Some skills will make you live a better life and be more successful in everyday tasks. Communication skills include many subcategories such as verbal skills, and learning each of these skills requires time and practice. Proper use of communication skills can greatly contribute to your work and non-work success.
Maybe there have been many times when you want to express a topic, but because of bad expression, you can't get your meaning right, and maybe you have a lot of trouble. Failure to master communication skills will cause you to miss many work opportunities and cause many problems for you.
{tocify} $title={Table of Contents}Mastering communication skills is not difficult, but you must have a lot of patience to master all communication skills. Many people think that mastering communication skills is an innate thing when it is not and you have to master these skills over time.
You definitely know that we have 2 types of intelligence, IQ, and EQ. According to experts, the IQ of each person is constant, but EQ can be increased. So you can be sure that EQ can be increased with practice and training. In this article, we describe the skills and exercises that you can use to improve your communication skills effectively.
20 ways to improve communication skills
1. Be a good listener
Listening to other people's words is one of the most important things that helps to strengthen your verbal and communication skills.
You have definitely seen that some parents go to their children's schools and ask their child's teachers to listen to the child. This is not because the parents themselves cannot give advice to their child, but because the child accepts the words of the teacher better than the words of the parents. The meaning of this example is that many people even children, hear some words but do not pay attention to them.
If you pay attention to your surroundings, you can use communication skills in a better way. If you do not know what communication skills are and how they are used in life, reading the article "what is communication skill" can be useful.
2. Don't be afraid to ask questions
Many times, while talking to your family members, colleagues, friends, and even your managers, you have not been able to ask questions due to a lack of confidence or shyness. This is very common and many people cannot ask their questions and doubts while talking to others. If you have this issue and you cannot ask your question to others, you should practice a little to strengthen this skill in you.
Strengthening your questioning skill can increase your confidence. If this skill is strengthened in childhood, we can be sure that high self-confidence will be created in the child. Note-taking and note-making also help you to strengthen this skill.
3. Be confident
Self-confidence is perhaps one of the most important things in communication skills. If you have good self-confidence, many successes will come to you, but the lack of self-confidence will continuously destroy very good business and personal offers.
There are many ways to improve your self-confidence, but keep in mind that if you don't have this skill, you can't improve your communication skills efficiently. It is also very important to get to know the most important factors of lack of self-confidence so that you can solve them.
4. Strengthen your empathy
Helping others and empathizing with different people can be effective exercises in strengthening communication skills. Some exercises to strengthen communication skills are seemingly irrelevant, but in practice, they have a great impact. To strengthen your empathy, you can hang out with different people and try to help them.
This allows you to strengthen your empathy. Socializing with animals and taking care of plants also helps a lot so that you can strengthen your empathy.
5. Optimize your speech for the audience
If you want to say the same thing to two people, you should be very careful about the moods of these two people. Maybe it is better to measure the characteristics of the person you are talking to before saying anything and whether it is right to say this to this person or not.
Of course, in many cases, the word can be announced to the other party with minor changes so that he does not get upset. One of the exercises you can do for this is to consider good news and bad news for the people close to you and try to practice the best model of announcing that news to the other party. You will get much better results if you try to do this process in writing.
6. Eliminate distractions
One of the things that you should be very careful about is your surroundings. Paying enough attention to the surrounding environment to grow and strengthen your communication skills, but you should keep in mind that distractions can distract your mind from the events around you, and you generally cannot have sufficient control over the environment. It is recommended to make a list of distractions around you, and it is better to have this list in writing.
Next, you should try to specifically remove each of them or control the amount of use of these factors. Sometimes there may be distractions like an illustrated magazine on your desk that you need to pay attention to. Some distractions have become so ingrained with us, that it's hard to get rid of them, but it has to be done anyway.
7. Become a master of storytelling
Storytelling is one of the skills that has received a lot of attention in recent years, and usually, those who are skilled storytellers can perform verbal and communication skills in the best possible way. If you have listened to the conversation of some people, you have noticed that their speech is very dry and there is no story at the heart of these people's conversations. Try to practice the skill of storytelling so that you can understand your speech well to the listener.
The use of stories and anecdotes helps you to convey difficult and complex concepts to the audience in an easier way. If you want to develop this skill as soon as possible, you can tell yourself about everyday events in the form of stories or even write them down. So, if you are looking for an answer to the question "how to improve communication skills", make sure you're a master in storytelling skills.
8. Practice simple speaking
Simplicity helps you to easily gain the trust of the audience. Many people think that the use of specialized and difficult words makes the audience enjoy more, while the use of uncommon and specialized words confuses the audience.
If you are skilled in a certain subject, try to consider one of the most difficult topics in your field and express it at the simplest possible level. For example, if your academic field is engineering, try to express one of the most important and difficult topics in your course in simple language.
This work is enjoyable for the audience and makes them feel closer to you, but it also makes more people listen to your words. Speaking simply can be one of the most important steps to improving communication skills.
9. Using body language
Body language is one of the things that plays an important role in strengthening your verbal skills, and you definitely know that verbal skills are a subset of communication skills. The correct use of hands, body movements, and facial expressions can have a great impact on the audience, and this makes body language one of the most important principles in attracting people's attention.
If you just say your words consecutively without using body language, the probability of your words being effective is very low, but if you know how to use body language correctly, you can significantly increase the effectiveness of your words. To practice improving body language, you can speak in front of the mirror and try to pay attention to yourself and your body movements and try to use them at the right time.
10. Maintain proper eye contact
Proper eye contact can nail the audience when you speak. While talking if you look at the door and the wall or at your feet, no one will be interested in your words.
Getting the right eye contact can increase the impact of your words several times, so be very careful about this point. To practice eye contact, you can place a camera in front of you and try to talk while looking into the camera lens.
11. Control anger
While talking maybe something will be said, that will make you angry. To improve your communication skills, you should try to be a good listener and try to control your anger. Even if the other person goes crazy, try to stay calm and answer him calmly.
Of course, this is not an easy task and it may take years for you to reach such a level of communication skill, but you should try to reach such a stage anyway. To practice this part, you can get help from everyday discussions. There will definitely be times when you get upset in the family, at work, or among friends. During these times, try to control your anger to slowly master this skill.
12. Prepare yourself before speaking
Knowing what you are going to talk about can increase your preparation. Of course, one of the communication skills is the ability to speak impromptu, but speaking impromptu is an ability that you should have, but it does not mean that you always speak impromptu.
If you are going to a meeting or have a business or romantic date, it is better to write down important points that you want to talk about and practice enough for each of them. One of the communication skills that are very attractive to the audience is your mastery of what you say.
If you cannot present your speech in a specific framework, the listener will not be able to analyze your words well. Also, try to use examples, stories, appropriate emotions, etc. In addition to these things, keep in mind to summarize, so that the listener does not get bored.
13. Honesty in speech
The listener seeks to trust you, if you say something hard to believe in between your words, you have enlightened the reader's contradiction detector and the listener will probably doubt you until the end of your words. So try to speak fluently and honestly so that you can attract many readers.
Honesty in speech can always be one of your advantages over your competitors, so try to follow this point. As mentioned in the previous sections, improving communication skills is a matter that requires you to practice several skills to achieve them, and only using a few limited items cannot strengthen your communication skills.
14. Speak briefly and usefully
Talking long and monotonous can tire the audience. Try to make your speech as short as possible, so that it is interesting for the audience to hear it.
If your speech is concise and useful, the audience will always seek to hear your words, but if your words do not have a specific framework, the audience will probably not enjoy hearing them and will count the minutes until your speech ends. To improve and strengthen your communication skills, try to keep your words as brief as possible, this will make your words worth hearing over time.
15. Don't consider yourself apart from the audience
If you want your communication skills to be at their best, try to always think of yourself as a listener. If you constantly use the word "I" in your speech and look up and down at the term, the audience will be upset and your words will not have the necessary effect. So try to team up with the listener to get the best results.
16. Practice patience with others
If you are patient enough in communication with others and can calm your mind in stressful situations, then this trait can become a valuable asset for you with proper management. At work, when your boss is under pressure to handle a certain situation where others lose they're usually cool, so when the time comes to promote employees, they will remember the troublemakers well.
17. Make reading a priority in your life
People who read with an open mind are more analytical, wise and of course more attractive to communicating with others. In fact, people who read a lot of books seem unique as compared to others. These people have many topics to start and continue a conversation on. In addition to looking wise, they are also smart and clever.
18. Don't forget to smile in conversations
Try to smile in between your talks, the combination of eye contact and smiling at the audience can be a unique combination to attract the attention of the listener. If you are speaking in a group, try to share your smile with the audience, and don't focus on just one side or one person. To practice this, you can smile while talking in front of the mirror or in front of the camera. To begin with, you can smile in everyday conversations and see its unique effect.
19. Provide useful experiences
Another way to improve communication skills is that you can easily share your work and personal experiences with others. If you can talk about your motivations, you can bring more listeners with you. Try to share the experiences of your career path with others during your talks, because the audience likes this very much.
20. Make energy level higher than the others
Usually, people want to be in a relationship with those, who lift their spirits instead of depressing them. When you speak with a high energy level, people around you will feel more comfortable. Of course, don't be so energetic that you push them away, but show enough energy that they feel energized after talking to you.
10 steps to strengthen effective communication skills
1. Tailor your message to your audience
The best communicators adjust their conversations based on who they are talking to. You may use different language when talking to your co-workers or boss than when you are talking to a special audience, your children, or your elders. When trying to convey a message to someone, always try to keep their point of view in mind.
2. Strengthen communication skills with empathy
Communication between people is like a two-way street. If you practice taking opposing points of view into account, you will be able to reduce the difficulties and anxiety that you sometimes face when communicating with others. For example, when your target audience says they're too tired to talk, you'll know what they mean. Empathy helps you better understand even the unspoken parts of your relationship with others, and helps you react more effectively.
The best thing you can do to improve your communication skills is to learn to really listen, pay attention, and let the other person speak without interrupting. We all know that this is a difficult task, but in this case, even if your communication styles are not compatible with each other, at least you will have a correct understanding of each other and you can hope that your audience will also have the same accuracy.
3. Offer good experiences to others
Suggest trips you've taken, movies you've seen, places you've been to, restaurants you've been to, job opportunities, and basically anything else you can think of. Explain what was remarkable about those places and things, and how you can make them attractive to others. You have to offer enough ideas to get them interested, and they look to you as a companion, they can rely on when deciding what to do.
4. Pause before answering
To improve communication skills, the most important and key point is to pause before answering. After the end of the conversation with the other party, a short pause of 3 to 5 seconds is considered proper and good behavior in conversations. With a short pause, you can achieve 3 goals at the same time.
The first goal: is not to jump between the conversations of the other party who may have interrupted his speech to take a breath.
The second goal: is not to quickly comment on the other party's words, and to show that you were paying attention to his words very carefully.
The third goal: by listening better, the other party's words will slowly sink into your mind and you will understand more clearly what the other party said. In addition, by pausing, you appear to be a personable and well-spoken person.
5. Retell the words of the other party in another way
After you've nodded and smiled, can you tell me if that's exactly what you meant? And then repeat his words in your own language. By repeating the other party's words in your own style, you leave no room for doubt that you paid full attention to the other party's words, and tried your best to understand the other party's feelings and thoughts.
One interesting thing is that when you practice effective listening to others, they feel like you're a great person and want to be around you. They feel comfortable and happy in your presence because by listening to others you make them feel that you are very important. Use the powerful listening tool to build trust to improve your conversational skills.
6. Become adept
If you take the time to improve your communication skills, your ability to communicate with others both at work and in social situations will improve dramatically. A freelancer having good communication skills can get more freelance work than others. Strong communication skills also play an important role in becoming a successful freelancer on freelancing websites. Take the time to observe the most socially skilled people you know. You will find many of these methods in them.
Keep in mind that these methods should not be operated like a robot or be too visible. They should be done in a natural way, and in a way that is compatible with the current situation. To achieve the best possible result, it is best to relax and let these communication skills flow naturally.
Choose the best ways that are compatible with your personality and your motivations for others. Learn to feel which ones are appropriate for unique situations and which ones don't match your true personality.
7. Think positive
A positive comment encourages and a negative comment discourages. Usually, the mind wants to focus on the negative points. As a result, it is very important to consciously manage positive comments and conversations.
If you can accept that others are not like you, then you can properly oppose their opinions and ideas that you don't think are right. Therefore, you can reach the right result without any destructive arguments that are usually accompanied by raising your voice, yelling, anger and rage.
One of the most suitable methods for opposing the opinions of others is the disarmament method. In this way, one finds truth in the other party's words. Then he speaks in the capacity of agreeing and confirming it.
This method has a strangely calming effect on the other side. Maybe he will not accept the method of disarmament, but arguments are always useless. With this method, in fact, you have emerged victorious from the discussion, and the other party also feels victorious and listens to your words with more readiness.
8. Self-awareness
To improve and strengthen communication skills, first, achieve self-knowledge. To know the world around you to empathize with them or to reach the result of your conversations with others, you need self-knowledge and try to increase your knowledge and awareness to know others and the living environment.
9. Be aware
Being aware of your strengths, weaknesses, fears, desires, and needs helps you see the characteristics of others more realistically and accept them. You should keep in mind that self-knowledge and increasing awareness requires time, patience, and effort to change your negative characteristics. You can get help from experts such as psychologists and counselors for self-knowledge and increasing awareness.
10. Communicate with any person
People can play a key role in your life. If you take the time to improve and strengthen your effective communication skills, your whole life will be easier. So, the steps to communicate with any person in any situation are much easier. New opportunities will be open immediately to you if you have the power of effective communication skills.
Conclusion: Improving your communication skills has a very positive impact on your personal and work life. Perhaps many successes are waiting for you only, you just need to learn communication skills and become a master in all of them.
