 You're listening, but our filter is preventing you from really getting the message? Welcome back, and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. We're working hard all this month to help everyone communicate better at work and at home so that we can all really understand each other. And this week we're going to talk about some of the internal filters we have that may prevent us from really hearing or understanding what someone is trying to tell us. We all have these filters, and being aware of them is a great first step towards becoming a better communicator. Last week we talked about barriers to communication, and the filters we're going to talk about this week can certainly be considered another barrier to communication. Filters are a little more internal than the circumstances we talked about, like power dynamics, values, and language, but those circumstances can certainly influence our internal filters. It's important for us to understand the filters we place on communication when someone else is talking to us, because we can miss critical information if one of our filters excludes it. This can lead to making a decision or taking an action without all of the relevant information. There are a lot of filters we place on communication, but we're only going to talk about a few today, and all of these come from a great article by Peter Vyata, and you can find that at the link below. The first filter we're going to talk about today is correcting, and I used to have a real problem with this one. Correcting is where we interrupt others to interject our view of what the facts are. And this can prevent us from really hearing and understanding what the other person is trying to say, because we're on the lookout for opportunities to correct them instead of listening to what they're saying. We also start to disregard their message, even if it is valid. In practical ways, we can keep ourselves from falling into this trap once we recognize it, or to ask ourselves if it's really that important that we correct facts now, or let the person finish and ask some clarifying questions when they're done, as well as asking if our desire to make the correction is genuinely to help the process, or if we're just trying to make ourselves look better by pointing out inaccuracies. Another filter along the same lines as correcting is interrogating. This is where we continue to drill down with questions, not from a perspective of trying to gather information, but to try to catch the person in a trap, or get them to take the blame for something. If we find ourselves continuing to ask, why did you do that, that can be a sign that we're interrogating. As with correcting, interrogating can keep us from really hearing and understanding, because we can miss important pieces of information if we're too focused on trying to assign blame and get the other person to admit to it. When we're interrogating, we're often focusing on motivations and intentions, rather than the facts of the situation. To avoid this filter, we can ask ourselves, is blame really important at this point? Is it more important to gather facts and come up with a solution now and deal with accountability later? Do the other person's intentions and motivations matter as much as the situation we're in right now? The last filter we're going to talk about today is one-upping. This is where, no matter what someone else tells us, we have a story or an achievement to tell them where we did it, smarter, better, faster. Just like the other two filters, one-upping prevents us from hearing and understanding the other person's message, because we're so focused on impressing everyone else. We all like to share our accomplishments and be an active part of the conversation. But there's nothing wrong with that. In order to do it without one-upping, we can choose our moments carefully to share our experience, as well as when we do share, focus on the shared emotional experience we have from doing the activity, instead of focusing on our success in the activity. So the remedies to all three of these filters is to treat people with respect and dignity while letting them finish what they have to say. And I know that sounds a little touchy-feely, but from a practical perspective, the best thing we can do is to let people get out their message without interrupting and save questions for the end without focusing on blame or status. We only talked about three filters today and there are a lot more out there. Check out Peter Viat's article to learn about more filters and see if you catch yourself using any of them. If you found this helpful, don't forget to check us out on Facebook and Twitter and join us every week for a live interactive leadership discussion on BLAB at 10 a.m. Pacific Time on Fridays. Click off on that globe to the right. That'll get you to subscribe to our email list and that'll bring all of our content direct to your inbox. Thanks for watching today. I really appreciate it. And remember, the future is out there. Lead the way.