Understanding Vs Agreement
Understanding vs Agreement
Whether you are presenting ideas, discussing plans, or negotiating with others, it is crucial to ensure that you can make your listeners clearly understand.
However, gaining understanding is just the first step. To achieve your goals, you also need to gain agreement from your audience.
- Understanding means that others comprehend the exact meaning of your message.
- Agreement means that they think what you are saying is good, right and true.
Understanding should come before agreement.
Therefore, the first thing to do is to make yourself clearly understood.
Followed by gaining their agreement.
It may be the case that they understand what you are saying, but they disagree.
That is just a fact of life.
Not everyone will agree with what you say. But we should strive for universal understanding.
You should be able to make yourself always understood, even if they do not agree.
Ideally, you would like to gain both their understanding and agreement.
How to Make People Understand
To make people understand you need to:
- use specific language
- give definitions
- use illustrative examples
- use numbers to express exact times, places, and quantities
- speak slowly enough to allow people to keep up with your presentation.
How to Gain Agreement
We gain their agreement by giving sufficient reasons to believe that what we are saying is true, right, good, practical, and fair.
The clearer your message, the easier it is to gain both understanding and agreement.
Remember that understanding comes from using clear language, and agreement comes from giving sufficient reasons to believe.
It is important not to invert the correct order and put agreement before understanding.
Coming to agreements before we have gained mutual understanding, leads to conflicts.
What happens when we sign agreements based upon misunderstanding? There is conflict.
Summary
As a professional person, your goal is to communicate effectively and achieve your objectives.
To do this, you must gain both understanding and agreement.
By following the right order and using clear and specific language, you can communicate your ideas effectively and achieve your goals.
Communication Skills Training
We recommend our Communication Skills Training course for anyone who is involved in making presentations. Learn to communicate with clarity, confidence and persuasiveness!
Blogs by Email
Do you want to receive an email whenever we post a new blog? The blogs contain article 5-10 minutes long - ideal for reading during your coffee break!
Further Reading in Communication - Persuasive Communication
-
Three Steps to Better Communication Skills
It is important to become a good communicator, since to achieve your goals, you need to gain the willing cooperation of others around you.
Read Article > -
Why are Some People Dangerous?
Most people would consider themselves rational, and a few may be inspiring. A great leader is both rational and inspiring. However, the inspirational but irrational communicator, is a dangerous combination.
Read Article > -
The Way You Speak to People
Learn to speak properly to people and you will gain their willing cooperation to help you. Negative talk tends to repel people.
Read Article > -
How to Get the Gift of the Gab
People who have developed the gift of the gab usually have an easier life, than those who struggle to find the words to properly express themselves.
Read Article > -
How to be more persuasive
How to make yourself more persuasive, by working on refining the communication of your message.
Read Article >
Looking for Communication Skills Training?
If you're looking to develop your Persuasive Communication Skills, you may find this Communication Skills Training Course beneficial:
Open Training Course Pricing and Availability
Next Open Course Starts in 19 days, Online - Teams, places available