When I first started Soft Skills Academy I had one goal in mind, to help people re-connect and help them build better relationships along their life journey.
Technology advancement is supposed to bring people closer together, yet relationships are more fragile than ever before.
Social media and instant gratification have led us to become increasingly impatience in the past 10 years, everything we want we want it now, fast. So when we want things like job satisfaction, relationships and most importantly, love, those that require time, investment and effort, everyone is too lazy to make an effort.
We crave human connection, technology cannot replace that. We are fast losing our basic ability to form deep meaningful relationship with each other.
Communication and interpersonal skills training has never been a formal agenda in today’s education, we are also teaching communication skills that do not help people establish better relationships. It was as recent as April 2018 LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said that:
‘The No.1 lacking job skill in today’s industry is communication skills’
Building relationship is so much more than just writing emails or giving presentations. Today if you speak to anyone about communication skills, most would answer active listening, body language, how to give better presentations, the lot.
These are mostly theoretical, not intuitive and don’t really improve any relationship.
In fact what I dislike these courses the most, is that they try to program you to act in a certain way. Yes there might be a perfect formula to write an email but it doesn’t improve the relationship in any way.
Communication is in dire need for a revamp, to make it relevant in today’s world.
My team and I worked very hard in the past few months. We wanted to come up with a more intuitive way to help people becoming better communicators without the need to learn countless theories.
We meet, speak and build relationships with people from all walks of life and because everyone is different, the way each of us interpret information will not be identical. As a result, communication should be dynamic, agile and flexible almost like a muscle memory.
To really help change people’s view and behaviour, we must restart at the beginning.
We believe we have come up with a solution. Steve Jobs once said,
‘we never stop innovating and if we want to be great we have to risk everything, even failure.’
And so here I am — today we reinvent the way communication skills is thought of and taught.
I was hugely inspired by Simon Sinek’s theory on “Start with Why”, that people don’t buy what you do people buy why you do it. (If you have not heard of the theory you can watch his Ted presentation here.)
So inspired that I decided to employ his theory in my thinking, not only it helps me visualise it, it also simplify the message so that everyone can understand it easily.
As you may expect I call it The Golden Circle of Communication.
Let me explain.
Inner Circle — The WHY
Everything in life, our relationships, financial success and happiness depend on our ability to establish deep meaningful relationships with people.
We believe, for communication to be effective we must THINK PEOPLE, assign relationship as your top priority and placing other people’s needs before your gain.
There is no need to learn any theory, you just need to speak in other people’s interest and communicate from their perspective.
Because every person is different and will interpret your message differently so instead of thinking about how to convey a message, you start by thinking about who you are talking to, how they communicate and then use the best way possible in that situation to help them understand your message.
When you regard communication is a way of thinking, rather than a bunch of rules or theories — this becomes intuitive and simple.
Middle Circle — The HOW
The first way to naturally become a better communicator is to think and understand from other people’s perspective, in other words we try our best to “know-your-audience” as we convey our messages.
Secondly, we must also become self-aware, what image/brand are we projecting to people around us? are you looking friendly with a nice warm smile or are you acting closed up? Your choice of words, tone of voice and body language, does it maximise communication effectiveness in the current situation? When we become self-aware, we naturally adjust ourselves so that we use the best way possible help others understand our message.
Thirdly, and we feel really strongly about this, is empathy. We believe empathy is the most lacking element when it comes to communication and building good relationships. Too many people fail to put themselves into other people’s shoes and really understand their situation, feeling and motives.
When people can relate their situation and emotions to each other, it builds rapport and trust — the two most important elements in any relationship.
Finally it is our human nature to enjoy being around and working with positively minded people, so as long as you think positively you would naturally attract more people, and people will enjoy connecting with you.
Outer Circle — The WHAT
When you understand this framework and believe communication is a way of thinking rather than theories, it will completely transform the way you communicate in almost every situations.
Consider writing a CV as an example. A lot of candidates have the tendency to just list out as many things they can do as possible, hoping recruiters would be able to work out how and why they add value to the role they are recruiting for.
If you think from the recruiters’ perspective, understand their needs and empathise the fact that there’re hundreds of CVs to go through, you will re-write your CV in such a way that it automatically highlights why your skills and knowledge add value to the role you are applying for. (It will substantially increase your chance of being selected for interview right?)
Let’s move to the other end of the spectrum and think about your company brand message.
All successful global brands put customer as the hero of their story (THINK PEOPLE), they are able to think from their customers’ perspective, understand and empathise their problems and come up with a solution that solve their customer’s emotional problems. They communicate this message in a clear, compelling and consistent way using stories.
You can apply the same framework in job interview, keynote presentation and simply just building relationships in networking sessions.
We believe, everyone can become better communicator, it can be as simple as a small shift in your way of thinking, there is no need to learn countless theories.
It doesn’t matter whether you are an individual or a company, when you are able to communicate in a way that your audience can understand and relate to, they will respond.
Next time when you talk to your friends, your boss or your business partners, begin the conversation by thinking from their perspective — trust me, the conversation and relationship quality will improve dramatically.
