Becoming a Great Communicator
Under-considered keys to professional and personal success..
Posted August 16, 2021 | Reviewed by Ekua Hagan
- Practicing a few standard communication skills can help people get ahead, have more friends, and feel better about themselves.
- Good communication starts with listening and conveying understanding to the other person.
- While it's common to avoid giving advice, it can be helpful when done tactfully.
Don’t you know people who listen poorly or who talk too much or unclearly? We all do.
Here are keys to being a good communicator. They apply both to your work and personal life, and may be worth sharing with your loved ones, with whom excellent communication can be crucial.
Better listening
Everyone thinks they’re a good listener, but it’s harder than it seems. First, you have to fight against intruding thoughts and outside noises. You also have to decide whether you can think ahead to what you want to say, which you can do when you’re confident you’ll be able to understand the rest of the speaker’s utterance. You also need to be alert to an emotion underneath the words, which is often conveyed by a change of tone of voice or body language . Also, you have to decide whether to interrupt. The default is no, but if the person tends to be discursive or you really are short of time, it can be appropriate to interrupt, especially if the person tends to interrupt you.
Showing empathy
Sometimes, a person's words have an emotional component: S/he's happy, sad, or angry. and is glad if you understand how they’re feeling. You can convey that with a nod, by leaning forward, issuing a sigh of empathy, or a few words such as, “I can understand” or “I can only imagine how that’s making you feel.”
Asking questions
Most people like to be asked a question in response to what they’re saying, especially a question that asks for clarification. That shows that you care about what they’re saying, and may help the person crystallize his or her thinking. Asking a question is also a way to diminish the negative effect of giving advice.
Giving advice
Many, maybe most people resist getting advice. It can make them feel less than, and often the advice fails to consider factors that the other person has. You can diminish those risks by offering your suggestion as a question and, if you can think of more than one option, giving a choice. For example, I’m wondering if you’ve considered doing A or B?”
When to confront
As mentioned, input should usually be couched, tactful, often phrased as a question. But there’s a time for the nuclear option: confrontation. That’s usually reserved for an important issue about which the person has erected an impervious wall of complacency, defensiveness, or foolishness. For example, someone you love clearly has a substance abuse problem but insists that s/he “can handle it," even though it’s devastated his or her career , family, even hurt someone in a car accident. In such situations, it can be appropriate to be direct, listing, point by point, each of those devastations. But even then, it’s face-savingly helpful to end with a question such as, “Am I missing something here?”
Confidentially speaking
It’s tempting to share a person's juicy disclosure with other people who know him or her. Indeed, gossip is, almost by definition, interesting. Of course, the juicier the tidbit, the more trust your disclosure betrays. It's easier said than done but when someone trusts you with a disclosure that they wouldn’t want to be spread around, see if you can adhere to the "Vegas" rule: What happens in the conversation, stays in the conversation.
The takeaway
Great communicators get ahead, have more friends, and feel better about themselves. Whether it’s you or your child who could use a communication lesson as s/he returns to in-person school after a year of remote instruction, these standard but too-rarely practiced communication skills can make all the difference.
I read this aloud on YouTube.
Marty Nemko, Ph.D ., is a career and personal coach based in Oakland, California, and the author of 10 books.
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Here are keys to being a good communicator. They apply both to your work and personal life, and may be worth sharing with your loved ones, with whom excellent communication can be crucial.