Mastering your communication is essential to develop your impact.
You communicate all the time and everywhere! Whether it's to market yourself in a resume or during a pitch, to increase your visibility, to sell a new service, to manage a team or even when you want to seduce, you interact with your environment constantly by communicating.
Good communication is a good connection to oneself and to others in order to harmonize one's relationships, to better influence and develop a positive impact.
Here are the 6 qualities of a powerful and impactful communication:
Listening
Listening is not just about "opening your ears". It is also about letting the other person know that you are listening and that they are being heard. To do this, you can practice active listening, nodding, agreeing, confirming with "I see. That's interesting...". You can also ask questions to clarify the message, the person will feel that you are engaged, that you want to know more and that you are interested. It is not a question of asking too many questions without letting the other person speak, the quality of your silence is also important. You can punctuate your listening with phases of silence while remaining connected by the look and the energy and then with questions to show your interest.
Open-mindedness
Open-mindedness is essential for good communication. It is about being able to welcome new perspectives or alternative ideas. Do not remain closed to points of view that are different from your own, this is the richness of an exchange. The first reaction is often to reject what does not correspond to our way of thinking: "No, I'm not interested, that's not what I want...". We then start to judge, to criticize, to put a wall between us and the person in front and his ideas. No effective communication can pass through this wall. You lock yourself in your certainties and you cut yourself off from others and from any desire to communicate. People are attracted to those who listen and consider their ideas, not in a superficial way but honestly, because it is a chance for them to share and expose their ideas.
So when someone speaks 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 them and in the end you may adopt one of them. This is very rewarding from a personal development point of view because if you only stay focused on your own ideas you will stay stuck in the same place, with your same beliefs and you will not evolve. What creates communication problems is often what limits us in our growth as human beings.
Empathy
If you can communicate with others, it is thanks to your "mirror neurons" which allow you to empathize, to put yourself in the place of the other person, to experience his or her emotions as if you were yourself in that situation. This has become a central point of psycho-neuronal knowledge.
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.
An example: a friend invites me to have a drink on her terrace one summer evening, the weather is nice, we are barefoot and when she arrives with the tray near the table, she bumps her little toe against it... Seeing what happens and reading her face, I can almost immediately feel the pain. Maybe not as strong as she feels it but I can feel some of it.
Why is empathy important for good communication? Because the person you are communicating with wants to be heard and understood. When you show empathy to your interlocutor, he will feel understood "Ha! I see that he understands what I want to tell him, he is like me, we have many things in common..." and this will create what is called a cooperative dynamic.
If you don't have any empathy with this person, you won't understand their emotions, they will feel it and therefore they will say to themselves: "Ok this person doesn't know anything about me, they don't understand the challenges I face so how can they help me? I'm not going to listen to her, she doesn't understand me and her message doesn't resonate with me...". : this will generate negative emotion and a space of separation.
The more you develop your empathy, the better your connection and therefore your communication with the people around you.
Authenticity
Authenticity is being true to oneself and to others.
How often have you been truly authentic in communication? Most people are careful to be polite, not to offend. They try to make the verbal transaction go smoothly, without necessarily being fair to themselves, without listening to themselves, without being aligned with their own values. To succeed in knowing your authentic self, you must have clearly stated your values and have the courage to defend them. Not everyone is spontaneously authentic, it takes effort. And it is not because you are polite and smiling that your interlocutor cannot see through this expression and realize if you are really authentic in your message or not. To embody your message and convince, it is important to be true to yourself and to convey a message in line with your values.
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.
Clarity
Your communication must be clear. Good communication is not based on what you have to say but on what the other person has received as a message. Often we think we have said something, and the other person does something else or believes something else than what we meant. This can create a lot of problems in terms of business, management, or even the education of your children. Clarity is aligning your intention with the other person's perception.
To do this, you must communicate in a precise, focused, accurate manner to eliminate all risk of misinterpretation. If you notice that you have trouble making yourself understood, that what people do is not what you asked for, it is surely due to a lack of clarity in the orders communicated. This leads to misunderstanding and therefore poor execution or an image of yourself that is not aligned with who you really are and the message you wish to convey.
If you have communication problems or just want to improve, ask yourself this question:
What are the qualities I need to develop to reduce the friction I encounter in my communication? Is my weak point assertiveness, authenticity, lack of openness, insufficient empathy, a problem of clarity in my messages or a lack of listening?
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 my presentations more explicit, more striking? Do I have to read up, do I have to take notes, do I have to prepare them better, do I have to ask my boss for feedback, do I have to learn a new vocabulary? Maybe I need to simplify my vocabulary? Instead of trying to be sophisticated, maybe I should go for a simple vocabulary that everyone can understand instead of trying to impress with terms that only I, in some cases, understand. Maybe I should adapt my vocabulary to my audience?
All these qualities can be gained through practice. It's like sport.
The more I practice, the easier it becomes, the more automatic, the more agile I become and the more I master the power of my communication.
Take care of this power and use it to interact harmoniously with the people around you.