I’m not good at passively waiting for things to happen. While this can be a positive trait in the workplace and as an entrepreneur, it can also be a deterrent to being an effective and efficient communicator.

I’ll explain why.

I didn’t define the word “things” in the first sentence. In my vernacular, the word “things” equates to thoughts, conversations, and people getting to the point.

I’m prone to ask a ton of questions and I feel my questions are all aimed at the sake of arriving at some sort oh “ah ha” moment. I like my eureka moments – in fact I like them so much that I’d trade in all the banter before and after just to have more of them more often.

Problem is that most of work and life consists of the before and after which is why people like me need to develop better coping mechanisms and have heightened self-awareness of our communication style because it can be read as impatient, short, and just plain ol’ insensitive. While I don’t think my personality reflects any of these words, my communication style might be saying this in not so many words.

I recently had the pleasure of learning from a presentation coach who taught me about employing certain techniques in my day-to-day. “Presentation,” he stressed, “is everything from the moment you enter the room to the second you leave.” He went on to say it’s not just when you’re giving a formal presentation that you need to “be on your best behavior.”

The strongest, best communicators are those that adapt their styles to accommodate for their audience. (i.e., they may be deductive by nature, but they know how to put an inductive client at ease by walking them step-by-step thru a process and save the grilling for someone who might share their affinity for Sherlock Holmes.)

Reading body language, non-verbal facial cues, power words (feel, think, believe, etc) that tip you off to a disposition (feeling/thinking) are all clues to getting you to arrive at better communication. Of course, being negative is never a good thing. Being happy is, etc, etc.

Communication style not only relates to work, but also has repercussions at home. I’m grateful that I have a husband who may have a tendency to tell a long story and arrive at a point late in the tale (usually a pet peeve of mine), but he’s also aware enough of my nature, to ask before he embarks on a story if I’m ready to listen and to let me know how long it will take.

For those of you thinking I’m high-maintenance, I might be, but I can also tell you that you may be like me. Point is if you can make it work communications-wise with a spouse, a partner, or any other kind of loved one and end the day respecting and honoring one another, you can at least  fake it in the workplace for 40 hrs/week, 52 weeks out of the year.

Let’s face it. We don’t really need a phone, a BB, an IM service, a wiki (or the equivalent of an online file sharing repository where we can leave even more verbal vestiges of our daily excess), and several email accounts. We’re polluting our networks and our cable providers with unnecessary clutter and maxing out memory. But worst of all, we’ve become so accustomed to all these materialistic spoils we’ve forgotten how to actually talk to someone.

All this introspective anti-technology ranting spilled from my head recently when my company’s server went down. We were only able to connect to our internal resources (server) inside the office and could only access our external resources (Internet aka contact with the outside world) if we worked outside of our physical office.

My company is wired for us to work with ease externally. It’s one of the perks of working there and this also means we should be able to work from home at any given moment. We have VPN which allows for getting onto the internal network from anywhere and accessing whatever files we might need. This was also down.

I realized after Day 1 of this travesty that I tended to err on the side of external resources. Not having access to internet for one whole work day was enough for me to arrive at the conclusion that human contact meant less to me in the short-term than being able to jump on IM or Twitter my status updates through my Facebook account at any given moment.

Silly, I know. But I got to the point after Day 2 where I was lonely. I didn’t want to be alone and quite honestly I could have accomplished more in the office, without the IM distraction of Gmail chat or AOL IM. And yet, despite my loneliness, here I was trying to avoid unnecessary non-work related distractions on IM. I learned that a”Busy-I’m working” message up on my Gmail account could really be a stand-in for my best friend and despite my hyper over-achiever mindset, being “idle” meant I could get more shit done.

From my days of self-contained confinement, I’ve decided IMing sucks and furthermore, there should be an unwritten law or driving principle behind companies implementing IM as an acceptable form of inter-office communications. What this means is that if you have an urge to start ranting on about the blue nail polish of someone sitting in the adjacent cube, in an ideal world, you would be sent an electronic volt shock of enough amps to make you thing again before disrespecting someone else’s time with your drivel. There would also be a junk filter button similar to spam filers to eliminate all the garbage that comes pouring out people’s minds and spills onto their keyboards. This would also mean that for most people only 2% would end up getting communicated. That’s ok.

Technology is great. Don’t get me wrong. I’m all over Facebook, Friendster, Flixter, Flickr, and just about all the f*-ster sites out there. I use and abuse them just like everyone else. But in creating more applications (and channels) for indirect discourse and ironically to build in more communication time, have we become entirely socially dysfunctional? Have we lost the ability to connect and communicate in way that’s actually effective and doesn’t entirely turn everyone else off?

I think so. In short, I think we’re kinda just plain gross.