Experience has taught me the significance of effective communication. It doesn’t have to be unduly lengthy and accentuated with dramatic language. The audience wants a crisp, meaningful, comprehensible and positive language which conveys the precise objective. This is what brings joy! And here, I am talking about communication as a profession, as well as communication in general.
A lot of us are not really born with great communication skills, we learn this during our professional years depending upon the nature of our job. It is easy to learn this through practice primarily, followed by dedication and self-awareness. It is very important to be yourself while communicating rather than pretending to be someone else. Only then can you have an easy flow of, and, honest communication.
Your message should be useful to the other person and should make sense to them. This surely helps in striking a chord and helps in maintaining a strong connection, thereby bringing value into the conversation.
To be quick, crisp, positive, and clear are signs of a person with good communication skills. If you drag your conversation with unnecessarily long sentences, and using difficult words, it tends to get lost on the listener. This results in losing the entire purpose of communication. It is imperative to convey the bottomline within the initial conversation. Be straightforward and clear.
To be a good communicator also requires you to be a good listener. All of us want to be heard and want to be seen. Be an active and sincere listener, this gesture speaks volumes rather than an actual communication. Try it out, it works wonders, believe me. Your communication in such a case should be absolutely minimal as it’s the other person doing the talking. This is what we call effective communication.
The dynamic of any conversation is shaped by what we say and how we do that. You will be surprised to know how the use of certain terms and the manner of speaking is able to greatly affect the outcome of our interactions. There are certain words that are often used by us in our communication without realising that they might lead to a different and not so positive message. These could be any words. All we need to do is to identify those words by going over the conversation in our mind, and try to remove those completely or to replace those with better or neutral ones.
It is important that the communication is positive. To ensure that, if you are having a bad day, defer the communication (could be any mode – e-mail, message, whatsapp, phone call, personal meeting) to another day to avoid anything negative coming out from you. This also helps in avoiding knee-jerk reactions and allows us to formulate our thoughts and deliver our message in the best way possible.
Few tips I can think of and am taking the liberty to offer here are:
Be conscious of what you are communicating, the words you are choosing and where are you using them;
On social media platforms, be wary of what you post, your likes, your shares and your content while tweeting or even retweeting;
In your personal space, be a conscious listener to your friend, family, co-worker etc.; Do not intervene when they want to talk their hearts out;
Do not give unsolicited advice to find solutions to others’ problems, unless you are asked for it
Well, I do not want to sound like a preacher (Alas I might already have done that!) but these are all my personal experiences and learnings. These tips work well in our personal as well as professional life. So give them a try.
She quit her corporate career in the beginning of 2018 to try her hand at various related things within communications space. She turned into a published author in 2020 with her maiden book ‘Little Joys of Communication’.
Currently Ritu is Senior Director at SCoRe and, Executive Director Communicators Guild – India (CGI).
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