Understanding yourself comes from years of listening to others

I used to be quite the over-thinker. As I get older, though, I tend to lean towards under-thinking. It can be freeing when I trust that I know what I’m talking about. It helps, of course, to keep to only the things I do know about. Credibility is a hard-won commodity.

In his book ‘Outliers,’ Malcolm Gladwell argues that experts achieve their expertise by dedicating at least 10,000 hours to practicing one specific skill. The Beatles, he argues, would never have conquered the charts if they hadn’t performed contemporary pop songs eight hours a day, seven days a week for years before releasing their own music. By then, they just intuitively knew how a melodic hook works and what gets people onto their feet. 

Like a lot of Gladwell’s conclusions, it’s important not to get bogged down in the specifics of his rules of thumb, but focus on the bigger picture lessons. My point, out of his point, is that when you’ve been doing something long enough, you just know something’s right. Or wrong. And sometimes, you just know it. 

Sometimes you can’t verbalise how you know but it’s important to try. Finding time to do the over-thinking can be important. Asking ‘Why does this work?’, enables us to define what we offer and how offer more of it.

What works for us

Why do Quids in! messages land so well with its intended audience? Why is our money guidance so impactful? What have we got that other people doing seemingly similar things do not?

We know we’re trusted. Our independence matters. (I wouldn’t turn to a creditor for help if I was struggling to pay them each month.) Language and presentation is important. And being ‘one of us’ brings to life the value of lived experience. Our team knows what it’s like to struggle and we’re not ones to judge.

At the heart of all this is communication. This is inevitably at the heart of everything Quids in! does, in our publishing and in our one-to-one support and training events. All the above goes into everything we do and turns rapport into trust, and trust into action.

According to Forbes Magazine, there are five golden rules of communication we should understand: (1) The audience; (2) How timing is everything; (3) Why what they hear trumps what you say; (4) Broadcasting is not necessarily Communication; (5) The dangers of Ego.

This is my interpretation in the context of what I’ve learnt.

1. Know your audience

So many times, I’ve wanted to ask, ‘Have you actually met someone who’s struggling?’ The early iterations of the Universal Credit roll-out, for example, suggested its architects hadn’t. Quids in! surveys its readership, we’re obsessed with the data from our support services, and we recruit people with lived experience. This gives me authority at local meetings to say ‘they’re not interested in your skills and careers programmes, they just want to be able to feed their kids’.

2. Timing is everything

The people that Quids in! supports don’t necessarily want to discuss employment now, but they might when all their other options are exhausted. But we also accept that maybe people aren’t ready right now for support at all and they disengage. That’s okay, and it’s why we call to introduce ourselves and manage expectations.

3. What you say is less important than what other people want to hear

How do we know what people want to discuss? We listen. Our Money Health-Check is our active listening process: ask questions (be curious); hear the responses (capture them); feed back what we heard; start the conversation; identify priorities. We have semi-automated the process by creating a digital tool but it takes a human to engage. (The web-based app also gives us data to evidence their needs and demonstrate our impact and it is now available for community groups to licence from us.) Participants guide us with what they want to know and where they want to start. Now they’re listening.

4. Don’t confuse broadcasting with communication

At the end of a Money Health Check, participants see their responses and our automated guidance. An email is automatically generated for them and a follow-up conversation is booked. We have a record but that still doesn’t mean that messages have landed. So, our next step is to find some quick wins that draw people in – something like a benefits check or using a comparison site for broadband, say.

5. Leave your ego at the door

Forbes says, “If your attempts at communication fail, don’t blame your audience – blame yourself.” I have been saying this a lot at regional strategic meetings recently. As professionals, we have to take responsibility for service failures, for example. I routinely push back on the idea that deprived communities ‘lack aspiration’. They don’t. They just might not aspire to doing what we’d like them to. We’re paid to get it right. 

Basically, if we know our audience, because we listen and we hear them, we’ll do things better.

Trusting my instincts is not a bad place to be but I need to be on call to explain a flippant one-liner or even a facial expression. (I also have a rubbish poker face.) It can be useful to be a disrupter at meetings where assumptions are bouncing around. Luckily, our process gives us the data to back us up when we push back.

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