Like most skills deemed necessary for success, communication skills happen along multiple dimensions, like personal vs. professional or individual vs. organizational. But for all the talk about active listening, concise writing and body language, the discussion about effective communication ignores the primacy of your ability to communicate with yourself.
Advice directed to beauty school students, licensed pros and salon owners often focuses on interacting with clients in the workplace. For now, I want you to focus on yourself. In the last week, have you missed an appointment or a deadline? Neglected to contact or respond to someone? Avoided reading your mail/emails/texts? Forgotten to do something important? Searched for something you lost or misplaced? These things happen.
“The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.” – George Bernard Shaw
If only you could pay someone to keep you on task, supply reminders, arrange appointments, pay bills, reply to texts/emails/phone calls, etc. That’s a viable solution if you can afford to hire someone. But as a responsible adult, delegating tasks to a virtual assistant, business manager, or another person does not solve the problem of a lack of communication. Unless you cede control, you’d still need to communicate to facilitate the successful completion of tasks.
You could solve your own problems more directly by improving how you communicate with yourself.
Accomplishing as much as I do professionally (salon owner, licensed professional, independent educator and industry advocate) and personally (caregiver, parent and spouse), the credit does not belong to my motivation, perseverance, cooperativeness, confidence or tolerance for stress. The credit for my success belongs to intrapersonal communication, how I communicate with myself. Out of necessity and a desire to maintain control, I’ve developed a workflow for exchanging and organizing information. While far from perfect, my workflow allows me to prioritize and systemize as much as possible, providing both practical and psychological benefits.
“Communications technology changes possibilities for communication, but that doesn’t mean it changes the inherited structure of the brain.” – Margaret Atwood
Blaming technology for the volume of information that confronts us would be easy, but even snail mail has the potential to overwhelm if not managed properly. Despite alternative methods of communication, the accessibility of information and the convenience of online and recurring payments, I still receive physical mail that requires my timely attention. As a precaution, I’m deliberate when giving any mailing address to limit and channel what I receive. While three possible locations exist (home, business and post office), I choose to limit the options to two: home for shipping and post office for billing. The post office serves as my primary address for everything governmental, legal or financial for the purposes of consistency, security and permanency. Visiting multiple times a week, I don’t leave without immediately recycling any bulk or junk mail. Next, I open what remains to determine what must be saved and what can be discarded. (The shredder awaits in the garage!) The mail allowed inside my home requires my attention, and eventually gets filed, scanned or shredded when no longer needed.
“What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.” – Strother Martin
No matter how organized and responsible I try to be, sometimes my workflow does not function as planned. For example, I once missed a dental appointment despite having it in my calendar and being reminded by text the day before. But no excuses, I screwed up. And I have only myself to blame for this failure.As a professional who operates by appointment, I cannot afford to waste anyone’s time, or my own. My missing an appointment happens so rarely that I cannot recall the last time. Embarrassed and angry at myself, I apologized and offered to pay; the staff treated me kindly and promptly rescheduled. Needless to say, this unintended experience reinforces the importance of effective communication.
To communicate more effectively with myself, I should acknowledge the multiple mistakes I made.
First, I rarely schedule personal appointments on a workday, especially when doing so requires an earlier and more congested commute. And yet, I made an exception against my better judgment. Second, I did not set any reminders when I entered the appointment in my online calendar. Third, I didn’t bother to check my calendar that morning because being a workday, I knew when my earliest client would arrive. Fourth, I engaged with a colleague in an unplanned phone conversation, and I allowed that and other distractions to interfere with my morning routine. Fifth, I neglected to account for road construction that slowed traffic, eliminating any chance of arriving within the scheduled time.
“Communication works for those who work at it.” – John Powell
Because human error accounts for most of my communication failings, I already trust technology more than my memory, paper calendars, sticky notes and hard copies. Beyond various forms of communication that must be managed, important information must also be organized and accessible for later reference. Multiple devices, technologies and services combine in my workflow to function as follows:
• Separate personal interactions from work with two cell phones.
• Employ different email addresses according to purpose.
• Manage contacts and send marketing emails (Constant Contact).
• Host and participate in live virtual meetings (Zoom).
• Present information on my website (WordPress, Elementor and GoDaddy).
• Produce documents (Pages), spreadsheets (Numbers) and presentations (Keynote).
• Create graphics (Canva).
• Sort digital content (email, documents, images) into folders.
• Backup to both physical and cloud-based storage.
• Schedule clients, send reminders and collect payments (Square).
• Maintain a separate online calendar for personal events.
• Track my personal and business finances (Quicken).
• Automate bill payments and go paperless.
If this seems complicated, I understand. But when a lack of communication generates stress, decreases productivity and possibly ruins relationships, what more, or less, can I do? I could always do better. As the demands on my time and resources continually evolve, I’ll refine my workflow to improve efficiency in communicating with myself and others. Here’s hoping new technologies compensate for changes in the functioning of my brain.
An earlier version was published by Beauty Cast Network.