4 Ways to Beef Up Communication Skills

Com­mu­ni­ca­tion lies between the key link between peo­ple and get­ting work down.  It is essen­tial that we become pro­fi­cient in com­mu­ni­cat­ing.  How­ever, not all of us are born with the tal­ent in com­mu­ni­ca­tion.  We strug­gle to under­stand and even con­vey our mes­sage to the other party.  The lack of com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills becomes a break­down between two par­ties and some­times being mis­in­ter­preted result­ing in mis­un­der­stand­ing or mis­aligned goals.  By focus­ing on lev­el­ling up our com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills, we can bet­ter under­stand, bet­ter con­vey the mes­sage between two par­ties.  Here today, we give you a dif­fer­ent view point on how to beef up your com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills that touches on the tech­ni­cal aspect instead of the con­ven­tional “empa­thetic listening”.

1. Improve your vocab­u­lary – The prob­lem most of us face is our lim­ited vocab­u­lary of words.  We do not under­stand the words used when they are used in the com­mu­ni­ca­tion.  We may even mis­in­ter­pret its mean­ing to some­thing we think it should be.  This is prob­lem­atic!  When we mis­in­ter­pret words, we risk the chance of mis­in­ter­pret­ing the objec­tive of what the other party wants to achieve!  To avoid such prob­lem, the only way is to improve our vocab­u­lary.  By improv­ing our vocab­u­lary, we know more words; our arse­nal of words that can be used in com­mu­ni­ca­tion also increases.  It becomes eas­ier to com­mu­ni­cate as we are flex­i­ble in our avail­able of words to use.  We can use dif­fer­ent words to con­vey the same mean­ing to another party when they have dif­fi­culty under­stand­ing it.  On another view point, the arse­nal of words allows you to bet­ter under­stand mes­sages con­vey to you too!
2. Ask when in doubt – Do not feel embar­rassed to ask what a word means even if you’re in the mid­dle of a con­ver­sa­tion.  Obvi­ously, it would be pretty dif­fi­cult to com­plete the build­ing the list of words in our arse­nal.  Clar­ify with that per­son on the mean­ing of the word.  Loosen up on the ego­ism.  Break free from fear of being mock at.  You ben­e­fit more than you know you can loose more by clar­i­fy­ing the mean­ing of the words.
3. Speak more – You become more effec­tive by prac­tis­ing what you learn.  This greatly applies to com­mu­ni­ca­tion.  The more you speak and use the new learned words (and phrases), the more pro­fi­cient and con­fi­dent you are in using them.  You will be also more com­fort­able when some­one com­mu­ni­cates to you using the same word and phrases.
4. Lis­ten more – Same with tak­ing time to speak more.  You get more con­fi­dent in the new words.  You learn how the new words are being used in dif­fer­ent con­text.  Through lis­ten­ing more, you become more aware of its proper usage and also wrong usage of the words.

To sum up, it is crit­i­cal to improve com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills by increas­ing our vocab­u­lary.  An improved vocab­u­lary allows you to under­stand and con­vey mes­sage bet­ter to another party.  How­ever, build­ing a com­plete set of vocab­u­lary may take ages to do so.  There­fore, learn from dif­fer­ent avail­able chan­nels as much as you can.  Such as clar­i­fy­ing when you are in doubt in the mid­dle of the con­ver­sa­tion, tak­ing chance to speak more and lis­ten more.  All these, will help you beef up your com­mu­ni­ca­tion skills and avoid any misinterpretation.

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