Tweak Your Message Without Losing Your Integrity

In this episode I expound upon an idea that came up in my conversation in episode 02 with Finka Jerkovic. I share a personal example of how my husband and I learned to honor each other by learning to approach each other authentically, while also honoring the other person’s voice.

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Transcript

Hey, hey!  This is Andrea, and welcome to my Voice Studio.  This is where we play with the idea that developing a voice of influence is quite a bit like developing a singing voice, which is something that I have some experience with.

So today, we’re going to talk about one little thing from our interview with Finka Jerkovic in Episode #2.  She talked about the Fascinate Assessment and how when we want to convey an authentic version of our voice and our message but we’re talking to somebody who doesn’t necessarily understand the way that we communicate, we need to tweak our messaging, not the message itself.  We still want to try to achieve the same outcome but we need to tweak the way that we talk to somebody.

Now, I want to give you a little example of how this is played out in my marriage with Aaron.  So we have taken a number of assessments throughout the years when we took this assessment, it was like having an objective mirror kind of looking back and affirming who we are and helping us to see how we’re different, how we’re the same, and how we can communicate differently or interact and honor one another in our differences.

So we went deep into Myers-Briggs and StrengthFinder, love them both.  But this last one that we did was called the Fascinate Advantage system and with the Fascinate Assessment, what I realized is this is really about voice and how we convey our message to one another and what our voice is like.  So the Fascinate Advantage system helps you identify the top two sort of languages that you speak in out of seven then they put those two together to come up with an archetype that kind of describes who you are.

So for me, I am the Maverick Leader, which is the language of innovation and the language of power.  So as a Maverick Leader, I am somebody who gets all these really great ideas that I’m confident that we need to move on right way.  Well, Aaron on the other hand is an Architect.  And the Architect speaks language of prestige which is like the language of excellence and the language of mystique which is the language of listening.

So you can imagine that when we’re dating this worked out really, really well.  But when we got married, it became more of an issue because I would have all these really great ideas that I would throw on my husband and he would kind of sit back and go “Whoa, wait a second,” and quite often, he’d sort of burst my bubble and not necessarily because he wanted to be me just because of the way that he thinks.  He sits back, he processes.  I mean just think of an architect, they’re going to make sure everything is in place, make sure it’s all very deliberate, whereas the Maverick Leader, you can imagine is kind of just all over the place and ready to go and not wanting to sit back and wait.

So what I’ve learned is that I need to speak his language when I have a new idea.  If I have a new idea, I need to give my husband a little space to think about it before we really have a discussion and make a decision together.  So if I have this idea, I bring it to him and maybe I will sort of gently offer a little nugget of it, just to sort of plant the idea in his mind.  Now, he knows this and I’m not being manipulative.  When I’m doing this, I truly wanted to honor who he is and how he processes things.  So I offer him a little nugget and say “You know, I’ve been thinking about this.”  And I just sort of leave it there and I give him the space that he needs to be able to think about it and then maybe a week or a few days later, I come back with a fuller version of my idea.

That is giving him some time to think about it a little bit and now he is more prepared with questions that he wants to ask or opinions that he wants to share because otherwise if I just come in and share my big idea, I could run all over him with my logic and my passion and whatever.  But then he could simply take a little pen out and poke my little balloon and burst my bubble.  And not just because of we are and the way that we communicate, but if we want to honor one another then he’s going to make a snap judgment and I’m not going to force him to have a discussion about something before he’s ready to really talk about it.

So this is just one way that you can think about when it comes to conveying your message but doing it in such a way that is yes, authentic to who you are and what you’re wanting to communicate, while at the same time, honoring the other person in the way that they communicate, the way that they process.  Because when we honor one another, we’re going to be able to have better dialogue and come to better conclusions together.

So if you’re interested in learning any more about the Fascinate Assessment, you can find the information about that on my website at voiceofinfluence.net.  Thank for being with me today in my Voice Studio, and I look forward to seeing you in the next interview episode.  Now, go and make your voice matter more!

 

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