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How do you feel when someone is not communicating clearly? What if it’s your boss, your teammate, or your teacher? Beyond feeling annoyed, many people mistrust those that are not being clear. It’s because those speaking are overlooking the human reasons that communicating clearly is essential for building trust. Let’s look at those human needs.

Communicating Clearly is Essential to Building Trust. Image by Fearless Stumbler via Flickr Creative Commons License.

Image by Fearless Stumbler via Flickr Creative Commons License.

Human Reasons Communicating Clearly Is Essential for Trust

1. Need to understand. When someone like a leader, teammate, or teacher, is talking to us, we have the innate need to feel competent. If they are not communicating clearly, we wonder — are we? Or is it their poor communication? These doubts create mistrust.

2. Sense of control. Most adults like to have a sense of control in their lives. When someone spews confusion at us, we wonder about their motives. Are they doing it on purpose? Are they trying to control the situation and us? This creates mistrust.

3. Innate learning styles. Listening to someone else speak is a way of learning. Yet their speaking styles may not clearly map to our different learning styles. An analytic learner wants things explained step-by-step. Meanwhile a driver-type teacher may be giving the big picture first and skipping details. This gap creates mistrust.

The Expectations of Success or Failure

4. Unstated expectations. When a leader, teammate, or teacher is spewing confusion, most of us still think that they expect us to do something with the information they are sharing. Yet, how can we be successful if we don’t understand what they are saying? This fear of failure creates mistrust.

Need to Collaborate

5. Denied collaboration. As you read the list above, you may have thought, why not just stop the speaker and ask questions to clarify? It’s a great step yet many speakers won’t stop along the way and take questions. Perhaps they don’t want to admit to themselves that they aren’t being clear. Or maybe they want full control over the moment. Either way, as they deny us the chance to collaborate and understand, they create more and more mistrust.

Communicating Clearly is Essential to Building Trust

Communicating clearly is far more essential for building trust than you might think. To do it well, stop along the way and check for understanding. Allow questions. The clarity you create with this approach will help now and teach you to communicate more clearly each time. You will learn so much about how you communicate, that it will improve every aspect of your work and life.

From my professional experience to your success,
Kate Nasser, The People Skills Coach™

Related Posts:
Are You Silencing Employees?
Service & Teamwork Collaboration: Why Bother?
Empathy Starts w/ Questions, Not Statements

©2022 Kate Nasser, CAS, Inc. Somerville, NJ. I appreciate your sharing the link to this post on your social streams. However, if you want to re-post or republish the content of this post, please email info@katenasser.com for permission and guidelines. Thank you for respecting intellectual capital.

Kate Nasser, The People Skills Coach™, delivers coaching, consulting, training, and keynotes on leading change, employee engagement, teamwork, and delivering the ultimate customer service. She turns interaction obstacles into interpersonal success. See this site for workshop outlines, keynote footage, and customer results.

Tags: clearly, communicating, communication, emotional intelligence, Leadership, listening, management, mistrust, people skills, relationships, sustain, Teamwork, trust