I am thinking to add this to http://www.helium.com's "How to Improve Your Communication Skills" topic. Most of the top essays there tend to be short and sweet. This would be way too big probably! But, after seeing that topic, I was inspired to write my own recollection of how I have improved my own in hopes that it can help other people who are trying to improve theirs.
How to Improve Your Communication Skills
by Joshua Gough © 2007
Improving your communication skills will test your P's. That's Practice, Patience, Persistence, and Pain tolerance! But don't worry, once you get started it's not that bad! You probably won't even need a 12-step-program or a money back guarantee. I know this because improving my own communication skills required me to take that first painful step of admitting that I was the one who needed to improve, not everybody else.
Oh sure, some people had similar communication problems, but I had to learn what I could do to improve my own skills as much as possible. After all, I realized, I was the only person I knew who would be involved in every single conversation or communication I would have for the rest of my life. So, I thought, I had better learn to understand myself and how best to adjust my behavior to accommodate the communication styles of people I meet.
Principles of Successful Communication
What I have learned can be classified into these principles. Here I provide the summarization of the principles. Afterward, you may read the rest of the essay to see exactly the context of how I came to each of these conclusions.
1) Kindness, Respect, and Receptivity
To become a better communicator you must first learn how to be kind and respectful to people. You must not fake this. You must take time and experience life enough that your interest becomes real to them. You must also be open to learning from criticism about your own behavior because this will enable you to make adjustments and improve.
2) Attention and Listening
You must pay careful attention to your audience, whether it's comprised of one, one hundred, or one million people, before you can understand the best way to communicate in any given context.
3) Understanding and Mirroring
If two people are to successfully communicate on a non-trivial level, then each must strive to achieve consensus of understanding by confirming, or mirroring back, his or her own understanding to the other before moving on to the next topic.
4) Clarity and Eloquence
Speaking with clarity and eloquence comes after much practice and patience. You only get one chance to make a first response to a situation. In business situations, be prepared. As a friend of mine and I said on the tennis court once, "Preparation, not spectation". In social and familial situations, strive to make your response to wrong or hurtful behavior a good response that stresses your intention of correcting the problem, rather than simply expressing your rage. Express that you were made angry, but do it after the immediate physical symptoms of anger have subsided.
5) Patience and Persistence
Being patient means that you accept the fact that not everything will go your way immediately and that some things may never go your way. With this acceptance, you must be persistent in your efforts, trying different ways to convey your message to people.
6) Failure, Compromise, and Persuasion
When communicating with others you must be prepared for three possible outcomes: failure, compromise, and persuasion, or success. You will experience each of these results in due time, so learn to handle each one with grace and kindness.
7) A Culmination in Compassion and Forgiveness
You will become compassionate when you grow to be simultaneously ever-aware of the person you once were, ever-accepting of the person you now are, and ever-focused on growing into the person you hope to become. Embodying this wisdom, you will extend a helping hand and forgiveness to others around you.
While we all have different communication styles, I have found that regardless of style these principles avail themselves time and time again when I analyze the qualities that make for successful communication and successful communicators.
It's true that I could stop here and say that since I don't know you personally I cannot prescribe any sure-fire means for you to overcome any particular problems you may be facing in your quest to become a better communicator. However, I'd like to go much further by sharing with you my own personal story about the wisdom I have gained regarding each of the principles above. In doing that, I hope that there may be something with which you can identify and incorporate into your own learning process.
Therefore, in the rest of this essay I will relate my own personal experience in going from a somewhat less than confident communicator to a sufficiently confident one.
I'll begin by citing the following quote from the American inventor and scientist George Washington Carver:
"How far you go in life depends on your being tender with the young, compassionate with the aged, sympathetic with the striving and tolerant of the weak and strong, because someday in your life you will have been all of these."
I've used this quote in other essays because I love it so much. There is a lifetime of wisdom embodied in that one sentence.
Learn more about George Washington Carver at Wikipedia by clicking the links below
He was born into slavery in Newton County, Marion Township, near Diamond Grove, now known as Diamond, Missouri. The exact date of birth is unknown due to the haphazard record keeping by slave owners but "it seems likely that he was born in the spring of 1864" [1]. His owner, Moses Carver, was a German American immigrant who had purchased George's mother, Mary, from William P. McGinnis on October 9, 1855 for seven hundred dollars. The identity of Carver's father is unknown but he had sisters and a brother, all of whom died prematurely.
When George was an infant, he, a sister, and his mother were kidnapped by Confederate night raiders and sold in Arkansas, a common practice. Moses Carver hired John Bentley to find them. Only Carver was found, orphaned and near death from whooping cough. Carver's mother and sister had already died, although some reports stated that his mother and sister had gone north with the soldiers. For returning George, Moses Carver rewarded Bentley with his best filly that would later produce winning race horses. This episode caused George a bout of respiratory disease that left him with a permanently weakened constitution. Because of this, he was unable to work as a hand and spent his time wandering the fields, drawn to the varieties of wild plants. He became so knowledgeable that he was known by Moses Carver's neighbors as the "Plant Doctor."
Source:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Washington_Carver
Principle 1: Kindness, Respect, and Receptivity
To improve my own communication skills required me to first pay extremely careful attention to other people and begin to take these words from Carver to heart. As I mentioned above, this was painful! Think about it. After so many years as a teenager and early twenty-something, during which time I was sure I was always right and everyone older was just plain wrong, uninformed, or unmotivated, I had built some pretty strong egoistic tendencies! I imagine it feels the same way for almost all of us when we finally realize we must improve ourselves.
I finally took it to heart that communication really is a two-way street in which both I and my recipient target audience are continually exchanging messages through both words and nonverbal cues. This made me realize that the very first thing I had to do to become a better communicator was to learn what it means to be kind, respectful, and receptive. Most of us think we know what it means to be kind and considerate of others. I am pretty sure I thought I did. However, I still had reason to believe, and had been told outright, that I could, at times, be impatient, mean, or unkind. To address this I had to take some time to learn more about what it truly means to be kind and respectful of other people.
There were many ways I tried to do this. I read about it. I watched and learned about people who everyone thought was kind. I read articles, books, short-stories, read the Gospels, re-watched Carl Sagan's Cosmos television series, and scoured the internet for quote mines that collected wise words and aphorisms like Carver's words above. I saved bits of wisdom I found in a text file and took time to contemplate their meanings as a type of meditation. I wrote about them in a private journal during my own time. I attempted to write my own wise words and aphorisms as I felt myself becoming wiser than I had been before. I wrote about anything I desired to express myself and strived as best as I could to correct my own behavior. I discussed what I'd learned with friends and family members and they shared we me the wisdom they had learned.
During this time I realized the following fact: if you and I are to successfully communicate with each other then first I must allow you to be the singular focus of my attention. I must give way to you. Likewise, you must give way to me in return. This give and take, back and forth, to and from rhythm is what makes for engaging conversation. This is what leads to lasting relationships founded upon mutual respect, genuine acceptance, and understanding.
This meant that if I were to improve my ability to communicate effectively in all areas of life from work, to family and friends, and to community, then I truly had to begin with some surgical adjustments on my own attitude! I knew I had to do an attitude organ transplant, so to speak. I had to reach deep inside and yank out my old worn down attitude and replace it with a new healthy one! I needed one that was filled with genuine respectfulness toward others.
Tip 1: Perform surgery on your own attitude organ first! Replace your old dilapidated attitude with a new and positive one.
As a result of trying to do this, it also helped me a great deal to realize that very few people were consciously against me, despite what it might feel like. In fact, I came to see, 99.9999 percent of the time people were just going about their business as best they could and harbored no ill will toward me. But, they also didn't have any special interest in me or obligation to me either! So, this again impressed upon me that the best bet was to start by respecting people and accepting who they were from the get go. Learning how to do this has shown me that people will then offer me their own respect and acceptance. They will endeavor to help me communicate with them rather than being edgy or guarded.
Without this foundation, I realized, I would never be able to really communicate with you. All my attempts would fall short of feeling genuine to you. They would remain on the surface level only, never to reach any part of you that truly matters.
To further illustrate this point, think about this fact: no person can ever truly force you to enjoy his conversation. He can never truly demand that you listen to him. He can never implant respect for him directly into your mind. All successful communication begins not with words, but with respectful actions that construct a symbolic bridge from one person to another. Across this bridge both words and non-verbal communication messages must travel to success or to oblivion. The words themselves, no matter how refined and eloquent, will never reach their ultimate destination should they end up falling over the edge of an improperly constructed bridge.
That is why it is so important for you and I to labor first to create a symbolic bridge between the front doors of our minds. Who should get started constructing that bridge? Well, it doesn't really matter much who builds the bridge! I learned that I have the power to start its construction by thinking about how I can change my attitude. If I can build the bridge to you, then so long as I don't set up a mental toll booth in my own mind, you are free to walk over it to get to my door too.
Tip 2: It is absolutely crucial to take the chance and just start to "build bridges" to other people. Don't expect others to start building first because most of the time they are waiting too, just like you are! So, go and be the first one who just picks his tools and builds.
These realizations and recognitions taught me to become much more welcoming of acquaintances, offering first to them a simple smile and basic acceptance. Soon they became friends. Later still, through my willingness to help them in their times of needs just as they had first been willing to help me, they became good friends. And even later, as a result of listening to them when they shared with me accounts of their own life struggles and then through sharing with them my own, they became best friends. There is a small plaque in my grandparents' home that embodies this process in these words: "A friend is someone to whom you can empty the contents of your heart".
Tip 3: Be a friend to other people, even if you are not sure they will be your friend back. Good people will start to notice and you'll never look back.
Yet, even after I learned to be perfectly kind and considerate, I still had reason to believe that people had a hard time understanding what I was trying to convey, whether it was through speech, writing, art, or any other communications medium. When people explained this to me I realized that I had to slow myself down and stop to consider carefully this criticism.
Principle 1 in summary: To become a better communicator you must first learn how to be kind and respectful to people. You must not fake this. You must take time and experience life enough that your interest becomes real to them. You must also be open to learning from criticism about your own behavior because this will enable you to make adjustments and improve.
Phew, that first step sounds like it was pretty grueling. Well, it was, but looking back it all seems like a different life time now. I imagine that it will feel much the same way for you too.
Principle 2: Attention and Listening
Let's move on to something less painful: Attention and Listening.
Once I had recognized the need to accept criticism I was able to let go of the irrational idea that other people should innately understand what I had to say or that they should immediately agree with my ideas just because they were, well, after all, Mine!#@!#!! This freed my ego and the rest of my mind to focus on creative ways that I could help people to understand my ideas and my positions. I did this by paying careful attention to the ways in which people I was talking to learned. To put it in business-speak: I focused on my target audience. When my target audience was just one person, then I had to think carefully about how best to communicate with this person. I realized that I could not always use the same tactics with every person. I had to pay attention and adapt. I learned to look closely at the ways other people could successfully communicate with that person, and sought advice when they were willing to give it.
Principle 2 in summary: You must pay careful attention to your audience, whether it's comprised of one, one hundred, or one million people, before you can understand the best way to communicate in any given context.
Principle 3: Understanding and Mirroring
The third idea is really a subset of the second. I realized that if I wanted people to listen to what I had to say, then by all means I had to try first to listen to what they had to say and the questions they chose to ask. After all, if I really believed that I had good things to say and had good ideas to share, then was it such a stretch to think about the fact that the people I wanted to share them with might also feel the same way about their own ideas? Therefore, I realized I must give them the opportunity to share their ideas with me first. I learned to listen to them and pay attention to what they seemed to be asking. Were they looking for advice? Were they just sharing some good news with me?
I learned to be very wise in one thing here. When I recognized that I was struggling to communicate, then I knew I was in some sense already ahead of the game. But, I remembered that I did not always feel that I was not as good a communicator as I needed to be. Oh sure, I didn't feel right about some things, but I more often than not attributed this to a problem in the people I was trying to communicate with rather than a problem within myself. Yet, in my stream-of-consciousness that was and still is my personal journal I finally had a Joycean epiphany in which I really and truly realized that it was me who had to make improvements. I also recognized then that not everyone has made this recognition in themselves. Therefore, they may want to express a lot of things to me as soon as they can open their mouth. So, l decided then to just let them do it. I decided to show them some patience. I could then just sit back and listen for a minute or two. I will be fine, I thought, and they will feel better too. I considered it time for my mouth and jaw to take a break and time to exercise my ears and eyes instead to practice listening and giving attention.
I must reiterate this point because it was so important: I realized that in order for me to effectively communicate, I absolutely had to put the interests of others first in my mind, even when it was so excruciatingly painful to do so, like when it was someone prone to snapping or being gruff and unduly dismissive. I also had to realize that if people came to me for advice, then obviously they had at least a provisional reason to seek my input. If at work, maybe it was just because of the job I was in at the time. If in social or familial circles, maybe it was just because of our relationship.
Recognizing this, I decided I didn't want to disappoint them by a lack of good manners, foul or offensive speech, or an overzealous desire to immediately impress them with my own knowledge that could "solve" their problem without listening to the problem they were explaining very carefully. I didn't want to be the kind of person who used a hammer not just on nails, but on screws as well. Not all problems have the same solution, nor are all people actually seeking the solution to a problem. Sometimes they just want to talk and communicate and that's perfectly okay too. Most importantly, I realized that I must strive to always remember to listen to people as closely as I can since people are more important than tasks, mere knowledge, or ego anyway. Of course, I know that I will never fully understand everything I hear no matter how hard I may try, but trying my best will bring me closer to that true understanding.
And so it does! I learned to become welcoming of the slow and sometimes arduous process of understanding. I let go of the desire to know solutions before even hearing questions. I realized, because you and I are different people and because you and I process our sensory inputs differently, that it is literally impossible for us to ever have the exact same idea about anything at all. The best we can do is acknowledge to each other that we think we understand what each other is communicating. Because of this, I realized that it is important for me to mirror back to you, my audience, my own understanding of what you had attempted to communicate to me before I respond to what I thought you said. Similarly, I learned that when I was initiating an outbound communication of an idea to you then it was important for me to ask you to mirror your understanding back to me. This can be as simple as waiting for you to finish processing what I'm saying before I keep speaking, or letting you repeat back to me what I have said in your own words.
Principle 3 in summary: If two people are to successfully communicate on a non-trivial level, then each must strive to achieve consensus of understanding by confirming, or mirroring back, his or her own understanding to the other before moving on to the next topic.
Principle 4: Clarity and Eloquence
Communicating with clarity and eloquence is not something that happens over night. I realized that the key component of this skill is to winnow away all words or ideas that do not contribute to my core target message. For example, when I was trying to communicate a business idea to a client, then I realized I should not ramble on about unrelated things when it comes time to discuss business. I learned to listen to their concerns and questions about whatever they chose to ask first, but when they indicated readiness to get down to business, I learned to remain focused on business.
Here is another example from the realm of social and familial communications. When I was trying to communicate to a loved one about something he or she had done wrong or hurtful, then I had to first learn how to borrow a little wisdom from the principle of patience before I spoke. Recognizing that it was always very difficult for me to convey my core message to help the person correct his or her behavior or understand how he or she had been hurtful when I was in a state of anger or frustration, I resolved to allow myself time to collect my ideas and thoughts before I chose to react. I know that I only get one chance to make my first impression in any given situation when I do react, so I learned to take the time to assemble a clear and eloquent response or instruction to leave the recipient completely sure that my intention was to help remedy the situation, not simply to express anger.
And, when I was ready to fully address the issue, I learned to stop and ask the person about the situation first. Next, I struggled to remember to follow the same pattern of attentive listening and achieving understanding. Finally, I learned to speak when I had achieved understanding and assembled as clear and as eloquent response as I could. I learned that it is good to calmly express that I had angry feelings, but choose to wait for my anger to subside before I choose to reveal the nature or cause of such feelings. This showed me that people appreciate this and it will help them to learn that when interacting with me, they are free to take their time to formulate their responses. It helped them to realize that I did not desire for them to be rushed into replying without adequate preparation.
Principle 4 in summary: Speaking with clarity and eloquence comes after much practice and patience. You only get one chance to make a first response to a situation. In business situations, be prepared. As a friend of mine and I said on the tennis court once, "Preparation, not spectation". In social and familial situations, strive to make your response to wrong or hurtful behavior a good response that stresses your intention of correcting the problem, rather than simply expressing your rage. Express that you were made angry, but do it after the immediate physical symptoms of anger have subsided.
Principle 5: Patience and Persistence
Achieving the virtue of patience is also not easy at times. It is easy to get frustrated when attempts to communicate seem to fall on deaf ears. A good first step I discovered was to ask myself again whether I had improperly listened or misunderstood the person with whom I was communicating. Similarly, in the competitive business world, if I have failed to understand my potential client or my audience while someone else has taken the time to do so, then I can pretty much guarantee that I will not win their business. Thus, on all fronts, I knew I had to think of different communications tactics to help people understand me, but if I had misunderstood what they wanted, then I had some other adjustments to make in myself. I had to remember that this is a two-way street.
If it was patience with a family member, sometimes there was little I could do to change their behavior. In fact, I really cannot change their behavior anyway. I understood that they must be the one to make the choice internally to change. The best thing I could do is to remain patient and continue to communicate in the best ways I could according to the principles outlined above. Love is not love if it is forced and change is not change if it is coerced. Therefore, I learned that I must remain patient.
Persistence goes right along with patience. I realized that patience is not the ability to sit and wait for someone else to solve problems for me. Rather, it is the realization that it's unreasonable to expect that everything should be perfect at this very moment because I say so. More than this, it is an understanding that it takes time and continued efforts for changes to take place. Continued effort is persistence. I kept at it. I tried different approaches. I tried for more understanding. I tried to listen more deeply. I adjusted my own behaviors and my own expectations. I again realized that because this is a two-way street I may never achieve exactly what I had in mind, but I remained persistent.
Principle 5 in summary: Being patient means that you accept the fact that not everything will go your way immediately and that some things may never go your way. With this acceptance, you must be persistent in your efforts, trying different ways to convey your message to people.
Principle 6: Failure, Compromise, and Persuasion
I learned that at the end of the day there were three outcomes to all communications. At times there was failure, in which case I had to prepare myself to enter the cycle again with patience and persistence. Other times brought compromise, in which case I and my audience reached an agreement that differed from what either of us desired, but was not completely unsatisfactory to either.
Finally, sometimes there was persuasion. Since I was struggling to improve my communication skills then it's safe to say I was hoping to be able to improve my persuasive skills more than anything. While this is true to an extent, it is also true that I simply wanted for people to accept that I had ideas of my own and just wanted them to hear what I was saying, whether or not they agreed. Achieving this ability was in and of itself a type of persuasion in that I overcame a once formidable barrier.
Principle 6 in summary: When communicating with others you must be prepared for three possible outcomes: failure, compromise, and persuasion, or success. You will experience each of these results in due time, so learn to handle each one with grace and kindness.
Faith in Doubt
All the while throughout this entire process I was doubtful that I could improve my communications skills, but I had faith in doubt. Faith in this case meant "something held with strong conviction". My strong conviction was not that I had discovered any magical formula or secret doctrine, but rather that I saw far too much negativity in myself and plenty of positivity in others to which I aspired. My strong conviction was thus in the belief that if others had been able to do it, then so too should I be able to do it.
Interestingly, the words "faith in doubt" could also be read as having a strong belief in doubt itself. This is also a good way to interpret this, because I noticed that the people who had become most successful often looked a tiny bit unsure of themselves. It was almost as if they were continually walking a tight rope. They prefaced their words with phrases like, "I believe", "I have found", or "I have learned". They were aware that others may be experiencing different things at any given time. This language also indicated their own realization that they once may have thought differently before becoming wiser.
It was only over time and through experience that I came to assemble my own understanding of the tips and principles outlined above. This is my story and I hope that it will help you in your own quest to improve your own communication skills.
Principle 7: Culmination in Compassion and Forgiveness
The last thing I want to share with you is that striving and finally learning how to become a better communicator has culminated in another realization for me. It has culminated in my becoming a more compassionate and forgiving person who is better able to recognize the struggles and concerns in others as just as valid, real, and worthy of attention as are my own. When I began to accept this, and not just accept it, but also cherish it, I found that many of the things I had wished so desperately to communicate about in the past were not quite so important as was the simple act of loving kindness.
As paradoxical as this may sound at first, this final awakening has been for me the most beneficial one toward my continued success as an improved communicator. The reason is that as I became wiser to the concerns and needs of others and grew to actually care deeply about those concerns and needs, I found that I had the skills and abilities tailor-made to help meet many of those needs. I also realized that it was immature to hold on to grudges or past expectations, so I tried to become more forgiving. I have subsequently tried my best to put these skills to work by helping my family and friends, improving my workplace through a positive and realistic attitude, and volunteering in my community. This is a continuous process of self-improvement. Some days are better than others, and the paradox is that while no single day is perfect, neither is any single day imperfect.
Principle 7 in summary: You will become compassionate when you grow to be simultaneously ever-aware of the person you once were, ever-accepting of the person you now are, and ever-focused on growing into the person you hope to become. Embodying this wisdom, you will extend a helping hand and forgiveness to others around you.
Even if you have some doubts that improving your communication skills is possible for you to do at this time, have faith in doubt. I can assure you that it has worked in at least one case: my own. Knowing that I once had very little ability to effectively communicate, but also knowing that I read and read and struggled and struggled through much real world practice to sculpt myself into a much more effective and confident communicator, you can take hope in your own quest.
Conclusion
By taking time for careful reflection, self-analysis, and self-improvement I have been able to improve my communication skills over the course of my life. I believe you can do the same. Since you're reading essays about how to do this, you are obviously already trying. Finally, my wish for you above all else is that in your quest to become a better communicator you too will learn that final lesson of compassion and forgiveness and then grow, like I have, to count it as the most important improvement of all.
