Leading and Learning: Powerful Communication

This last week I got to watch General Conference for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I heard a lot of things I needed to. This is a perfect example of what powerful and prolific communication is. We had two great guys from the BYU Communications Department, Todd and Joe, come and talk to us about the power of communication. I thought Conference was a great example of what they talked about.

From a worlds perspective it has to be one of the greatest forms of communicating a message to a mass group of people in a specific organization. They see our leaders and must say, “Wow, how do you get everyone together like this to listen to you?” The trick is....it isn’t them that gather. It is Christ like leadership at its finest.

“What I the Lord have spoken, I have spoken, and I excuse not myself; and though the heavens and the earth pass away, my word shall not pass away, but shall all be fulfilled, whether by mine own voice or by the voice of my servants, it is the same.” -Doctrine and Covenants 1:38

Listen to that power. He has so much confidence that his servants will carry his message to his children. How does he do it? He knows that his servants teach the doctrines and principles of His kingdom. In so doing, it opens the door for the Spirit to come and teach His children the ways in which they need to apply the message to each personally. Now some of you may wonder, “What is the Spirit or what is its role in this?” Simply put the Spirit is part of the God head; God, Jesus, and the Spirit. The Spirit testifies of God and Jesus Christ and their truths. Thus he is sent to us to comfort and guide us in our personal lives. A lot of people would recognize it as your conscious or a gut feeling. Well, those feelings have a real name because they are real. It is the Spirit that invites you and me to act on the messages we receive.

What some leaders don’t understand is that communicating a message isn’t about demanding people to accept your message or even creating a specific wordy lecture that wins people over. It is presenting truths that inspire others to act. More than that, an outstanding leader’s communication is recognizing the spirit is who will carry the message to the “audience”. So if it is built on personal gain and deception, forget about it. If you are trying to bring about good, all good things come from God.

Whether it’s in my family, work, or church I want my message built on what I believe. The two guys that spoke to us said that it is really hard to present a message you don’t really agree with. I want to be able to communicate like these men. I want to bring a true heartfelt message that creates a channel between God and my children, between God and my co-workers, between God and my fellow brethren in Christ.

A pattern by which I have seen before in my own personal life was on my two year mission for the Church of Jesus Christ. In my service I had the opportunity to plan weekly meetings for most of my mission. In these meetings a group of missionaries, in my surrounding areas, would meet together to work on being better missionaries. To prepare for these meetings I would evaluate performance, needs, and people that other missionaries were teaching. I would take that and the message that our mission president would want the missionaries to know and then go to God. Every time my thought and studies would begin to gain a focus. With that focus I would study around it until I felt comfortable and ready to share that message to my fellow missionaries. It was then that I knew what I would say. I can testify from personal experience the more I prepared and then relied on the spirit the message was always clear and there was a difference. In summary, the pattern by which I share my message is:

1 Taking information to the Lord and seeking His guidance