You've got to love Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver. If you
haven't seen it you might want to check it out. It's an old (really old) movie about a cabby who becomes a vigilante. In that movie, DeNiro utters that now famous line, "Are you talking to me?" "ARE YOU TALKING TO ME???" He stands in front of a mirror practicing that line over and over.
It's all about communication. DeNiro wanted to communicate his question and his attitude in that scene. And, we do that all the time. You probably don't practice as much as DeNiro did, but you run things through your mental mirror to see what it looks like in real life.
Communication is important in business. Actually, it's critical that we not only understand what is being said, but it's important to know who is being spoken to in communication. An old friend of mine related a story that illustrates this point perfectly.
When Jeannie and her sister were little, her dad was in the military. That meant they spent a lot of time on the base and in the shops and restaurants around the base. One morning, Jeannie, her sister and dad were having breakfast at a local restaurant. While they waited for their food to arrive the girls decided it would be fun to blow straw paper at each other. They shot their paper missiles back and forth over and over. Eventually the food arrived, but the barrage didn't let up. Finally, their officer dad had enough.
In typical military fashion, he barked out, "Put that paper down and eat those eggs!" At the table right
next to them was a young soldier of a lower rank. He was causally reading the morning paper. When Jeannie's dad barked out his order the young soldier immediately dropped his paper and scarfed down his eggs.
Communication! It's important. What you say, who you say it to, how it's interpreted and what the end result will be is dependent on you.
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