From the course: Cultivating Presence and Impact in a Live and Virtual World

Are men and women heard differently?

From the course: Cultivating Presence and Impact in a Live and Virtual World

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Are men and women heard differently?

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- The next step in cultivating presence and impact is to really focus on being heard. Being heard at its core is talking about communication. In the literature, there is a lot of research about the gender differences between how men and women communicate and even how they hear one another. One of the most interesting I've found is that on average, at least in the U.S., and it's very similar in different parts of the world, women use about 20,000 words a day. On average in the U.S., and very similarly through different parts of the world, men use an average 7,000 words a day. So one way to reflect on this is women bond through words. That's how we develop meaningful relationships with each other. It starts very early in our lives of how we bond in friendships. But if the majority of our work place, in both government and business, men are in positions of power, and men want to hear less and communicate with less words, we're over-justifying, we're over-rationalizing, we're giving more information than possibly is really going to allow us to be heard. So you have to think about your audience. That's the first step. I'm not telling you to use a certain amount of words, but it is very powerful to be succinct and use headlines. When you think about that schedule on those big meetings that you're experimenting with your presence on, think about what you know about the content of that meeting, and if in the past, maybe if you ventured into talking about that subject, if there was excess information that could be trimmed and then what are the major headlines you want to get across.

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