 Having trouble getting your message across? We'll help you fix that. Welcome back, and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. This June at Evil Genius Leadership, we're working on becoming better communicators, because effective communication is key to great leadership. To communicate clearly and effectively, it's important that we understand what the things are that might get in the way of us getting our message across, or from understanding someone else's message. Today we're going to talk about some of these barriers to communication and how we can deal with them. One of the most common barriers to communication and also one of the easiest to deal with is when we aren't speaking the same language. While certainly speaking different foreign languages can be a problem, what we're talking about here is when we in our own profession have certain meanings for words or phrases that aren't common to others that we might be working with. Technical jargon is a very clear example of this. If we use a lot of technical jargon with someone who doesn't know what it means, we can overwhelm them and our meaning can get lost. There are some simple ways we can deal with this. If we need to use technical terms when talking to someone, we should make sure to define them as we bring them up, and if we're the one receiving the message and we don't understand a term, we should ask what it means so that we can clearly understand what the speaker is trying to tell us. In the military we talked about rank being a barrier to communication, but even in the civilian world, when two people are at different levels of the hierarchy in the organization and they're talking to each other, they can set up a dynamic where the difference in position and authority acts as a barrier to communication. As leaders, we need to understand that if we're speaking to someone who works for us, they may not be as open with communication as we would like them to be because they might be afraid of repercussions on their career if they speak their mind. If we're speaking to someone who is higher up in the chain than we are and we're concerned that we can't speak freely, it never hurts to ask if we can be honest with our thoughts. And even when disagreeing or pointing out problems, we should always do it with respect and dignity. And one more thing if we're in the leadership role of this dynamic. If you're like me and you like to think out loud and kick ideas around the group, you can give the impression that you're directing your team to do something when all you're really meant to do is brainstorm ideas, so be sure to be clear if you want your team to go forward with something you've talked about or if you're still thinking it over. Sometimes individuals' beliefs and values influence the content and tone of their message or how they receive a message. This can be a very challenging barrier because many of us aren't even aware that we're doing it. One of the ways to counter this is to clearly separate facts from beliefs or values as we facilitate discussion with others. Being aware of any bias we may have from a deeply held belief and asking a trusted advisor to help us hold that bias and check during discussions is one way we can mitigate this barrier to communication. A few weeks ago we talked about intellectual honesty and critical thinking and you can check out those videos for more practical tips on being aware of our biases and how we can avoid having them influence our thought processes. There are a few other barriers to communication like age, gender, state of mind and emotional barriers that can get in the way of effective communication. Most of these can be dealt with using active listening and asking for feedback to make sure we're getting our message across. Barriers to communication can prevent us from getting our message across to others effectively, whether verbal or written. Or it could turn out that someone's trying to communicate with us and we're not getting the message fully either. Recognizing these barriers exist and taking an active role in minimizing them can help us communicate clearly and effectively with everyone around us. If you found this helpful, make sure you follow us on Facebook and Twitter and join us every Friday at 10 a.m. Pacific Time for a live interactive leadership discussion on BLAB. Don't forget to click off on that globe to the right. That'll get you subscribed 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.