Noel IHEBUZOR
Experts on Effective Communication advise us to do the following when engaging in verbal communication:
Use variety, vary the stimulus and avoid monotony,
Be credible – if your audience senses or suspects that what you are saying is at variance with your every day practises and conduct, you have lost them,
Use a hook to attract attention, hold and retain attention,
Always find ways to gauge the attention, interest and response of your audience and adapt your delivery to align with these. Remember to constantly tap into that interest:
Spice your presentation with interesting tit- bits that relate to the life and experiences of your audience;
Start your presentation with something catchy -.the hook and keep on using different hooks to sustain interest and.retain attention.
Christ our saviour and leader was an expert in communication, often using a blend of strategies ranging from the amazingly simple yet subversive (the strategy he deploys in the Beatitudes) or plain dramatisation (eg setting a child amongst his listeners) or challenging his audience to engage in self examination (eg when he saves Mary Magdalene from stoning by a not too upright crowd) to drive home his key messages.
But by far, the most effective tools of communication are deployed in the parables. A close look at them shows that they contain all the aspects of effective communication – getting, retaining and sustaining the interest of the audience until the key message has been delivered and the audience has been guided to see what are the right choices This is because every good piece of communication ends with a call to action, a CTA, which may be explicit or implicit, subtle or direct – and the CTA is an invitation to choose and act wisely in the light of the message that has just been delivered.
The same experts on effective communication also point out to us the barriers to communication. These include
a) Language – speech and accent, dialect, non-specific meaning of words, double meaning jargon, technical language, woolly use of language, rambling, insufficient information given
b) psychological – emotive words, personality clashes, lack of interest; audience hostility
c) bias, prejudice and faulty assumptions
d) content not suited to education, status and intelligence levels of your listeners
e) physical environment – noise and distraction from the environment
Again you will notice that the parables anticipate and avoid most if not all these barriers and succeed in delivering winning presentations
Our age is obsessed by the power point presentations, where illustrations and fly-in effects and the jazzing up the presentation often mask inadequacies in content, logic and flow, We would do well to read the parables and learn from them.
In an age where verbose usage is often used to mask cognitive deficiencies, platitudes, social irrelevance of the message or the lack of preparation of the speaker, we would do well to go to the parables and learn how to communicate. And to communicate with interest, focus and effect…and with economy, things which I know I will need to learn myself.
Reflections 