11 Steps To Become A Great Communicator
Improve your communication and relationships by connecting with yourself.
1. Understand Your Agenda.
We all have an agenda, usually to either survive or thrive.
What is yours? Both long and short-term.
First, just for this one conversation. Maybe you want a job; maybe you want a date, maybe you just want to take some weight off of your shoulders.
And then, what’s your agenda in general? Are you in survival mode for several years now and just looking to get a break? Are you bored with life? Are you excited about new opportunities?
Your catalog of agendas will show in any interaction with humans. That’s OK and normal, but the more you’re aware of your agendas, the more you control them.
People generally want to give to people who don’t need it. And want to be around people who would be fine alone.
Meaning, the last thing you want in anyone you talk to is a sense of ‘I need to behave a certain way, or this person will be depressed, lonely, or will lose a house.’
Don’t make your life anyone’s problem. And you’ll be very popular.
Of course, you can share your trouble with people, especially good friends, but you should know your agenda again — why are you sharing?
Do you want them to save you or pity you? Or do you just want to share with another human being, expecting nothing back? Or do you even think they might find it useful or interesting?
Be honest with yourself here. Sometimes it hurts to know your real intentions. But if it hurts you first, you won’t hurt others by mistake.
2. Use Yourself As A Source Of Knowledge
If you deeply understood what you like and don’t like when other people talk to you, you’d know exactly how to be the best communicator.
May it be you talking to your mom, neighbor, friend, or colleague or you being sold something.
You can even watch TV characters and notice the dynamics and be in touch with your emotions — what do you like about which behavior and why?
The truth is, we all have the same human brains. And when it comes to being a great communicator, we all prefer similar things.
In general, nobody likes to be sold without permission, nobody likes to be lied to, and nobody likes fake people or hidden agendas.
Most people like genuine interactions, people who can take a joke and are not too emotionally reactive.
Keep noticing what you like and dislike when other people talk to you.
And while you’re at it, notice how much slack you cut to people daily. I bet you don’t like so much of what they do and say, and you’re still there. Other people will do the same for you.
People are quite forgiving, and you mostly get a lot of chances, so don’t get scared by failures and rejections. They suck but are an inevitable part of the learning process.
3. Be In Touch With Your Emotions
Being in touch with your intuition and your emotions is a godsend in conversations.
You will know what’s happening in the conversation.
- Am I being asked something I like or don’t like?
- Do I want to share this or not?
- Am I oversharing?
- Are they interested or bored?
- Am I interested or bored?
- Am I too close? Am I too distant?
- Am I trying to get validation?
- Are they trying to get validation?
- I want their approval so desperately now; what’s happening?
- I want to kill them now; why?
4. Don’t React While Having High Emotions
In connection to the last point, emotional reactiveness is the worst path to choose. Everywhere in life, you will benefit if you simply don’t do anything when you’re high in emotions.
Our emotional part of the brain and the logical part share resources for energy. Meaning they compete for them.
Meaning when you’re high on emotion — positive or negative, your intelligence is low.
Your thinking plain sucks.
In high emotions, I have reached conclusions; I deeply believed that I was so embarrassed after the dust settled. The logic was just … not there, even though just half an hour ago, it felt like such a 1 + 1.
So I learned to simply not trust my brain when high on emotions. Just wait it out. Back off for a bit.
Say you need to think about it. Say it makes you too uncomfortable, and you’ll get back to it. Or just change the topic if it’s easier.
There are a million ways to learn to calm your emotions you can research, try and test. But the bottom line is — just don’t say anything when you want to genuinely kill the other person. You will always regret it, even if it sounds so logical at the moment.
5. Understand Nothing Is Personal
Understanding nothing is personal works like a charm with the previous point of not reacting. Because what hurts us the most is the sense of — I’m being attacked.
It is an interesting fact that our brain registers social threats at the same level as physical threats. So when you’re called out, pointed at, or laughed at — you are attacked.
The thing is, nothing a person ever says, does, or thinks is about you. It’s always about them and their internal world right now.
A kind person almost always finds kind thoughts about anything. An unkind person almost always finds the ugliest points of view there are.
This is the inner working of their brain, and nobody can change that unless they deeply want to. And even then, it takes a lot of time and effort. So there’s nothing you can do to change a person’s internal narrative.
This concept may take time to sink in; it did for me.
But notice how often you think about others when you talk to them and how often you think about your bills, boss, or to-do list.
How often are you irritated and overly critical because you just didn’t sleep or someone just canceled on you?
Other people are the 100% same.
6 . Train Active Listening And Being Genuinely Interested.
Listen to the person as much as you can. Redirect your attention back to them if you find your attention wandering.
We often feel like we need to say the right things to be liked, but most people want to be heard.
Even being genuinely interested can be trained. But it does help if you don’t find your conversation partner the most boring or annoying human you met in a while.
A nice thought is that when speaking to someone else, you have the opportunity to lose yourself in the other one’s brain, offering them your attention and love, and escape your to-do lists and problems for a moment.
7. Always Set Intentions, For Everything.
Set an intention for every conversation from now on. Even calling your parents — what do you want from this call?
Ask something? Give love? Check up on them?
Get clear on these:
- What do you want from this conversation?
- How do you want to feel at the end of it?
- What impression/memory do you want to leave on the other person?
- What should they feel?
Most of the time, just setting one or more of these intentions will do marvels. The human brain works like a charm when it’s given a clear goal.
However, most of the time, our wishes are quite vague: I want to be happy, and I want to be liked. Some day I want to …
So, ask, and you shall receive.
8. Set One Improvement Goal For every Interaction
Set an intention about what you want to improve this time. Set just one thing at a time.
As I said, most people like too vague and broad wishes.
‘Oh my god, I sucked so much last time; I will do everything better!’ No.
Maybe you kept interrupting someone in the last conversation. So now your intention is this time, I will cut interrupting by 50%.
9. Evaluate
If you’re serious about improving your communication skills, or pretty much anything, take time to sit down and evaluate how it went for a couple of minutes. As early after the event as possible.
Write down three things in this order:
- What worked ?(always first)
- What didn’t work?
- What will I do differently next time?
Using this method on anything will do marvels. It’s as specific as it gets. It’s so much new information your brain can work with when improving.
It’s the opposite of blindly saying — I’ll just do better and hoping.
10. Don’t Beat Yourself Over Failure
When it comes to relationships and conversations with humans, we feel it’s a super important and sensitive topic. We just CAN’T screw up. It’s too raw, too personal.
With programming or learning to play basketball, you are pretty much fine with making a lot of mistakes in the beginning.
You’re OK with not being given a CTO job or an NBA post right off the bat. You know you’re just not that good yet, and that’s fine.
But talking to people is different, right? We all do that since we are babies, so we should know better.
Nah. It’s one of the most difficult things we ever have to learn.
Being rejected registers as probably the worst threat, there is. It means being kicked out of a tribe and dying alone. People avoid that crap like crazy.
Look around you; everyone dims their light and potential so that they don’t have to fail publically and be seen as rejected.
When you can’t be stopped by failure and rejection, you can’t be stopped. Period.
You will learn fast, and you’ll just walk out new paths for you in the jungle of life.
11. Have Fun
No matter how hard you try and prepare, you won’t ever beat someone who’s genuinely having fun.
Our brain never works as well or learns as fast as when we have genuine fun and feel safe.
That’s where creativity and authenticity come in.
I used to wonder why I remember 70% of Simspons's quotes in existence, but my economy exams seem to be impossible to prepare for.
Well, that was because when watching Simspons, I had the perfect conditions to learn. I was safe, relaxed, and I had fun.
When we feel like the next conversation or speech is the most important thing in our current life, it becomes very heavy.
Try and put it into context. If someone called and told you great news, or a disastrous one, you wouldn’t put so much pressure on this one event.
Look around yourself on social media, for example. I’m pretty sure a large reason for this is that they are brave enough to be themselves, not take it so seriously and have fun while doing it.
Thank you so much for reading ❤
If you found it helpful, let me know in the comments which step you like the most. ❤
