotten the promotion. Of greatest shock to him was that no one knew he was hungover during the meeting. Of course, the joke was on him when he stepped out to wash his hands and found his manager waiting for him at the sink. Remember: you are always in presentation mode until you are home with the door shut and locked.

There will be moments when you know you could have done better and communicated more effectively. I encounter them regularly. The important thing is to examine your mishap through the lens of the communication essentials, and then brush yourself off and get back out there! This is what it means to be a communication student for life.

We must keep learning, growing, evolving, and chasing after that best version of ourselves. The good news is that—no matter your age, position, or life story thus far—each of us can continue to enhance our communication effectiveness. I wrote this book to provide more people with the communication essentials for winning in the workplace and beyond. If you don’t understand and apply the communication essentials, you leave yourself vulnerable to unnecessary failure.

The communication essentials I’ve described in this book will enable you to express yourself and your ideas better, elevate your career, and bring you joy and satisfaction from making and maintaining meaningful relationships. But mastering the essentials is still no cause for a premature victory dance. While there may be some wins along the way, the learning never stops. It’s all a journey, and the view gets better as you keep hiking upward.

So I implore you to be a communication student for life, not only for the joy of it, but also because new challenges are sure to arise. Part of what makes the communication learning journey challenging is that our personal and professional lives tend to become more complicated with age. For some of us, especially during our working years, this means the stakes grow higher as we get older. Sending a careless email to your professor in your freshman year of college may not be as consequential as sending a poorly worded memo to your CEO. Failing to meet your sales quota in your high school retail job may not cause the same career insecurity as making it to partner in a consulting firm but failing to win new business.

In addition to the stakes rising, our tools for communicating continue to evolve at breakneck speed. While this can be exciting, it often results in increasing the demands for communicators to always be on and respond immediately, especially as the demand for juggling multiple time zones, platforms, and devices fluently is only increasing. Challenges like these require us to be gracious and stay humble. We would be wise to be gracious with ourselves along the learning journey, and to extend that grace to others also.

Likewise, a bit of humility will encourage us to be nimble, adapt when beneficial, and demonstrate a willingness to learn and grow. And, lastly, although change will come and teach us new things, we must always keep a pivot foot on the communication essentials.

ESSENTIAL TAKEAWAYS