How to Improve Your Communication Skills – Basic Communication Skills

Do you want to develop the ability to communicate clearly and accurately, so that your audience can fully understand you? Do you want to know how to build instant rapport when you speak to people? Listen to this – developing your communication skills will help you in every aspect of your life, both in your private and professional life.

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What you will learn in this series

In this article series on?Communication Skills, we will cover such topics as followed:

• Basic Communication Skills: Beginner guides
• How To Improve Your Communication Skills,
• Why You Must Improve Your Communication Skills
• What Is Nonverbal Communication?

In the last article, we talked about why you should learn about good communication skills. That was an interesting topic in our monthly communication article series. Let’s expand on that today by learning how to improve our communication skills because we all need it.

First thing first, reflect upon your own communication style. How would you like to engage the people in your life and in the business arena? These are going to be very important for you as you go about your experiential exercises to further develop your communication skills.?Learn more about Basic Communication Skills.

We have all come to understand that better communication skills are the fundamental requisites for success in many aspects of our lives. So, let’s find out how to do that, how to keep on refining our tools so we can claim our rightful position in the marketplace.

Develop effective communication skills

By now, you would have understood that what we are talking about in this series is not just communication, but effective communication. And learning how to improve your communication has many benefits to you, personally and professionally.

Many people find it very difficult to know where to start from and this is what we are going to be considering shortly.

A couple of years ago, The Conference Board of Canada, an independent and nonprofit research organization, developed the?Employability Skills, which lists the important skills employees of different industries need to possess in other to succeed in their respective workplaces.

In that list, communication skill was on top, meaning communication was considered a fundamental requirement to succeed in workplaces.

Now, I am going to make a shortlist. It’s not that the other communication skills are not important, but here, there are mainly four areas we need to develop to get a better result in today’s workplaces and they are:

1. Friendliness,
2. Clarity,
3. Emotional intelligence,
4. And confidence.

Ok. Let’s see these vital communication skills, one after the other and how we can develop them in our everyday life.

Friendliness as a communication skill

Friendliness simply means the quality of being friendly. It’s an important skill you need to develop to make you appear to people like an open and warm person to deal with. I know that a lot of people might enjoy saying that they are bold and therefore do not need to take any nonsense from anyone.

Well, that might be ok at a point, but if you allow an overstated ego to come between you and the people you are dealing with, there will be consequences.

One disadvantage of overpricing yourself is that you will find that many people will tend to avoid you for not wanting to offend you because you are too far beyond their reach. And that can quickly translate into several setbacks on your road, especially in today’s service-based economy where an interpersonal relationship is the name of the game.

The good news is that even if you are not a very friendly person, because some of us are not, depending on the experiences we have had in the past, you can develop the skill. It is called a skill for this purpose.

To develop your friendliness as a communication skill, begin by practicing openness. Start by being less judgmental to people and try to see the good in everyone. There are a lot of good things about people even among those who might sometimes appear bad or behave badly to you.

Remember that you will always deal with people. If you are in business, you are going to talk to people you have never met before and that means they come with their own different characters, some of which might not particularly be appealing to you. But this is the point – you are going to deal with it, overlooking their shortcomings so you get a better result from the communication.

Learning to be friendly and open-minded to different people, including those you might not agree with their personal philosophies is advantageous to you. It will help you whether you are in your workplace or in a social environment. Think about that.

Still don’t know why you should develop your communication skills? Check out the following article on the series:?Why You Must Improve Your Communication Skills

Learn the art of clarity in communication

With all simplicity, good?communication?should be a meaningful exchange of information between two or more parties, and for your message to be well understood, it needs to be clear and concise to the point.

This is a very important skill of communication to learn in today’s social life with a lot of fusing and confusing information all over the place.

At one time, there was a lack of information or the ability to collate and analyze them, but today, we have tons and tons of information, reaching us from different places and through different devices. What this implies is that we now have the ability to be precise, to be straight to the point. We really need to be clear in our communication because it is an important skill we cannot afford to ignore today.

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