Great Communicators Always Look In The Mirror
Great Communicators Always Look In The Mirror
Whilst mentoring and teaching marketers, I’ve said so many times over the years that to be successful, they need to step out of their own shoes and take their customers’ perspective.
To be the voice of a customer, reflecting needs and priorities back into the organisation, a marketer must constantly see everything from their customer’s perspective. If they only think and look from their own viewpoint, they will inevitably be biased and controlled by their own ego.
I call this process looking in your Marketing Mirror and it’s so applicable in everyone’s personal life as well as professional.
As a life-long introvert (well I would be wouldn’t I!) I tend to listen more than I speak and this gives me the space and time to appreciate the mirror and in turn reflect on how I must be appearing and sounding to whoever I am encountering.
This doesn’t mean I am worrying about this, just that I am tuned to it and aware.
It also doesn’t mean that I am especially good at this, but rather that it’s a natural default because of my introversion.
There are many people, who you might describe as intuitives, or ‘sensitives’, as they are sometimes called in the holistic world, who ‘feel’ a lot of this mirror effect without consciously trying. They are acutely aware of the feelings and emotional impacts of those around them and the energy flows in both directions. They may or may not be aware that they are doing this, but for the rest of us it needs to be a honed skill that is important if we are to become both self-aware and relevant to others.
Looking in your own mirror will help you to become more self-aware and more adept at flowing with the needs of those you are communicating with. How do you appear, what is the impact of what you are saying and how you are saying it? Is your tone of voice, style and body language appropriate to the other person(s)? What do you see if you hold this virtual mirror in front of you, both when you are alone and planning an encounter, conversation, date or meeting? What do you see, that may be very different, when you old up your virtual mirror as you in front of the other person(s)? What would you want to change and why? What do you cherish and celebrate and why?
Hold it up now and what do you see?
Neil Wilkins
