The ability to communicate is something every living person can do. We learn from watching adults as babies, we learn as teenagers watching teachers, as adults we learn from watching other adults. This kind of observation allows us to adapt to our environment, pick up slang or lingo that is useful. However, there is hardly ever real tangible training when it comes to how to structure a conversation, how to discuss a topic, how to debate a subject without letting emotions overwhelm. In more complex circumstances being able to effectively communicate is even more important. Circumstance like a professional business meeting, negotiating for a lower price on a vehicle will be a more technical conversation, while having an intense conversation with loved ones may be more personal. Lack of communication skills can lead to misunderstandings or mistakes.
Our solution to this issue is to offer some basic tips that can help any individual with their personal or professional communications.
Tip 1: Build Rapport
Building a relationship with the people you talk to allows for more honest interactions. People like others that they know, like and trust. As with any relationship the more time you spend with someone, the more you find out about them. If you put a focus on building that relationship at the very beginning of the contact rather than doing it over time, you can develop a more meaningful relationship.
Tip 2: Listen with ears and eyes
Effective listening in a conversation is essential. With 30-35% of a conversation being verbal and the rest non-verbal listening with just your ears is only a third of the conversation. Tone, body movements, eye contact, speech patterns, and many more are just a few of the items that effective listening can recognize allowing for better understanding of not just the subject of the conversations but also the person.
Tip 3: Structure of a conversation
Whether the conversation you are having is formal or informal, developing a reuseable template on how you speak can allow you to conduct these interactions more consistently. Just like reading a book there is the beginning, a rising action, a climax, and a resolution. A Conversation should be the same following the same kind of format. How it would look like:
Granted you should not try and force your conversations to match a format, every conversation should be genuine however the purpose of the structure is so that you allow for building report at the front end, not immediately jumping to the main topic.
Tip 4: Limit distraction
The average attention span lasts around 8-12 seconds. A conversation lasts anywhere from 30 secs to hours. Keeping focused is important and can be challenging after a time, however with practice it is very manageable. A common distraction with our own mind is when it wanders off topic, or thinks about food, or what other trouble or worries we have to figure out for the rest of the day. Reigning in these random thoughts will allow for less distraction mentally. A simple way to do this is:
While these are just a small fragment of the kind of improvements everyone can make to become a more effective communicator, it is a skill that is never truly mastered and undertrained. The average person can have up to 1500 conversations a month, imagine if most of those conversations were meaningful. With these tips in mind, any person should be able to effectively communicate in a genuine manner while developing the best and most meaningful relationships.