We start the year by grounding ourselves. Why are we here? What are we doing? Why are we doing it this way? And I give one suggestion to guide your work in communication this year.
The start of a new year is a good time to think big picture, so we’re asking big questions. Why are we here? What are we doing? Why are we doing it this way? And I’m also going to give you one suggestion to guide your work in communication, no matter what you’re planning this year.
Hi everybody, this is 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication. Giving you inspiration and strategies to improve engagement, experience, and satisfaction since 2017. I’m Dr. Anne Marie Liebel, a researcher, consultant, and educator with expertise in communication and education. I’m here to dig into some of what we might take for granted about communication in our professional lives.
And if you want to strengthen or extend the work you can do in your professional sphere, this is a place for you. Because communication touches everything. We’re here to learn, to get inspired, and most importantly, make the difference we got into our jobs to make.
So yeah, it’s the start of the new year, so let’s think big picture for a little bit. Let’s step back and remind ourselves why we’re here. Communication is the thing we’ve all got in common here, communication in our professional contexts. But why communication? Right, it can be hard to remember why? Because while we’re doing it all the time, we’re in the weeds every day. So that’s why I wanted to take a moment to kind of reset for us.
Let’s remember why we’re doing this. Let’s remember why we’re focusing on communication. Because we know how valuable it is. Sometimes it can be hard to remember that not everybody else does. And yes, probably part of your job is convincing somebody of the value of the work that you’re doing. So hopefully what I’m sharing today can help you make arguments when you need to make them. But I’m also hoping you can enjoy kind of articulating this to yourself as well.
So communication is the thing we’ve got in common. And we’re using it mostly–I think I can say this with some confidence–most of the people listening here are trying to improve some sort of outcomes. It might be your role involves improving patient safety or patient experience, patient engagement, patient satisfaction.
Maybe you’re on the employee side and you’re looking at employee satisfaction, employee engagement, employee retention. We’re all looking for ways to improve these factors. So why communication? because communication is integral to every one of them. So working on communication helps us be more effective at our jobs.
Another way of saying this is communication and patient education, which I talk about in the show too, are modifiable factors in satisfaction, engagement, experience.
So let’s noodle on this question about why communication a little bit more.
Another way to answer it is ’cause it’s something that we all do all the time. Therefore, communication is a tool we all already use. It’s a leverage point that we all already have at our disposal. Communication applies to everyone. Every role, every rank, every title in an organization.
When we focus on communication and the ways that language gets used the possibilities are also very very broad because of how powerful communication is as a tool. It’s how we connect with other people.
It’s how we build some of the most important things in this life: our relationships, our identities. We also use communication to build spaces, habits, ways of working and thinking. A lot of this work is done through language. We build ideas, we build momentum, we build boundaries, we build walls, we build bridges.
We can shape things with language too. We can shape a story, an argument, an issue, shape relationships. We also can and do use language to tear things down, tear down those walls, tear down ideas, unfortunately also tear down people.
So a focus on communication is going to help you no matter what you’re creating. And this is just our professional lives I’m talking about. I’m not even touching a communication in our personal lives, I’m not even touching all of the artistic uses of communication and language, song, stories, poetry. I’m just talking about everyday work communication here.
And most often I hear that people want to know how to be more effective and efficient across all social groups. Like people want to work as well with diverse communities as they do with mainstream audiences. So this is where working with equity lenses on communication helps us. And that’s part of what I do here in the show and with my clients.
Putting on equity lenses helps us see when we’re doing better with some groups of people than with others. And certainly over the past couple years the equity conversation has evolved. But in general I find that people now know what they need to be doing and are looking for new ways to do it or more ways to do this work.
Again, why communication when we’re talking about equity? Because communication is a modifiable factor, everyone does it, it’s powerful, the leverage points, and if we’re careful and thoughtful, the ways we communicate can help promote equity.
This does mean additional effort. We know how important it is to reach everyone, connect with everyone, teach everyone, but we know that this is difficult to do. So when we are asking questions about what are we doing here and why communication, I’m also asking you to constantly challenge your assumptions about your work.
This challenging of assumptions is one of the secret ingredients to 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication, the particular way I encourage reflective practice. We have reflexivity as a tool to examine our language, scrutinize it, interrogate it, and people tell me year in and year out this is one of their favorite parts of the show. Which, my friends, is saying something about you because these kinds of questions, “What are we doing here? Why communication?” These kinds of questions can make people itchy!
Because sometimes it can feel like the answer should be obvious. And people can get uncomfortable when we start poking around a little bit too much. We see that there’s more going on below the surface. And you’re aware of that, and my clients tell me that they’re aware of that too.
And I want to let us all off the hook, because it’s hard for us to notice our own language, largely because language is meant to be used more or less on autopilot. And so as a result, the sophisticated things and the complicated things that we’re doing with language can pass us by unnoticed.
Another reason it’s hard to notice our own language is because over years of being in a profession or in an organization we’ve been kind of acclimated into various specific ways of communicating by our organizations, by our contexts, and again this tends to happen largely without our noticing.
So for each of us we have a kind of normal way of communicating, a way of thinking about communicating. So this year, no matter what you’re doing with communication, I’m going to ask you to keep noticing your normal. Keep scrutinizing your communication to help you switch off autopilot and be more intentional with your communicating. This is about willingness to stir up the habits we can get into, the ways that we work, that we’re kind of used to, that we all carry around with us.
Examining language use at an individual level and an organizational level is a process. It takes effort. It takes courage to question assumptions, it takes courage to reflect, it takes courage to scrutinize and interrogate and question ourselves. It can feel threatening to admit we don’t have all the answers. It can feel threatening to acknowledge our limitations.
And I want to validate how hard this work is. In our jobs, we’re already dealing with incredibly complex, often intersectional issues, often deep -seated issues. And we still need to act with discipline and rigor and high standards. Can’t be messy. We need this work to last.
Now you could be turning away. You could be choosing not to see, not to struggle. Nope, not my lane, but you’re not! You are choosing to spend your time thinking about your own communication voluntarily. That is a sign of courage and bravery and imagination. That’s part of why this show exists, because it’s part of the community of people doing this work.
If you value this show and the stories and inspiration from the series, the research, I’ve got good news. I can help your organization! Message me on linked, visit healthcommunicationpartners.com and click on contact, sign up for the newsletter while you’re there. If you get my newsletter just respond to it–it comes right to me! Thanks for listening. This has been 10 Minutes to Better Patient Communication from Health Communication Partners. Audio engineering and music by Joe Liebel, additional music from Alexis Rounds.