Babel or Babble?

Many people have heard the Bible story of the tower of Babel. The whole earth spoke the same language and used the same words. And, man, in his arrogance decided to leverage that gift to collaborate and build a tower to reach Heaven. To rebuke them, God destroyed the tower and ‘confused their language’ (created many languages) so that they would not understand each other’s speech. That is how the tower’s name became Babel.  (ref. Gen 11:1-9)

I’ve come to the conclusion that God might have saved Himself the trouble. We confuse our language very well on our own.

Our love affair with buzzwords, jargon and meaningless language does as much to make it difficult to connect as speaking a foreign language. Add to that the different mental filters through which we see the world and it is amazing that we understand each other at all.

What can you do to make sure that you aren’t speaking babble?

• Be judicious about the use of buzzwords. Your idea of ‘bleeding edge’ and your client’s are likely different.
• Don’t jump on the bandwagon of the most current jargon in an attempt to sound smart, or current, or – I don’t know – what are you trying to sound like? And, for Heaven’s sake, don’t string a slew of jargon together.
• Be thoughtful about the way you are positioning yourself, your company and your services. Present them in a way that helps your prospect/client to see immediately how they can connect you to their needs.
• Make it your uppermost priority to be sure that you and your prospect/client are sharing meaning (rather than words). Use clarifying phrases like ‘What I mean by that is…’ or ‘That means many different things to our clients. Can you share with me a bit more about what you mean when you say…’

At the end of the day, you want to maximize your face time to be sure that you and your client are in alignment and leveraging your best practices to create synergy in a way that will leverage what you both have to bring to the table.

Got it?

 

“We often mistake fluency for comprehension. Because we can both use particular words fluently, we assume that we both mean the same things by them.” Mahan Khalsa

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