Photo Credits: Bindhiya Bindhu from Unsplash
Despite communicating every day, there are a lot of factors that shape our voices. Knowing these factors is the key to properly defining and improving your voice, which is why Fazeena Haniff of The Conscious Communicator stresses its importance to leaders!
What Is Your Voice?
The voice is the core of who you are and what echoes through your brand, while the brand is more of the aesthetics and the things we see. We learn so much about what we should be doing for our brand, how we should be building our brand, and how we need to be consistent but we’re not necessarily talking about the voice, which is why we need to deconstruct communication so we as leaders can have a better understanding.
Verbal vs Non-Verbal
If I were to ask you what percentage of communication is verbal and word based, what would that percentage be versus non-verbal like facial expressions, intonation, your body language? There are studies that show that words or verbal communication accounts for as little as 7% of communication, whereas non-verbal communication accounts for 93% of communication! We struggle so much and get stuck discussing communicating because we are worrying about this 7% when there is this whole 93% that we are not addressing. We can dig into it even further by discussing the conscious and unconscious mind and how that impacts how we communicate.
Conscious & Unconscious Mind
We all have a conscious and unconscious mind. I’m sure you’ve seen the image of an iceberg before with a small piece at the top that’s visible to the naked eye and with a huge piece underneath the water that we’re not seeing. This is a great metaphor for the conscious versus the unconscious mind since our conscious mind is 5%-10% of who we are while our unconscious mind is 90%-95% of who we are. In addition to those percentages earlier on verbal and non-verbal communication, you’re also being influenced by what’s in our conscious mind in our awareness versus what’s in our unconscious mind outside of our awareness. Understand that there are influences to the way that we communicate that we’re not quite aware of and become conscious of those as leaders. The more that we are aware of it, the more control we have over the way that we communicate.
NLP Model
This is the NLP communication model, Neuro Linguistic Programming, that is used to describe the way we process information. An external event which could be anything that’s happening externally comes into our awareness and then we process it through our five senses, which processes 11 million bits of information at any given moment. Our brains delete, distort, and generalize this ridiculous amount of information using filters to be manageable for our conscious mind. These filters are time and space, energy and matter, language, memories, meta programs, decisions, values and beliefs, and attitudes. Considering our inherent and acquired diversity, these filters are extremely different from person to person. We turn this information into five to nine chunks which end up creating an image in our mind that starts as an emotion state, leads to a feeling in our body, and creates a behavior. We get confused when discussing communication since you might say similar things as someone else, but people will take a different understanding of it due to this processing cycle. When you’re thinking about your own brand or your leadership voice, it’s a composition of all these things whether you’re aware of it or not. In order to recognize that these processes are happening, here are three tips to understand what defines your voice.
Three Leadership Tips
1. The first tip is recognizing that your values are a manifestation of your voice. If you haven’t done a lot of work on values and become aware of what those are, that’s one of the pieces that you will want to focus on. This will echo through all that you do, how you present yourself, and how you put yourself out into the world.
2. Know what you learned from society, culture, and family growing up because that has an impact on us as adults. Your voice is a composition of these external influences and it’s not until we spend time thinking about it that we can realize it.
3. Know how you view yourself. All those external influences have an impact on the perception we have of ourselves and how we perceive ourselves, which will ultimately fuel how we lead and how much of ourselves we put into the world, our businesses, and our communities.
Speaker's Specifics
Fazeena Haniff is a Leadership Communication Coach, Speaker and Workshop Facilitator in the GTA. She recognizes that communication problems are often disempowerment problems dressed up as communication problems, and goes beyond traditional strategies and tactics to create her own unique blueprint for communication. Learn more about what she offers by visiting her website.
Don’t forget to connect with her on LinkedIn and follow her on Instagram to stay up to date with what she is doing!
Three Leadership Tips
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