I’ve quit smoking many times in the past. I should be really good at it by now. But I’ve never gone more than a few days without a single puff of a single cigarette.
On November 12, I quit, really and for good. No cheating.Here’s what I did differently: I told the world the minute I made the (snap) decision.
I didn’t – as the experts say – prepare myself and pick a quit day and all that. I just felt so rotten one morning that I dumped my remaining cigarettes in the trash (breaking them in half to reduce the temptation of garbage-rummaging). I immediately went to my Facebook page and posted this:
That’s it. I quit. Cold turkey (with nicotine gum). This time I’m serious. If you love me, ask me tomorrow & tomorrow & next week how it’s going.
My Facebook friends knew I was quitting before my husband did, because they were “here” (they sit here in my computer all day, you know, waiting for me to say hello) while he was at work.
Communication lesson #1: If you want to make it happen, promise it. As publicly as possible.
In 1961, President John F. Kennedy said, “…this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.” It was a breathtakingly impossible goal. Yet it took less than 10 years for Neil Armstrong to take his one small step.
Publish your publication schedule. (You think you’d be reading this newsletter today if I hadn’t publicized that it comes out the second Thursday of every month?) Tell the world when your website redesign is going to launch. Even if you miss your date, you’ll miss it by less than you would have if you had not deliberately set yourself up for embarrassment.
After I published that announcement, I some great reinforcement on my Facebook page and by email. The next day, I reported that I’d gotten through 24 hours, and I got more kudos.
After a few days, I didn’t post at all. I was disappointed that no one checked in. I wrote, “Y’all are not doing a very good job of keeping me honest.” Of course I got more encouragement (as well as a couple of well-deserved comments about why I couldn’t manage my own health, for pity’s sake).
My virtual friends got the message: I really needed their vocal and repeated support. And they delivered.
Communication lesson #2: If you need it, ask for it. Keep asking for it until you get it.
This one will resonate with those of you in nonprofit development – though I think it’s a good life lesson for us all. You may want to couch the message in more general or less dire terms, but “We need $150,000 by the end of the month or we will not be able to feed people in February” is the message that will bring in money from repeat donors who have demonstrated commitment to your cause.
Those are the lessons I learned from what I did. The other two lessons I learned from what my friends and supporters did. (Great communicators put themselves on both sides of every conversation.)
I kept asking for what I needed, but one of my ways of asking was subtle. When someone posted something about how my lungs would get fried if I started smoking again – a perfectly reasonable thing to say to someone who is quitting – I didn’t respond. When someone posted something about how my lungs were clearing up after only a few weeks of non-smoking, I gave them a big THANKS. If they just said, “You go, girl!” I responded to that, too.
The positive messages were the ones I found motivating. My best supporters got the message and told me the kind of things I needed to hear.
Communication lesson #3: Listen to what your audiences need – and deliver.
Your audiences will not say, “Don’t talk to me like that. Talk to me like this.” They will be precisely as subtle as I was with my supporters. When your message does not meet their needs, the only way you will know is a deafening silence.
Wait for the silence. Listen to the silence. It is trying to tell you something that is just as important as the envelopes and emails you get in response to more successful messages.
Almost all of my Facebook friends are real-life friends, family, or colleagues. They were supporting me in quitting smoking because they care about me. They could have done it in person, on the phone, by email – it’s just that having the social media platform enabled me to enlist a lot more helpers a lot more quickly.
But here’s the surprising thing: Some of my most vocal supporters, the ones who regularly posted encouraging messages, are people I barely know through some third person. One of those supporters is someone I “know” only through Facebook.
Those people care less about me than my real-life friends do. (At least I hope so.) I suspect that what they care about is non-smoking generally. They would support a total stranger who was trying to quit just because quitting is a good thing to do.
But here’s the thing: One way or another they care, or they wouldn’t have bothered.
Communications lesson #4: Care.
Care, that is, about your audiences – who they are, what they want, what they need to hear from you.
If you have trouble caring about people you’ve never met, find the thing about them that you do care about. That’s probably something to do with the cause you hope to engage them with, the work that you want to do together – the equivalent of quitting-smoking-as-a-generally-good-thing-for-anyone.
If you care – about the audiences or about the goal you want to share with them – but you don’t know how to receive and send CARE messages, get help. (Hire me, for instance.)
Just don’t pretend to care. It’ll show. There is no substitute for genuine passion.