Customer Reviews

The Clarity Factor: The Four Secrets to Being Clearly Understood

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Our firm's research shows that spoken communication usually leads to more misunderstandings than understandings. Those miscommunications, in turn, stall progress and make life much more difficult for all concerned. The Clarity Factor is an outstanding explanation of how to improve your performance as a speaker and as a listener so that those stalls can be avoided.

As the introduction points out, top executives in major companies have pointed to their skills in communications as a major source of their career success. On the other hand, few people feel that they have or take the time to focus on improving skills in this critical area.

The book is written as a fable about Gloria, a manager in an accounting firm who must deal with a busy life, a recalcitrant subordinate, an uncommunicative husband, and a rebellious son.

The author proposes four key principles, along with some subprinciples for applying them. Each one makes a lot of sense. In fact, I can remember times when I did not get good results when I violated these principles either at work or at home. I found the book to be a good reminder to spend time thinking about what I am going to say before I say it. You are also provided with some simple guidelines and thought processes to give you some direction.

I particularly liked the way the author showed Gloria with poor communications, and then how she could rethink those and turn them into good communications. I think the examples will be helpful to you, too.

The great benefit of this book is that it can help your work and personal lives, as well as cut down your work so you can enjoy life more! This book is a real stallbuster!

Meet Gloria, harried boss, wife and mother. She's an intelligent, competent and well-intentioned person, so she can't figure out why Marty, her terminally put-upon employee resents her, why her husband Bill ignores her, or why conversations with her teenage son Todd always turn into shouting matches. Through a series of enlightening interactions, Gloria shows readers how seemingly hopeless relationships can be resurrected when communications improve. Author Ray DiZazzo uses hypothetical examples to illustrate his tips for clear communications. His narrative won't win any literary awards, but it is surprisingly effective at teaching readers how to communicate better. We [...] recommend his book to all managers, because your job hinges in large part on communicating effectively. Now is that perfectly clear?

Ever wonder what it would be like to actually peer into someone's mind and see how they perceive you as you speak to them? If you're a boss, for instance, how is that employee viewing you when you nonchalantly utter, "By the way, I need your report on my desk by Friday morning." Or, as a parent, what do your kids envision when you look down wearing your sternest poker-face and declare, "No staying out till midnight - period." And what about your spouse? What kind of mental images do you conjure up in his or her mind with, "Look, I've had it with these continual arguments!" Impossible to see inside someone else's head, you say? Not for author Ray DiZazzo in his unique new book, THE CLARITY FACTOR. Written in a refreshingly chatty, upbeat style, DiZazzo uses the vivid dreamscape of finance supervisor, Gloria Donovan to let us (and her) glimpse how people view her in a series of important business and personal conversations. For Gloria, this "gift" of sorts is not always easy to deal with, but it certainly is an eye-opener. About what? Verbal clarity - how clearly we speak and listen. What people hear in their own minds as our words are spoken. Often it's not what we think or want, and as this book makes perfectly clear, that can have a profound affect on our lives. According to DiZazzo we each have a "Clarity Factor" - an internal measure of how clearly we're understood and how well we understand those who speak to us. DiZazzo points out that in most cases the average person's Clarity Factor is, shall we say, a bit on the "cloudy" side. In fact, he says most of us are actually walking around in a kind of garbled, verbal daze half the time, but we don't realize it! Why? For three reasons. First, we feel we're too busy to work on basic communication skills. Second, we assume we don't need to. We're brought up with the mistaken perception that talking is like walking - an instinctive reaction. And most important, we don't use DiZazzo four simple "Focal Points" to sharpen our words, clear the static from our cerebral receptors, and polish our Clarity Factors to new levels of conversational prowess. Now you might think that the pay-off for using DiZazzo Focal Points would be just what we'd all expect from a communication book - less stress, more efficiency, stronger relationships, better productivity, reduced frustration, and so on - as if that weren't enough! But something more comes with this highly engaging little tale - an amazing byproduct of verbal clarity we call basic human understanding. In other words, an ability to focus on the sensitivities of those we communicate with - to tune in to their message so precisely, we can hear "between the lines" as they speak. That's right, The Clarity Factor gives us a way to actually connect on a new, more profound level with people and the world around us. You know the one - that fragmented, fast-paced, constantly churning sea of humanity we're all treading water in. And the result? Increased self-confidence, a spiritual sense of personal well-being, and rich, deep relationship harmony. This is a great little book - just over a hundred pages, lots of fun to read, and it winds up with an unexpected, hard-hitting emotional twist. The Clarity Factor drives home how important and simple, yet unfortunately rare true clarity is in both our business and personal lives. The good news is DiZazzo also gives us a simple, entertaining, sure-fire way to solve the problem.... Check out your local bookstore, visit any of the on-line booksellers, or go to sourcebooks.com, the publisher's site, to check it out...

"The Clarity Factor" is a perfect example of how a few well-chosen words and well-written sentences can get the most complicated message across to the most number of people in the least amount of time. Ray DiZazzo's writing is simple and straight to the point, yet charming enough to win a smile or two.

The story is a parable refreshingly set in the here and now. Its central character is Gloria, an executive, wife and mother, whose relationships with an employee, her husband and her son are becoming more and more chaotic and strained. Enter Joel, who meets Gloria in her dreams and shares four basic Focal Points of communication with her. Over the next few weeks, in her waking life and her dream life, Gloria uses these Focal Points and does not just get her message across, but transforms her relationships.

I particularly like Joel's Clarity Monitoring System and its holographic Sender and Receiver plates. It showed me, rather than told me, how Senders and Receivers can be on such different wavelengths that a message doesn't get through alive. Showing is always better than telling, which is why this book works so well.

DiZazzo could have easily written the one millionth non-fiction book on effective communication . . . and bored us all to death. The short story format really does get his point across much more effectively. The situations in Gloria's life are excellent, even amusing, illustrations for his message. As they represent common problem areas in communication that many people face today (on the job _and_ at home), they speak directly to readers.

This is not the kind of thing I usually read, but I enjoyed it immensely. "The Clarity Factor" is magical, even sentimental, at surprising moments.

...this book has been written many times before by much more informative communicators. "The Articulate Executive" and "Emotional Intelligence" come immediately to mind. Where this book succeeds is in the shallow artifice of using dream sequences and parables to outline these 4 incredibly basic points:

1. Focus your message 2. Magnify (get) the listeners attention 3. Penetrate personal barriers 4. Listen with clarity

Whew! Let's all communicate! It's as easy as 1, 2, 3! Next: "How to build an atom bomb in 2 easy steps".

Communication is serious business, and done correctly, really can improve the quality of your life.

I suggest finding a resource that treats the subject matter with more research, guidance and respect.