Communication skills training is important, because in order to achieve your goals, you need to gain the willing cooperation of other people. And the only way you can do that is to communicate your message.

Communication has six major channels:

Here is one excellent piece of advice for each set.

Always strive for verbal clarity.

Avoid using open ended words and phrases which have multiple meanings. For example; the phrase, “As soon as possible”, denotes multiple possible meanings and is therefore a poor choice of expression.

Your first duty is to be understood. And to be understood you need to use clear and specific language. Not unclear and ambiguous language.

Voice tone concerns the musical element of your voice.

People judge your emotional balance largely on the tone of your voice. Good voice tones are generally slower, louder, deeper, and more variable.

Bad voice tones are the opposite: faster or quieter, shriller, or monotone.

Therefore speak with a voice tone that is generally slower, louder, deeper, and more variable.

Body language is a huge topic and pertains to how you appear to your listeners. Body language is about your dress code, your facial expression, your eye contact, your posture, gestures, proximity, scent and orientation.

A good piece of advice I can give you is this:

Give good eye contact and try to maintain a relaxed and friendly facial expression.

A vast amount of communication that occurs in business world is in the form of the written word. Therefore, it is important to get your writing up to standard.

The best one-line piece of advice I can offer you is:

Never send unstructured, rambling messages; instead always structure your message.

Listening is the art of paying attention to the other person, understanding, judging and remembering what you heard.

The best piece of advice I can give you is this:

When listening, give the other person 100% of your attention.

Reading is a uniquely human activity. No other animal in the universe reads. Many people are not good readers. They read, but they don’t absorb what they read. So, read slowly and with a pencil in hand. Try to reduce what you are reading into simple summaries. Then review your summary notes and memorise them.

For example: Here are the summary notes for this blog.

1. Always strive for verbal clarity.

2. Speak with a voice tone that is generally, slower, louder, deeper, and more variable.

3. Never send unstructured, rambling messages; instead always structure your message:

4. When listening, give the other person 100% of your attention.

5. Listen with intent to understand, not with intent to disprove.

6. Read with a pencil in hand; and memorise the key sentences.

The thing that separates you from all other animals, is your power to reason. It is your rational mind, that sets you apart from gorillas, monkeys, tigers and tadpoles.

Other animals are driven by two factors, their Instinct and the environment. But humans have an additional factor that allows us to do all the things that are distinctly human. That additional factor is the rational mind. It is the capacity to think rationally, to deduce consequences, to discover causes, and to think logically, that make us more than a mere, Naked Ape.

It is your rational mind that allows you to think about science, politics, economics, art, psychology, history, architecture, ethics, mathematics and technology. Animals can’t do any of that, but humans can, because humans are the Rational Animal. Be a rational animal.

The advice I would like to offer is this:

How to improve your personal effectiveness

Your personal effectiveness is a measure of your ability to add value to yourself and others.

How can you improve your personal effectiveness?

How can you improve your personal effectiveness and thus make yourself produce more valuable work, per day, in less time and effort?

That is a good question.

Let us say first that personal effectiveness is the product of:

Doing all the right things, in the right way, at the right time.

Let us answer each of these three questions and see what we can discover.

In order to improve your personal effectiveness, what are the right things for you to be doing?

Answer: Do only those things that are consistent with your goal

Do not do anything that is inconsistent with your goal.

If you are able to achieve goals, then you are deemed to be personally effective.

That implies two other attributes:

Let us assume that you do know what your goal is, and that you are, indeed, intelligent enough to know what actions are necessary to achieve the goal.

It means that you stay focused only on those things that are consistent with your goal.

Personal effectiveness requires that you are doing things in the right way.

Question: Do you do the best you can do, or not?

Do you have a tendency to do the least you can get away with? Do you use the phrase, “”Oh, that will do. Let’s put the kettle on“”.

Your personal effectiveness is a partly a measure of your willingness to do your best work.

The most efficient manner possible means that you are always looking for a better way.

If we assume that technology is always advancing, therefore, the methods of doing any task are always changing. So, for example, if you wanted to send a message to London, in 1800, you had to send a messenger to either run, or ride, to London carrying your message.

There is a set of six fundamental management skills: These are skills that are needed by everyone who wants to succeed in their role as a manager or team leader.

For example: Sam joined the organisation years ago in a particular role, in a certain department. As the time passed, the organisation grew and so did the department. It used to be just two people in the department and now there are ten people in the same department.

These ten people need a team leader manager and Sam seems to be the best choice for the job. So now Sam is expected to manage and lead the team, but Sam has never had any training relating to how to be an effective leader manager.

Maybe you are in the same position as Sam.

You don’t need an MBA. You don’t want to go to college. You just want some practical guidance on how to manage the team on a day to day basis, in order to get the best performance from the team.

You just want a framework of fundamental, basic, practical ideas that will serve as a mental guide to successful action as a leader manager.

There are six major categories of management skills.

Here they are:

You have three spheres, your…

Please note the following facts:

Your sphere of control contains all the things you can directly control. This is a very restricted list: it contains everything you think, say and do. This is the only thing over which you have direct and unchallengeable control. You control nothing else.

You don’t control the weather, you don’t control your family, you don’t control the traffic, you don’t control the customers, or your colleagues or your boss.

You can only control yourself and many people can’t even control themselves.

We define Communication as, “The transfer of information and emotion from one mind to another”.

There are many, but here is a list of the most important skills under the general heading of “improved communication”:

Let us make some notes for each one:

Because thought precedes and controls all action, thought precedes and controls communication. Therefore, if you are to communicate clearly you must first learn to think clearly. You must develop your skills as a clear, logical and progressive thinker.

How?

You’ve heard it said that, “Everything happens for a reason”.

That is true. There is a reason for everything, including success and failure.

There are reasons why a person fails. The reasons are usually a combination of the following:

Let us say a few words on each.

Many people don’t really expect to succeed.

They don’t expect to succeed because, in the past they have not succeeded.

They use the past to justify their belief that their chances this time are not good, and they have the horrible feeling that they are probably wasting their time trying.

As a result of this belief that they “are onto a loser“, they only put in 75% effort.

Because they don’t give it their full 100% effort, they are beaten by a person who did.

They lose again, and next time around they are even more sure of a bad result; so, they invest only 73% effort, and consequently, are beaten again by a competitor who did give it 100%.

Many people put in half-hearted attempts and then, wonder why they never win.

The solution to the problem of lack of 100% effort, is “Give it 100% effort”.