10 Essential Skills you need to master for Excellent Communication

Enhancing communication skills guarantees you greater success in your personal growth and helps you establish healthier bonds. Therefore, below you will get the most essential skills and ideas to master communication. 

You may think that communication skills are easy to master. However, this is actually one of the most common barriers that the population presents: the difficulty in expressing themselves, in feeling skillful in their interpersonal relationships, where self-esteem and self-confidence should always go hand in hand to be able to move better in your day-to-day environments.

There are many who maintain the opinion that these types of skills should be developed early in the school environment. Knowing how to argue, expose without fear, speak assertively and respectfully, listen and even negotiate are key elements in a person's life.

However, it is very common to experience this lack from the first moment you face a job interview when you have to carry out a group project, or even when you have to make a presentation, conference, or defense of a job during university.

According to Brian Tracy, “Communication is a skill you can learn. It's like riding a bicycle or typing. If you're willing to work at it, you can quickly improve the quality of every part of your life."

Knowing the keys to communication skills and controlling them can not only help you open personal and professional doors. There is something even more important: you will be able to see yourselves better, you will have a more valid and positive perception of yourselves and that is something worth investing time and effort in.

 

10+ communication skills you can develop

At Indiana University Bloomington, a study was conducted throughout 2012 that was later published in Social and Behavioral Sciences. In it, the great importance of transmitting to university students the set of basic communication skills was detailed, so that they could improve their academic careers.

As you can deduce, it would be a priority for this series of skills to be part of any school and university curriculum. At the end of the day, you are facing that series of strategies that one is obliged to train in adult life.

Be that as it may, it can be said that you are always on time. Within coaching and therapeutic practice you undoubtedly find fabulous tools that expert professionals in this field can offer you.

Let’s see below what the 10 Essential Skills you need to master for Excellent Communication are.

 

1. Express clearly with a positive mind

Always starting with respect for others, it is necessary to learn to express your ideas bluntly and clearly. This strategy undoubtedly requires a series of prior skills: being clear about what you are going to say, maintaining adequate emotional temperance, and trusting yourself.

These three dimensions themselves orchestrate an exceptional substrate to be more assertive, direct, and effective when communicating.

On the other hand, have a positive focus on your reality and on yourself. Put aside pessimism or those fears that often completely limit your communication, negotiation, or arguments. If you focus on the barriers that separate you, on the idea that you will fail, that your ideas will not be heard, or that you will not succeed in certain activities, you will never move forward.

Basic communication skills require self-confidence, good self-esteem, and positive emotions, let's not forget.

 

2. Pay attention to your behavior

Maintain a good education whenever you can, remember that being educated opens many doors for you and is the best way to make your way in many social and work spaces. This implies, for example, learning to develop the following skills:

• Know how to listen.
• Respect turns to speak.
• Show opening.
• Build trust in others.
• Be correct at all times and stay calm.
• Do not disqualify.
• Use rich language.

 

3. Assertiveness

Assertiveness is the cornerstone of basic communication skills. Knowing how to defend positions with respect, knowing how to expose yourselves clearly, imposing yourselves without aggressiveness, defining positions, protecting your needs and ideas without being violated by others... All these dimensions make up and define the assertive person.

As a curiosity, Northwestern University carried out a study trying to explore what kind of language the general population used when making claims and protests in the administration, shops, centers, etc. Most of the people turned out to be more aggressive than assertive. This is a point without a doubt that you should all work on.

 

4. Be empathic

 

Empathy refers to the ability to "put yourselves in another's shoes" and understand their perspective without judging. Let you remember that everyone lives and interprets the circumstances of life-based on her point of view.

Therefore, you must be able to get out of your schemes and understand the emotions and thoughts of the other, even if you do not agree. This does not mean that you change your perspective and adapt it to others; what it implies is that you are able to understand and respect the other's point of view, and support as necessary.

For example, if a colleague is upset because he failed a test that didn't matter much to you, the least you can do is tell him that there is no reason for him to feel bad. On the contrary, you must be able to understand his discomfort and support him so that he feels better.

 

5. Open and listen

 

The ability to listen to others can do wonders for your relationships. Being able to attend with openness, to open up to others despite the fact that your positions are not the same always ends up making things easier and allows you to reach small achievements and understandings.

According to Plutarch,  "To be able to speak is precise to be able to listen"

 

6. Give value to your words

 

Make your communication interesting. If you are communicating verbally, make pauses, and inflections in your voice so that your dialogues are more interesting and do not bore your interlocutors. Give emphasis to your words. This is a strategy that is achieved over time as you feel more secure and comfortable with yourselves.

 

7. Send a clear message

 

Being clear in the messages you send will improve your communication skills

This tip is similar to the first. It is good to be direct and clear in your messages. Avoid vocabulary that can confuse, flee from flourishes, from pointless detours, from those arguments that lead nowhere. Always adapt your vocabulary to your interlocutors; remember that sometimes, simplicity is what causes the greatest impact

 

8. Anticipate and be patient

 

Read the possible reactions of your interlocutors but never take for granted what their reactions will be. Be prepared for any kind of reaction and unexpected situation. This is something that you will also master over time, but in any case, it is positive and recommended that you always have some counterargument, some idea, or heuristic that will allow you to get out of a complicated situation.

Patience is an excellent virtue in terms of communication. If you rush things and get frustrated because you don't get the results you want then your communication skills suffer. Be patient with others, if you need to go back and explain something, do it, if you have to do it twice, do it, others will thank you.

According to Jim Rohn, “Take advantage of every opportunity to practice your communication skills so that when important occasions arise, you will have the gift, the sharpness, the clarity, and the emotions to affect other people”

 

9. Coherence between emotion and message

 

Another of the basic communication skills consists of maintaining coherence between what is said and the way in which you transmit the message. The latter ranges from your gestures to the modulation of the voice.

Inconsistencies in this area can lead to confusion and misunderstandings among your interlocutors. For example, if you want your interlocutors to trust your word, the least you can do is show yourselves anxious with gestures such as evasion of the gaze, constant touching of the nose while speaking, broken voice, use of fillers, etc.

 

10. Train the ability to resolve conflicts and negotiate

 

Finally, it is important to keep in mind that in any relationship, it is normal for conflict to arise. Therefore, learning to handle them and knowing how to negotiate possible solutions is vital for relationships to work.

A mistake that many people make is to avoid conflict and hope that the situation will resolve itself. However, this only aggravates the problem and generates resentment between the parties involved.

However, the ability to resolve conflicts efficiently requires staying calm, respecting the other, and avoiding adopting a defensive posture. For this, it is vital to learn to manage one's own emotions and know how to communicate them without attacking or threatening others.

 

11 (Extra). Use a visual support

 

When you communicate, use visual elements that serve to support what you are saying. This is very useful when you want to make a presentation to a class or audience.

Use images, videos, graphics, and other visual elements that can help you. However, remember, sometimes supports such as PowerPoint end up boring, therefore, do not rely exclusively on these supports and make a combination of them.

 

How to enhance your ability to communicate efficiently?

 

To conclude, you want to emphasize that communication skills can be trained and enhanced through practice, as long as you take into account the aforementioned aspects.

Likewise, psychological assistance can be an excellent tool to develop those skills that are related to effective communication; such as assertiveness, proper management of social anxiety, and the ability to resolve conflicts, among others.

Hope you have got the Essential Skills and ideas you need to master for Excellent Communication. Don’t forget to visit Ghoori Learning blogs regularly. We encourage you to check your professional courses as well.