Tag Archives: communication

BCC is your contacts’ best friend

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So much of our modern communications technology gets dumped in our laps without instructions other than USE ME! Oh, there’s usually a “help” button on it somewhere – but honestly, how many of you click that, or if you did quickly gave up because it wanted you to  view a bunch of slides/verbiage and your eyes quickly glazed over?

Thus it’s no wonder that you may be accidentally annoying your friends, as well as exposing them and many strangers to spam address collectors and hackers if you don’t know about using BCC.

BCC = “Blind Carbon Copy” (forget that anyone under ~25 may never have seen carbon paper used!). BCC is one of the fields available in the header when you are composing an email (in some applications you may need to expand the header to find it). Any addresses you put into the BCC field will be delivered normally… BUT… unlke using the TO or CC fields,  the recipient will not see any other addresses you put into BCC – hence “blind.”

When sending email to many people, if they do not already know each other (e.g., people who subscribe to your newsletter or who want to be kept informed about your band’s gigs) you do NOT want to send your message in such a way that they all can see each others’ addresses, for several reasons:

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Are you the host or the presenter?

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I’m listening to the recording of an on-line presentation of a well-known author by a life coach with whom I’m not familiar. She lost me in the 1st five minutes – first by continuing to jabber on while ostensibly introducing the author (and cutting the latter off as she tried to respond), then controlling the interview (which was billed as a “presentation” but the author  was allowed little independence) with reams of prepared questions. I could tell that the author caught on to the situation immediately and fell back on just answering the questions… which by the way have little to do with the stated focus of the project.
I don’t think I’ll bother with the other dozen “presenters” based on this sample, since I’m not interested in hearing this one woman’s controlling chatter.
If your purpose is to learn things from a person, listen more than talk.

Feeling Music With your Whole Body

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Amazing Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie (who lost her hearing in her early teens) gave a TED Talk about “Listening To Music With Your Whole Body” – it’s 32 minutes well worth your time.

If someone asks me: “Oh well, how do you hear that?” Then I simply say: “I really don’t know, but I just basically hear that through my body, through opening myself up. How do you hear that?” “Oh well, I hear it through the ears…” …you know…” Well, what do you mean, ‘through the ears’, what are you actually hearing?” So, when you try to bounce the question back to a socalled hearing person, then, they simply do not know how to answer these questions…

There’s also a longer documentary about this, Touch the Sound.

Quick Quotes

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Things that fell out of my mouth today during a meeting:

Inter- means “between groups.” Intra- means “within one group.”  (e.g., “interscholastic competition” means a contest between different schools;”intra-team communications” means talking amongst your teammates)

Get to “yes” first, from all parties involved, to avoid later “no”s.

Escalate responsibly…

Random thought after explaining to a non-IT person how they broke a piece of the internet (though not totally their fault – combining a 1980s app with arcane Exchange 2010 features frequently does not end well):

A key communications skill when explaining tech to nontech users seems to be anthropomorphizing the effect of their actions on the application.