Our world is built on the interaction of people and any result depends on how effectively you can communicate with one another. Many people are mistaken about this as they believe that communication is an ordinary natural process and there are no special secrets in it. In fact, effective communication is a process that can be programmed to be mutually beneficial for all participants.
Of course, efficiency is a subjective concept, it is difficult to measure, but there is one strong criterion that reflects that some action is effective. This is the achievement of a goal or result. In other words, if you are just chatting, then you may not have any purpose other than pronouncing some words. Nevertheless, if you want to achieve a certain goal with your conversation – to convince a person of something or motivate him or her to take some actions, then you are not indifferent to the result of your conversation.
Let’s look at two secrets that will help you to significantly increase the effectiveness of your interaction with other people.
Simple communication and effective communication
Any process of communication is always the interaction of at least two people. One of them (Sender) transmits a message, the second (Recipient) – receives it. In real conversation, these roles are constantly changing at a pretty rapid rate. Anyway, there will always be a Sender and a Recipient.
If someone tried to describe the technology of conversation, then it could look like this:
- A thought (idea, image of something) comes to the Sender’s mind, and he or she wants to convey it to another person.
- The Sender “translates” his or her thought into words, creates the text of the message.
- The Sender sends a message.
- The Recipient catches the message and translates the words into his or her thoughts and images in order to understand the essence.
- The Recipient confirms receipt and gives an answer.
- The Sender receives it, accepts and interprets it.
This chain of six consecutive steps is the template for a complete communication cycle. 99% of all communication difficulties between people just arise due to a violation of the technology of this process. The weakest links are interpretation, because the concepts and images of people can be different, because, under the same words, people can mean something completely different.
Do not forget that failures can occur at every level of communication. The Sender may be silent at all or will say something but hide his or her true goals. People believe that others are simply obliged to guess their feelings, thoughts, experiences, and many people are embarrassed to say directly what they expect from you or want to get or have. In fact, a huge number of different factors can distort a message. You can try to get what people are saying and what exactly do they mean by chatting more in any free chat messenger, for instance NEEO Messenger. This application allows you to meet strangers from anywhere in the world and talk to them, using your own language.
Use all channels
If you want to have effective communication, you should use all available channels for it. Therefore, the first method that will help you to increase the effectiveness of your communication with other people several times is a persistent habit of having a face-to-face conversation and speaking in a calm, friendly tone.
You can even increase the impact if you use the technique of close attention. To do this, show your whole body to a person. If you are sitting, then lean slightly towards him or her. If you are standing, move your body towards the person.
Everybody knows that the easiest way to interrupt the conversation is to simply turn away from the person and look somewhere in the distance. If a person said something, then such an elementary gesture makes him or her stop abruptly and gives a feeling as if he or she was thrown out of your attention span. This is also a useful skill, because sometimes you do not know how to get rid of an annoying interlocutor.
In the continuation of the article, we will consider a few more methods of effective communication. Subscribe to the blog update to not miss important information!