Communication Skills

As promised in the article on Personal communication, we will now go into more depth on personal skills. After all we would never want to be accused of breaking a promise. The way we’re going to do it is with exercises so let’s begin:

Personal Skills Exercise #1 is changing leads in a conversation. Here we will repeat ourselves as we can’t improve on what we already said on the subject, therefore, quoting ourselves…..

"If you become aware of the fact that you are dominating a conversation, stop and turn it over to another party to take the lead. You can always return to what you were saying at a later point. If you are a personality that tends to take the lead in conversations, turn it over to someone else even for a short while. An easy way to do that is to simply finish your sentence and ask, "What is your opinion on it?” Or something else along that same line. If you do this often enough, you’ll be surprised at how quickly people will begin to consider you a charmer.

Personal Skills Exercise #2 Improve existing relationships by agreeing.

You can, no matter how difficult it seems find something in a person you have either a business or personal relationship that you can respect, appreciate, and some point/points that you can agree with them on. Then, go ahead and let them know that you agree with them. Really, if you can’t find any area for respect, appreciation, and agreement, than you don't belong in that relationship in the first place.

Personal Skills Exercise #3 Building rapport with Imitation This skill if influenced by the "pacing and mirroring" techniques of Neuro-Linguistic Programming. And no, it doesn’t mean mimicking, it means careful observation and deep understanding.

Observe how someone you admire moves, their gesutres, posture, and patterns of speaking and then practice following suit. Without going any deeper into it, if it’s someone you know personally, watch how they breath and follow their breathing. Invite them out for coffee and, without being obvious about it, get in rhythem with them by picking up your cup and sipping from it in time with them. And no you don’t have to know the reason for this, just do it and observe what happens.

Personal Skills Exercise #4. Observation of nonverbal messages

Ok this should be a fun exercise for you: As you watch people in crowds or pass them on the sidewalk, become attuned to the nonverbal cues you pick up about them. In other words as you observe their expressions, posture, gestures, be aware of what feelings, thoughts, or images may arise within you.

No, you don’t have to be right, and yes it is very possible that, particularly at first, what you may be picking up on is you own projections. However it really doesn’t matter. The point of this exercise is not to be right but to polish your personal skill of observation and awareness. The more aware you become, the more adept you will become at picking-up on subtle nonverbal cues, the more you learn to pick-up on these cues, the quicker you will develop the personal skill of ‘reading people’.