Umair Afzal shares his strategies for clear and precise communication, explaining why it’s crucial for dental professionals.
It’s a familiar scenario for many of us. Through an email, you get a response that doesn’t answer your questions. During a presentation, you see eyes glaze over and phones emerge.
Despite your relentless effort with patients, they still don’t remember what you tell them. We all know how it feels when the intended message isn’t hitting the mark, and the delivery feels underwhelming.
You could do this perfectly and still not succeed. But by explaining yourself in an impactful way, you can give yourself the best chance of being understood and achieving your objectives when speaking to others.
Below, I’ll share strategies that have helped me overcome communication barriers. I’ll also touch on my personal life and provide some examples from my clinical practice.
Personalised communication
At times, it can seem like our lives overflow with information. However, I’ve found that personalised communication can capture attention more effectively.
For instance, at the end of my final year at university, I found reminder calls significantly improved patient attendance compared to generic text messages.
As inboxes fill up, the likelihood of your message being read decreases. In this case, it was for the patients I needed to help me qualify. By making our messages clear, concise, and personal to towards patients, these recipients will be more open to what we want to say.
In my private life, I use voice notes rather than text messages to add a personal touch. The listener has a higher likelihood of clearly understanding my message, too. At first glance, voice notes may seem insignificant, but I’ve found they are less ambiguous than text messages can be.
Organising the message into themes
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed by the volume of information we might want to explain at times. As dental professionals, we have to share essential details with patients succinctly, ensuring we don’t overwhelm them.
Through emails, we might type an excessively long message, distracting our recipients from the main point we are trying to make. While tangents are enjoyable for wedding speeches, your audience can lose focus in professional presentations. You’ll risk losing the primary ideas you want to share. We must never forget to stick to the main points, myself included!
Often, I’ve found it helpful to identify key messages as discussion points. Some people may call them sections, strands or chunks, but I refer to them as themes. Just as stories have clear themes, compelling explanations also have clear themes.
There is never a fixed number of themes, but some may jump out at you quickly. For example, if a patient comes in with a painful tooth, that’s an obvious discussion point. However, addressing their uncontrolled diabetes and gum disease as a separate item on your agenda would help manage the patient holistically.
Once you’ve identified the key themes, your explanation will start to take shape. Organising your information around these themes provides a straightforward framework to follow. And above all, the ‘central message’ doesn’t get lost, resulting in a more precise explanation.
These skills have played an instrumental role when I’ve broken bad news to patients or had difficult personal conversations. By pausing to identify the critical discussion points, I’ve been better able to handle delicate discussions.
Knowing your audience
At university, I quickly realised the importance of clear explanations for launching fresh ideas. A vivid memory of this was when I led the dental society. I motivated my team by highlighting why our work mattered to the community around us.
I struggled during my first clinical case presentation on gum disease because I didn’t focus on being precise and concise. Upon reflection and over time, I learned to distil information to the fundamental points whenever I explained complex treatment plans.
Before my final unseen cases, I concentrated on the examiner’s questions rather than the questions I wished the examiner had given me. These experiences taught me I must know my audience and what they are looking for before explaining my point of view.
Making an informed assessment of someone’s knowledge base helps us tailor our discussions towards their needs. For example, I’ve started asking a few attendees of my presentations about their knowledge of the topics I am covering.
As a result, I avoid making them feel patronised by overexplaining things they are familiar with. Similarly, if I wrongly assume they already know lots about the subject, I might alienate them immediately.
Before embarking on an explanation, getting the level correct is crucial. Overcomplicating brushing advice might confuse patients and lead to poorer outcomes for their oral health too.
Final thoughts
Explanations help us decide what we want to say, find the information we need, and provide this most effectively to our audiences. Effectively expressing our ideas offers the best chance of creating change.
Refining these skills can improve your ability to handle difficult conversations at work and in your personal life. Explanations are a skill I’ll always be working on now as a newly qualified dentist, but this has helped me a lot so far!
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