Why is it so important to improve your qualities through communication?
Because communication is our main form of interaction.
You communicate all the time and everywhere! Whether it be selling yourself in a CV or pitch, raising your profile, selling a new service, managing a team or even seducing someone, you constantly interact with your environment through communication.
Managing your communication is essential to making all aspects of your life easier.
Here are 6 qualities for strong communication:
Assertiveness
When you communicate, it's usually because you want something to happen using your words or gestures. You want to share a message and make an impact on your audience. Your communication must be assertive to be sure you achieve the result you want. The message and messenger (you) have to be taken seriously. So you have to present yourself as confident and sure of yourself when you deliver the message. But that's not all, you have to be able to be subtly insistent and persistent until you get the result you want.
Authenticity
Authenticity means being true to yourself.
How many times have you really been authentic in communication? Most people are careful to be polite, not offensive. They want the verbal transaction to go well without necessarily being true to themselves, without listening to themselves or being aligned with their own values. To get to know your true self, you have to clearly set out your values and have the courage to defend them. Not everyone is naturally authentic, it requires effort. And don't think that being polite and smiling means the person you're talking to won't see through your expression and be able to tell if you're really being authentic in your message or not. To own your message and be persuasive, you have to be true to yourself and convey a message in keeping with your values.
Open-mindedness
Having an open-mind is essential to good communication. You have to be able to accept new perspectives and alternative ideas. Not being shut off to different opinions to yours is what makes communication so rewarding. The initial reaction is often rejecting anything that doesn't suit our way of thinking: "No, I'm not interested in that, it's not what I want...". So you start judging, criticising and putting up a wall between you and the other person and their ideas. No efficient communication can get through this wall. Being dogmatic will stop you reaching the other person and opening yourself up to new possibilities. That's how people will see you and they will avoid you, because who wants to communicate with someone who's so shut off? You shut yourself into your beliefs and cut yourself off from others and any desire for communication. People are drawn to those who listen and consider their ideas, not superficially but honestly, because it's an opportunity for them to share and showcase their ideas. So when someone talks to you, even if you don't agree with what they say, you can still take the time to listen to them and play with their ideas, have intellectual fun with it and you may even take one of their ideas on board. It's very rewarding in terms of personal development as you'll be stuck in the same place with your own beliefs and never progress if you just focus on your own ideas. The root of communication problems is often what stops us growing as people.
Empathy
You can communicate with others because of your "mirror neurons" which enable you to be compassionate, put yourself in someone's place, experience their emotions as if you were in the same situation. It has become a key point of neuropsychology.
To better understand how these unique neurons work, INSERM (French National Institute of Health and Medical Research) has produced an accomplished educational animation that you can watch here. No mirror neurons means no relationships, no culture and no humanity.
Here's an example: a girlfriend asks me over for a drink on her patio one summer evening, it's warm, we're barefoot and as she brings the tray to the table, she bangs her little toe into it... Watching what happens and seeing the pain on her face, I can almost instantly feel it. Maybe not as much as she feels it but I can feel some of her pain.
Why is empathy so important to good communication? Because the person you're communicating with wants you to listen to and understand them. When you demonstrate empathy to the person you're talking to, they feel understood "Ah! I can tell he understands what I mean, he's like me, we have so much in common..." and it creates what we call a cooperative dynamic.
If you have no empathy with the person then you won't understand their emotions and they'll be able to tell and say: "OK, this person knows nothing about me, she doesn't know the challenges I have to face so how can she help me? I won't listen to her, she doesn't understand me and her message doesn't resonate with me..": it will produce negativity and distance between you.
The more you develop your empathy, the better your connection and therefore your communication with the people around you.
Clarity
Your communication should be clear. Good communication isn't based on what you want to say but what the other person understands from it. Often you think you've said something and the other person does or believes something different to what you meant. It can create a lot of issues in terms of business, management or even educating your children. Clarity means aligning your intention with the other person's perception. So you have to be precise, focused and exact when you communicate to avoid any risk of misinterpretation. If you realise you struggle being understood, that people don't do what you ask, it's probably because your orders aren't clear enough. That leads to misunderstandings and poor execution or an image of you that doesn't align with who you really are and the message you want to convey.
Listening
Listening isn't just "opening your ears". You have to show the other person that you're listening and hearing them. So you need to do active listening, nod, agree, confirm with "I see... OK... That's interesting...". You can also ask questions to clarify the message, the person will feel you're engaged and you want to find out more so you're interested. You don't need to ask so many questions the other person can't speak, silence is golden. You can punctuate your listening with bouts of silence but maintain eye contact and energy levels then ask questions to show you're interested.
If you have communication issues or you just want to improve then ask yourself:
Which qualities do I need to work on to reduce the friction I have in communication? My weakness is - assertiveness, authenticity, I don't have an open mind, not empathetic enough, clarity issues in my messages or I don't listen?
Choose one or two qualities you'd like to improve in and work on them for the next 30 days.
Imagine you want to work on your clarity. How can I write clearer emails? How can I make more explicit and impactful presentations? Should I gather information, take notes, better prepare, ask my boss for feedback, learn new vocabulary? Could I simplify my vocabulary? Rather than try to look clever, maybe I should use simple terms that everyone understands instead of wanting to impress people with terms that sometimes I alone understand. Should I adapt my vocabulary to my audience?
All these qualities can be gained through practice. It's like sport.
The more you practise, the easier and more natural it is, the faster you'll be and the better you'll manage the strength of your communication.
Take care of this power and use it to interact harmoniously with the people around you.
