Love Life with Matthew Hussey - The 3 Commandments of Email Communication

Episode Date: August 8, 2016

We’re all busy and, often, the people we admire most are the busiest of all. So why is it, then, we can’t seem to help ourselves when writing them an email? We get carried away, typing paragraph after paragraph, hoping to convey every single point we want to make. And then we wonder why they never get back to us! Today, I’m going to give you my 3 Commandments of Email Communication to ensure your message gets across loud and clear, you get the response you’re hoping for, and you yourself come across even more important in the process!

Hi, I'm Matthew Hussey. Welcome to Love Life. It's a privilege to be able to offer you bite-sized bits of advice on this podcast that you can use every day. But what if you're ready for a big transformation and you want to do it now? You want to reinvent your career or finally find lasting love or break free from the self-doubt that's holding you back from living the abundant life you were meant to live. If you're saying, yes, Matt, that's me, I'm going to tell you exactly how to do just that at the end of today's show. So make sure you stay tuned. First, let's get to today's episode. So we did a video recently on my YouTube channel about emails and how very often we ruin relationships or at the very least begin to damage or erode them when we receive emails that we don't

get back to quickly enough. Someone may have taken the time to really write us a thought out or detailed email and they're wondering when we're going to come back to them. Now, very often we wait and it ends up being seen as a sign of disrespect when really what we're trying to do is just buy ourselves a little more time to give that email the attention that it deserved. So I wanted to turn this topic around a little bit to see it from the other point of view this time, because actually under the YouTube video where we did this,

there was one woman who wrote a comment that I found very interesting. She said, I think it's not right to write really long emails considering the lack of time for everything in these so-called modern times. Also, I think as if it's important to, just as it's important to express yourself, it's also important to respect other people's time too. And if you can't help but write a really long message, please be considerate and don't expect a really long email back. I don't feel the pressure to answer the same way because I'm a different person. People should remember that. It's invasive to write eternal emails. Please, people, be nice. Now, I found this to be kind of interesting because as much as we're often seen as disrespecting people when we don't get

back to them, there is something of an onus on the person, the sender, the scripter of the email to give us an email that is terse enough that it is manageable alongside everything else we have that day. And I think it's a particular problem when someone lacks the consideration for our time in the way that they send emails. Now, of course, I'm talking about this from both angles. I'm both talking about it from the point of view of the emails that people write us, but also the emails that we write other people. I caught myself recently writing to someone for whom I had an incredible amount of admiration. And the temptation when you admire someone, especially when you see them as either higher status than you, more important than you. The temptation is to write them very verbose emails and take too much time to say what we want to say because we're a little intimidated. We want to reiterate our points. We want to make sure that we've got in absolutely everything we

wanted to say. And we get into almost overselling ourselves in the content of our email. The problem is we're actually doing the opposite of what we should be doing. Because the more important we find someone to be, the more we admire them, the more respect for their time we should have. And part of having respect for someone's time is saying, I know that they probably won't have time or the inclination to read a very long email from me. So I'm going to keep this short. I'm going to keep this as succinct as possible as a way to respect their time and on a pragmatic level to try to ensure that they actually read the email. Because I know from my own personal experience, when I open an email and it's too long, my immediate instinct is to

close it and to save it for another time. I don't want to read it there and then. And sometimes it can actually reach a point of frustration or anger when you receive emails like that, because you think, who on earth thought I was going to read this? So I'd like to almost turn this on its head and say that it's a form of ignorance and disrespect to be sending people incredibly long emails and expecting them either to respond in kind or to respond at all or to even read it. Life doesn't work like that. We all are busy. And in order to respect someone else, we should keep things very short. Now, I will give you a couple of points here. Firstly, one tip for this is to stop reiterating in emails.

People have a tendency to do this when they're not quite confident they've made their point well, they will reiterate. The second, once you've written your email, try to halve the word count. Most of us are, especially when we're in a rush or when we're not actually thinking about being terse, we are very liberal with our words and we don't actually figure out the most concise way to say something. And lastly, make two to three main points maximum. This isn't you writing the 10 commandments for somebody. You don't need to write point after point after point. If there are 10 points that you need to make, it probably means that the first couple aren't strong enough. So look for the main points of whatever it is you're saying, the two to three points that really matter and stick to those. And if you need more time,

either do it in another email or do it in a phone call or book a meeting with them, but don't expect them to read this entire list of points by email. So keep them short. And the rule is the more important they are, the more busy you perceive them to be, the shorter your email should be. And of course, the great news is the shorter your email is instinctively people assume you have a higher level of importance when you haven't got the time to write an incredibly long, verbose email yourself. So that's it. I will see you soon. Go join me for the conversation on Facebook, facebook.com forward slash coach Matthew Hussey. I will see you there. Now, if you said earlier, yes, Matt, i'm ready for a big life transformation now then i want to invite you to apply for my retreat program now spots are limited but if you're accepted onto the program

i'll lead you through a series of powerful coaching sessions and enlightening exercises that will remove every barrier standing in between you and the extraordinary life you deserve. You'll walk away with a practical set of tools to achieve the career, love, balance, and fulfillment you've always wanted. To claim your spot for a phone interview with one of my expert mentors, just go to lovelifepodcast.com forward slash retreat. Take care and I'll speak to you soon.