You Need Feedback to Communicate Well - Rick Rhodes

So I did a lot of reading of books, then, uh, bought a DVD series that had a, uh, from a training conference and, and went through that. Uh, so, so that was good. But there was something that I was missing. So I knew I enjoyed communicating. I knew that's what God had called me to do. And some— a lot of my work was involved in that, in teaching and then, and then preaching. Uh, but what I lacked was personal coaching in this.

And. Interesting. What— you know, I don't get that from a book. I don't get that from a DVD. Yeah. And what can happen is we don't realize how we're coming across until somebody who knows communication listens to us, watches us, and then speaks into it. So, uh, back in 2013, when our family was, uh, living in Thailand, yet we were in the— a one-year furlough, one of my goals was to go to a, a communicating conference. And so I did. I went to that conference. Uh, I think I paid $2,100 to go to this conference, to fly out to Colorado where this was. Went to this conference. I had already read the communicator's book. I already had his DVD series.

So I didn't learn anything new through the sessions. Like, I'd— 'cause I'd been through it all. I'd devoured it all. Uh, but what I wanted to get was that individual coaching. And at this conference, you would— you were part of a speech group and you had a speech coach. So there were eight people in my speech group and there was a speech coach.

That's what I knew I needed. I needed a speech coach to listen to me speak and to speak into my communicating skills. After my first— and so you're given five minutes to, to present. After my— my speech coach said this: "Your voice is way too intense. It makes it hard to listen to you."

Hmm. Nobody had ever told me that. And then he went on to explain. He said, "What you need to do is just speak in, in your optimal or your normal voice. And then when your message is intense, then be intense, but it's for short periods of time. When you're always intense, you become hard to listen to." It's like, okay.

Uh, I had two more speeches to give, so I could work on that and, and point out a few other things. Um, that honestly is the only thing I remember from that conference is too intense. It was worth my $2,100 to have somebody tell me that.

I went back home two months before the conference. I just was the evangelist at a, a big area-wide tent meeting out in Holmes County and had preached, uh, I think 10, 12 sermons in these tent meetings. They recorded these, put them on, on CDs, and then they gave me a set when it was done. I'm not sure why. Maybe they said, you know, have some of your own medicine, listen to your preaching, whatever. I don't know. But, you know, they, they gave me a copy. When I got back from, from this communication conference, I thought, "Oh, I'm gonna listen to myself speak." Put one of these in my CD player and listen to it. And the first thing that jumped out on me is how intense my voice was.

And it didn't let up. Like, I was just intense. And I was like, "My coach was so right. This is hard to listen to." I shut it off and I never listened to another one of my— of those CDs. It's like, it hurt.

I'm like, "Oh no, what did I put all these people through?" And. Wow. So I say that to say, if we're gonna develop ourselves as communicators, we gotta have feedback into saying, "Look, this is how you're coming across." Because in our minds, we can think, "This is what I said and this is what I meant and this is how I said it." But the true gauge is, what did your audience hear you say? How did they hear you say it?

And when you think about it as communicators, there's very few places where you get that. So if you're a team leader at a business and you lead in communicating to your staff, who in your staff is gonna come to you after meeting and say, "You know what? This is how you're coming across." Or, "This is— this is a weakness. This is a distraction." Uh, they don't really wanna do that then. If you're in ministry, you know, you're preaching a sermon, who afterwards is gonna say, "You know, that was good, but there's some things that were distracting me." Or, "This is—" or, "You know, I thought he had a great sermon, but there was no application.

I don't know what to do with it." What happens is we have almost no place to get personal feedback into our communication. Therefore, I'll continue in my bad habit of being intense all the time unless somebody says it. So that's where to develop yourself, you, you wanna read, you wanna watch good communicators. I've done that. You, you learn from these, but you need feedback into how you're coming across. And, uh, I got that at that conference from a coach speaking directly into that. And you can seek it as, you know, from your audience. So if you are teaching a Sunday school class, outside of that class, you can go to somebody that you know and trust and that somebody that would trust you and say, "Can you tell me how am I coming across?

You know, what are some things that I could work on?" And you can get people permission to give that. Uh, you know, as, as a preacher, you can do that. Um, but you've got to be— you've gotta be willing to take it or you'll shut it down. They won't give it again. And, and honestly, as a communicator, we really wanna do it well. Like, I do want— and I believe everybody, we want our audience to understand it. We want them to get it. We don't want to have roadblocks in the way.