Leadership IQ · Online courses

You’re Not Hearing What I’m Saying

How to Get Your Message Through to People Who Communicate Differently

For managers, HR professionals, and individual contributors

Format: Online · self-paced
Coursework: 2 weeks · 2 modules
Time per module: Approximately 1 hour

Get Your Message Across Without Having to Keep Explaining Yourself

Built on Leadership IQ’s Communication Styles Assessment, taken by more than one million people.

Your best ideas can go nowhere if the people you need to convince stop listening halfway through. And when people think you’re too direct, too long-winded, or too touchy-feely, you can end up defending how you communicate before anyone addresses the actual issue.

It’s exhausting to keep explaining yourself and still feel misunderstood. You give more detail, and someone cuts you off. You keep it brief, and someone complains you haven’t thought it through. Meanwhile, you’re trying to get useful answers from colleagues whose way of communicating frustrates you just as much.

You’re Not Hearing What I’m Saying builds on that assessment to help you understand why some conversations go smoothly and others leave everyone frustrated. You’ll discover your own communication style, how it comes across to others, and what people with different styles need to hear from you.

Then you’ll learn how to use that knowledge to get your message through. That includes presenting an idea to a skeptical boss, giving direction your team can act on, and getting clearer answers from the colleague you always seem to misunderstand. You’ll also learn specific phrases to recover when a conversation starts going badly.

You’ll practice the techniques on a real message you need to deliver, so you leave with something you can use immediately.

Get your ideas heard, reduce the frustration of being misunderstood, and spend less time having the same conversation again.

How You’ll Benefit

Get your ideas heard by the people whose support you need. Present recommendations in a way that helps your boss and colleagues understand their value and evaluate what you’re proposing.
Understand how your communication affects your reputation. Discover why your attempts to be efficient, thoughtful, or precise can land differently than you intended, and learn specific adjustments you can make.
Spend less time explaining yourself repeatedly. Recognize what information the other person is missing and address it directly.
Work more effectively with the people you find hardest to reach. Learn how to approach colleagues who want a different level of detail or put more emphasis on facts, feelings, or next steps.
Get clearer answers from other people. Ask for the information you need in language that helps the other person respond.
Handle frustrating conversations with more confidence. Use specific phrases to recover when someone interrupts, misunderstands your point, or says you aren’t listening.

Why Leaders and HR Enroll Their Teams

Communication problems create extra work. Employees leave meetings with different understandings of the decision. Managers repeat instructions. Colleagues spend time resolving tension that began with a misunderstood email.

This course gives your team a shared method for making communication clearer. Participants learn how to:

Reduce avoidable confusion and rework by explaining the purpose of a request and making responsibilities and next steps explicit.
Improve communication across departments by anticipating the questions different colleagues need answered.
Make feedback more useful by describing specific behaviors and delivering the message in a way the recipient can understand and act on.
Address communication friction earlier by asking for missing information before frustration becomes a judgment about someone’s attitude or intentions.

HR professionals also gain practical language for coaching employees who have been told to “work on their communication” but haven’t received a clear explanation of what to change.

Course Outline

Two modules, approximately one hour each. Open each module to explore the lessons.

Module 1

Understand Why Your Message Isn’t Getting Through

The explanation that satisfies one person can leave another impatient or unconvinced. This module introduces the four communication styles and shows you how to recognize what someone needs from a conversation.

You’ll meet the Analytical, Intuitive, Functional, and Personal styles, including why they can come across as Robots, Rushers, Ramblers, and Huggers when communication goes badly. You’ll examine your own preferences and identify where they help you communicate effectively and where they create friction.

You’ll discover:

What each communication style listens for and which parts of a message it can overlook.
How your communication strengths can become frustrations for someone with a different style.
The clues in someone’s questions and messages that reveal what they need from you.
One question you can ask to find out what matters most to your listener.
How to approach a boss or colleague whose communication preferences differ from yours.
When the situation calls for a different approach, even with someone whose style you know well.

You’ll apply what you learn to colleagues you work with regularly, including someone you find difficult to communicate with.

Module 2

Get Your Message Understood and Put Into Action

Once you know what someone needs, you can change how you deliver your message. This module gives you a practical method for deciding what to say first, how much detail to include, and what to do when the conversation starts going wrong.

You’ll learn to use Point, Proof, Process, and People to prepare messages that answer your audience’s questions. You’ll also practice listening and asking for clarification so both sides leave with a clearer understanding.

You’ll discover:

How to adapt the same recommendation for someone who wants the bottom line, someone who needs evidence, someone who wants the steps, or someone focused on the people affected.
How to communicate with a room containing all four styles.
How to check whether resistance reflects missing information about your recommendation.
How to write emails and updates that put the main point where people can find it while preserving necessary detail.
What makes each style feel heard, including when someone wants a solution and when they need you to understand their experience first.
Specific phrases for recovering when you’ve given too much background, skipped important steps, or overlooked someone’s concern.
How to adapt feedback and difficult messages while keeping the substance clear.
How to close conversations with a shared understanding of the decision and what happens next.

You’ll finish by rebuilding a real message for its intended audience and choosing specific changes to use in your next workplace conversations.

Practical Tools You Can Keep Using

The course includes tools to help you apply the material after the training:

A communication styles assessment and reference guides.
A Point, Proof, Process, and People worksheet for preparing important messages.
Scripts for correcting misunderstandings and asking for missing information.
A team discussion exercise for establishing communication preferences and shared expectations.
A brief colleague feedback form to help you assess how your communication is landing.

Who Should Attend

This course is for managers who want to give clearer direction, HR professionals who coach others through communication problems, and individual contributors who want their expertise and recommendations to receive a fair hearing.

It’s especially useful if you regularly explain something carefully and still leave the conversation wondering why the other person didn’t understand.

Your Instructor: Mark Murphy

Mark Murphy is a New York Times bestselling author and the founder of Leadership IQ. He developed Leadership IQ’s Communication Styles model and teaches professionals how to apply it to the conversations that affect their work and careers.

Schedule & participation

Two weeks to learn. An extra week to finish.

Complete the two modules online at your own pace. Each module takes approximately one hour. Both cohorts include an extra week to finish the course.

Dates below follow your selected cohort. Choose a different start date in the enrollment panel.

Starts: Monday, November 30, 2026
Complete by: Sunday, December 20, 2026

Two weeks of coursework, plus an extra week to complete it.

Each seat is for one participant. Choose the number of participants at checkout, then add their names and email addresses after payment.

Enroll in You’re Not Hearing What I’m Saying

Bring a message you need to deliver and a colleague you struggle to reach. Leave with a clearer understanding of what they need and a practical approach you can use in your next conversation.

Ask about group enrollment →

$99.00 USDEnroll