Communication
Here, I write about communication and the topics around it. Communication is one of the most essential skills to have, and even though I struggle a lot with this, I want to improve considerably and become a skilled communicator.
Think Faster, Talk Smarter
These are techniques for understanding how to talk more easily in spontaneous situations; most of the information I got from the talk is here. The speaker also wrote a book on this particular topic. He also has a podcast on the subject.
Methodology
Tame the anxiety beast.
- Take a deep breath. Exhale, this is important. Try to exhale twice as long as you inhale.
- Drink water and chew gum beforehand. To make it easier to cope with the feelings and reactions of stress.
- Get present-oriented. Don't think ahead; think now.
Maximise mediocrity
- We are the biggest impediment to our spontaneous speaking.
- Reduce the cognitive load on yourself.
- Allow yourself to do that thing and not the right thing.
- Give the answer, not the correct answer.
- Give feedback, not the best feedback.
Don't do something, stand there.
- It is very important to listen and listen deeply.
- What's the crux of the speaker's intent? What is the speaker trying to tell you?
- Collin Dobbs on listening
- Pace, slow things down
- Space, move yourself into a good position to get yourself comfortable with listening.
- Grace, listen to your intuition. You need to listen to your sweat. Listening is an exercise and you need to train it.
- Paraphrasing helps you listen—work on always being good at doing this. After all, conversations, tell what you learned or heard.
Structure your spontaneity.
- Never lose your listeners. Structure proposal:
- What? Is your idea, product, or feedback?
- So what? Why is it important to the listener?
- Now what! It is the action. Planning your next meeting, take the feedback. Using this structure can help you prioritize what to say and package your information in a way that is more likely to be understood and remembered by the listener.
Focus
Tell me the time, don't build me a clock. Have a goal for the conversation, know, feel, do. Make a structure around the topic, an example can be answering/completing the following sentence
- What if you could ...
- So that ...
- For example ...
- And that is not all ...