Are You Communicating Powerfully?

The main purpose of communication is to convey an idea clearly and persuasively and to motivate the listener to carry out an action. This will be achieved only if our listeners listen to us attentively. How do I know that my listeners are listening to me attentively? Given below are some signals which tell us if our listener is listening attentively or not:

 Engaged listeners:

• Respond warmly and attentively throughout the conversation,
• Their eyebrows are raised, their eyes are rounded,
• They lean forward while listening,
• Give you more eye contact,
• Follow directions more accurately,
• Ask fewer questions for clarification,
• Appear more relaxed, smile more, and their shoulders are down.

Disengaged or disinterested listeners:

• Avoid eye contact,
• Squint their eyes,
• Close their mouths,
• Lower their eyebrows,
• Cross their arms and legs,
• Turn away from the speaker.

How to make your listener listen more attentively?

Avoid vague words:

Avoid unclear words like it, that, this, those, they, he, she, them, and we etc. We use these words thinking that our listeners know what we are talking about. It may not be the case always. As far as possible replace these words by what these words are used for. Don’t say ‘It is a great process.’ Say: ‘The new grinding method is a great process.’ Avoid saying ‘We are leaving at 10 am.’ Say: ‘Rita and I are leaving at 10 am.’

Don’t repeat yourself:

At times our listener is not able to understand our message and tells us so. In such cases simply repeating previously used words is not going to help. There can by many reasons for the listener not being able to understand. Fast pace of speaking, inadequate knowledge of the subject, poor language skills, diverted mind, low volume, back ground noises etc. The right approach is to ask for the cause of misunderstanding and take remedial action accordingly.  

Say one thought in a sentence and keep the sentence short:

The desire to say it all and say it quickly makes us use long sentences, difficult words and use complicated sentence structure. We must make our listener’s job easy by saying just one thought in a sentence, keeping the sentence short and using simple structures. This makes job of the listener easy to follow what we are trying to say. Many of us also tend to get in too much minor detail. As a result our listener loses interest in what we are saying. The trick is to get to the main point as quickly as possible.

And two golden rules to improve impact of our communication:

1.   Put the most important information at the beginning or end.

and

2.   KISS; meaning ‘Keep it Simple Stupid’

Following above simple ideas will definitely improve impact of our message and motivate the listener to act more enthusiastically.

We conduct workshop on ‘Communication Skills’ and many other soft skills improvement programs both for industries, educational institutes and individuals. We also offer a few programs like ‘Shine under Stress (Strategies to Succeed in Exams)’, ‘Seven Laws of Teaching’, ‘Student’s Behavior Management’ etc. pro bono to educational institutes

Please visit link http://bit.ly/sarwansingh or write to us at sarwansingh6644@gmail.com  or call (91)8866680407 for further details.

By:

Sarwan Singh

@sarwan_singh

http://singhsarwan.blogspot.com