I think the best communication skill you can possibly develop is curiosity. So today’s episode is going to be a little bit about that. How did you become the communicator that you are? How you can get better at it?
Hi, everybody. This is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners. Since 2017, we’ve been giving you inspiration and strategies to improve engagement, experience, and satisfaction. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, a researcher, consultant, and educator specializing in communication and education. This podcast series makes space to dig into what it’s easy to take for granted about communication in our professional lives, especially in healthcare and public health, but increasingly across sectors
because communication touches everything. We’re here to learn and get inspired, but most importantly, make the difference we got into our jobs to make.
I help organizations act with clarity and confidence in complex, high-stakes situations. I’m currently booking consulting clients. You can work with me. Reach me on LinkedIn, on Instagram at healthcommunicationpartners or at healthcommunicationpartners .com.
And while you’re there, check out our latest episode on communicating about uncertainty. Wow, that was a hit. I’ll put the link in the show notes.
So, “think before you speak.” We’ve all heard that advice and most of us assume that we do. We feel like we do. The tricky and kind of fascinating bit about language is that it’s designed to be used mostly on autopilot. So we think before we speak, but for a tiny fraction of the words we actually use, this is not a flaw. It’s how conversations are even possible, like how talk works at scale. We can’t slow down for every word. We have to be able to automatically produce and automatically consume a whole lot of words without concentrating on every single one.
What’s harder to see is how much our communication runs below this level of conscious thought. So habits, patterns, assumptions that we haven’t examined in years or ever, again, not a personal failure. This is a feature of language. And it’s also worth looking at because in your role, your words carry weight. They affect how people understand their health, their options, their situation. And that’s why this show exists. The question isn’t whether you communicate on autopilot. You do, we all do, but this is more of an invitation to be or continue to be curious about what’s running in the background.
Now you didn’t arrive as the communicator you are right now, randomly. Communicator you has been shaped by the communicators you were around in your early life. Also by your training, by the institutions you’re a part of, by the clinical culture you work in, by every supervisor who modeled something you either adopted or rejected. These are all the communities that you’ve been in and are a part of.
Our communities are massively important to our language use and vice versa, but that’s for another episode.
Many of the formative experiences happened before you could evaluate them. You absorbed patterns, and some of those patterns serve you well today. Some, maybe less so. The professionals I work with are, by and large, very skilled communicators. And you, as listeners to this show, are some of the best communicators on the planet. You’ve already had the curiosity and you’ve developed some visibility into your own communication. So let’s keep going in that direction. One client called it “intentionality” about our communication, when we’re making choices rather than running that kind of default autopilot.
There is a lot of advice out there on communication, what to say, how to say it. There’s scripts for difficult conversations. This advice can be useful depending on how you take it up. What works for one clinician in one context might not work for another. What works depends on, in part, your patients, your organization, your specialty, your personality, your role in the hierarchy, all of this shape what effective communication looks like for you. So the approach I’m offering is less prescriptive and more Investigative, not a standard, but a mindset, one based on reflecting and inquiring into how you actually spontaneously use language in the context that you live and work in. The goal is to be more familiar with, be the expert on your own communication, in your role, in your context, with your patients. So what could this look like in practice?
I’ve already said there’s a whole lot going on beneath the surface in communication and in any given conversation, right? There’s patterns, habits, assumptions, inclinations, histories, in the moment responses, those moves that you make before you’ve even quite decided to make them. Developing a deep understanding and awareness of your communication takes time and intentionality. So I’m a fan of starting or getting curious about one small part, a small piece of talk.
And if you’ve heard other episodes in this series, you’ve heard me talk about what some of these are, but I’ll pull up another example right now. Think about the last time a patient asked you something that surprised you. or made you uncomfortable, like threw you off. You didn’t see that one coming.
Can you remember what went through your head? Like, what did you do? Where did you go in that split second before you responded? Did you draw a blank? Did you flip through a few possible scenarios about where this could have come from, what they’re talking about? Did you scream internally? How proud were you of how you handled that moment? Is there anything there you’d want to change?
Getting curious like this about these kinds of moments isn’t just interesting to do. It is interesting. Come on, we’re all fascinating. But it builds something valuable. It lets you communicate more intentionally, more like you, without having to slow things to a crawl. I’m not suggesting that you go ahead and second guess every word, but periodically. examine a moment and those autopilot kind of moves. So you know what your autopilot is doing. And especially for those moments when it’s doing something that maybe it’s not what you want to be doing.
It also makes you a better student of communication in general. So when you read articles, like I mentioned at the beginning of this little section here, about how to talk to patients or you’re sitting through a training, you can ask, in what way does this apply to my context? Does this fit the communicator that I am the one that I want to be?
Now we can’t talk about language without also talking about power. You know: Conversations are not often a level playing field in this life. One of the most consistent obstacles to effective communication in healthcare is hierarchy. And it’s one that’s easy to overlook precisely because it’s the norm. It surrounds us. It’s the water we all swim in.
Now, as the health professional, you are usually the more powerful participant. in a patient conversation, not a criticism. It’s a fact about the situation. You have the expertise, the authority, the institutional role. The patient also has power, yet they may be scared in pain, unfamiliar with, or distrustful of the environment.
That power differential shapes what can be said, what isn’t said. It shapes whether the patient asks The question they really came in with, whether they correct some misunderstanding about them and their symptoms, whether they tell you something isn’t working, the quality of the relationship you have with them, the quality of the information you get from them are both at issue here. Knowing this hierarchy exists, what do you usually do with it? How do you typically manage it?
There are concrete ways to share power in a conversation. You probably already use these, but think of this as more of a reminder of some of what you could be doing if you are concerned about really inviting someone to be an equal partner in a conversation.
- Let the other person speak more. The irony, I know this is a podcast, it’s a monologue, har har, but really try to let the other person speak. even just a little bit more than you usually do. Resist the pull to fill silence.
- Wait time for the win.
- Use the language that that person brought in with them. The terms that they use, go ahead and use them too. Maybe build a bridge to the clinical terminology that they were pointing at.
- Allow people to teach you something. Like genuinely being a student in that moment. I’m going to put a link in here to one of the times that Dr. Jonas Attilus came by the show because he talks about being a student of his patients in such a remarkable way.
- Take each of their questions seriously, even and maybe especially the ones that seem tangential.
- Follow their lead on what the conversation is about, really. whether or not it made it onto the
- agenda.
Now, none of these are techniques that you have to faithfully deploy. These are orientations, orientations to the patient, to the conversation, to the work you’re doing together. You are already doing this work. You’re in rooms every day where language matters enormously. You’re making judgment calls in real time, under pressure with limited information. So I’m encouraging you to be or continue to be a student of how you do that.
Not in a way that makes you self-conscious or weird, slows you down, but in a way that gives you more agency over a process that is mostly below conscious awareness. As my mentor told me, let yourself be in process. The communicator you are now is not finished.
There’s no finished product. This is an ongoing inquiry. Your words have a big impact on the people around you. That’s a lot of power. And this is about getting more and more familiar with it.
This has been 10 minutes to better patient communication from Health Communication Partners. Audio engineering and music from Joe Liebel. Additional music from Alexis Rounds.Thanks for listening to 10 minutes to better patient communication from Health Communication Partners, LLC. Find us at healthcommunicationpartners.com.