Communication Skills

[Sher Alam Khan]

Improve your Communication Skills Here are 6 great tips you can use!  1. Awareness of your own interaction with other people is the first step in improving your communication skills. Learn to identify which types of situations make you uncomfortable and then modify your behavior to achieve positive results is a critical step in improving your communication skills. You can learn to become aware of behaviors in other people that prompt you to respond in negative ways and modify your own behavior to turn the situation into a positive experience. 2. You must accept responsibility for your own behavior and do not fear apologizing for errors in judgment or insensitive actions. Asking others for honest feedback about the way you interact with others can be very helpful. Accept the negative feedback along with the positive and make changes accordingly. . Your non-verbal communication is equally as important as the things that you say. Positive body language is extremely important in your interactions with other people.If your words and your actions do not match, you will have a difficult time succeeding in social situations. 4. In order to learn how to improve your communication skills, you must become a great listener. You must fight the urge to respond immediately and really listen to what the other person is trying to communicate.Offering suggestions or criticism before you are certain of the other person's intent can only lead to frustration for both parties. 5. Improving your communication skills is a process and cannot be accomplished overnight. Trying to improve or change too many things at once will be counter-productive. You will become discouraged and overwhelmed if you attempt to change your entire personality all at once. Choose one or two traits at a time and work on those over a period of time. Learn to take advantage of your personal strengths and make a positive impact on others. 6. Maximize your positive personality traits and use them in your interactions with others. Good communication and great listening skills are the most important tools you can use in improving your communication skills. You can learn how to improve your communication skills by developing excellent listening skills, learning to resolve problems and conflicts, understanding body language, and accepting responsibility for your own negative behavior. Determination and self-awareness will make your desire to improve your communication skills a reality. You can change your life and now is the time to start. Exceptional communication skills can be Learned...and Mastered!!!

---

The INTERNET now has a personality. YOURS! See your Yahoo! Homepage.

[Dhanesh R]

10 Tricks on How to improve Communication Skills

 

None of us is a perfect communicator. Throughout our lives, we all develop little habits and skills. Some of these habits turn out to be useful and some unfortunately create challenges at our workplace or while communicating with others. Effective communication is one of the most important life skills we can learn- yet we don't put a lot of effort into it. Whether we want to have better conversations or to bring across our ideas better across work communication skills play a very important role in it. Here are some extremely important tips on how to improve communication skills, which I learned at inlingua, New Delhi which will definitely help you as well:

 

10. Watch the body language:

 

You tell your partner you're open to discussion but your arms are crossed; say you're listening but haven't looked up from your phone yet. Our non-verbal and non-written signals often show more than we think they do. Whether it's how you make eye contact or how you hold yourself during a video interview, don't forget that you're constantly communicating even when you're not saying a word.

9. Get Rid of Unnecessary Conversation Fillers

Um's and ah's do little to improve your speech or everyday conversations. Cut them out to be more convincing and feel or appear more confident. One way is to start keeping track of when you say words like "um" or "like." You could also try taking your hands out of your pockets or simply relaxing and pausing before you speak. Those silences seem more awkward to you than they do to others, trust us

8. Have a Script for Small Talk and Other Occasions

Small talk is an art that not many people have mastered. For the unavoidable, awkward silences with people you hardly know, it helps to have a plan. The FORD (family, occupation, recreation dreams) method might help you come up with topics to discuss, and you can also turn small talk into conversation by sharing information that could help you and the other person find common ground.

7. Tell a Story

Stories are powerful. They activate our brains, make presentations suck less, make us more convincing, and can even help us ace interviews.

6. Ask Questions and Repeat the Other Person

Let's face it, we've all drifted off when someone else was talking or misheard the other person. Asking questions and repeating the other person's last few words shows you're interested in what they say, keeps you on your toes, and helps clear up points that could be misunderstood (e.g., "So to recap, you're going to buy the tickets for Saturday?").

It also helps for small talk and to fill in awkward silences. Instead of trying to stir up conversation on ordinary and boring topics like the weather, ask the other person questions (e.g., "Got any plans for the summer?" or "What are you reading lately?") and work at their answers. It's more important to be interested than to be interesting.

5. Put Away the Distractions

It's pretty rude to use your phone while someone's talking to you or you're supposed to be hanging out with them. Maybe we can't get rid of all our distractions or put away technology completely, but just taking the time to look up could vastly improve our communication with each other.

4. Tailor Your Message to Your Audience

The best communicators adjust how they talk based on whom they're speaking to; you'd probably use a different style of communication with co-workers or your boss compared to when you're speaking with your significant other, kids, or elders. Always try to keep the other person's perspective in mind.

3. Be Brief yet Specific

There's actually a BRIEF acronym—Background, Reason, Information, End, Follow-up—to help you keep your emails short without leaving anything out. It's a good policy for both written and verbal communications. Just two more items on this list! Clear and concise are two of the 7 Cs of communication, along with concrete, correct, coherent, complete, and courteous.

2. up Your Empathy

Communication is a two-way street. If you practice taking the opposing viewpoint, you can reduce the difficulty and anxiety that sometimes arises when trying to truly communicate with others. Developing empathy helps you better understand even the unspoken parts of your communication with others, and help you respond more effectively.

1. Listen, Really Listen

Finally, going hand-in-hand with most of the points above, the best thing you can do to improve your communication skills is to learn to really listen—to pay attention and let the other person talk without interrupting. It's hard work, we know, but "A good conversation is a bunch of words elegantly connected with listening." Then, even if your communication styles don't match, at least you're both working off the same page.