Communication skills
“The ability to convey and share your ideas and feelings effectively”
Communication skill is the ability to communicate effectively with people no matter what industry
you work in. Workers in the digital age must know how to effectively convey and receive messages
in person as well as via phone, email, and social media. Following communication skills will help
you to stand out in your job: Listening, Nonverbal communication, Friendliness, Clarity and
Concision, Confidence, Respect, Empathy, Open mindedness, Feedback and Picking the right
medium.
Types of Communication Skills
Perhaps no hard or soft skill gets as much blame when social situations break down as
communication. It’s pretty common to hear disagreements end with “You’re just not
communicating well,” or “It must have been a miscommunication.”
For its apparent necessity, communication doesn’t always include a huge margin for error.
There’s actually a good reason for that, and it is because communication is not just one person’s
burden. By definition, communication means two or more people exchanging information. There
are many important types and forms of communication. Here are the six most important forms of
communication.
1. Listening
We were talking above about how many arguments are blamed on miscommunication (most of
them – rightly so). In those arguments, it isn’t uncommon to hear one party accuse the other of
“not listening.” It’s not just in arguments, though, that listening is important. Listening is a mode
where you are receiving and processing every other form of communication another person, or
group of people, is putting forward.
Good listening skills will not only help you in the midst of an argument, but will be beneficial to
avoiding disagreements altogether. Understanding that a person’s communication goes far
beyond his or her words will help you read into nonverbal cues and possibly extrapolate
completely different messages than what he or she is saying in some cases.
2. Verbal communication
As the form of which most people think when they hear ‘communication,’ verbal communication
is incredibly important to well being in your relationships. Knowing how to use words to properly
articulate your thoughts in a way that is gentle and yet assertive can be one of the most difficult
soft skills to master. Understanding your audience can be crucial to elements of verbal
communication like word choice, slang usage, etc.
Other instances may call for you to use euphemism, or say something in a kinder and less forward
way than you might actually intend. Another verbal communication skill is repeating back
something somebody else has just said to you. Not only does this show you were listening, but
helps avoid you misunderstanding their meaning if they did not communicate it properly.
3. Nonverbal communication
Did you know that, while verbal communication is extremely important, it only makes up 7% of all
communication. Your mind literally only uses words as a last resort when nonverbals clues have
been perceived as ineffective communication. Because nonverbal is a bit of a deconstructed term
(meaning any communication without words) it encompasses a huge range of elements.
The most studied elements to nonverbal communication are things like body language, eye contact,
voice tone or inflections, and distance. Paying attention to the way you are using these elements
to communicate will help give you a more straight-forward and assertive communication method.
For instance, if you’re involved in a project and trying to communicate that you think it will get
done on time (even if you’re nervous about it), a relaxed stance (one foot crossed over the other if
standing, shoulders lowered, chin up) and wide hand movements are confident communicators.
On the other hand, if you’re not mindful of this and telling your group that you “know everything
will get done” in a weak voice, moving erratically and with your arms crossed, you are actually
betraying what you’re saying with your nonverbals. While your group members may not be able
to put their finger on it, most or all of them will be able to say there was something untrustworthy
about your assertion. Their minds are doing what all ours do – recognizing nonverbal cues first
and prioritizing them higher than verbal communication.
4. Emotional awareness
Like nonverbal communication, emotional awareness is an element of good communication that
requires you to be attentive and in-the-moment. Good emotional awareness means being able to
figure out the emotions both you and a conversational partner are bringing to discourse.
Our emotions are powerful filters that are going to affect our perception of reality regardless of
how hard we try to be unbiased. Knowing your own emotional state will help you communicate
better. For example:
A coworker has said something to me that made me feel stupid and like I didn’t know what I was
doing. When I go to meet up with a friend later, he’s telling me about this new stereo he bought
and mentions it’s a 150–watt amplifier, then follows up with “not that I expect you to know what
that means.” The conversation can either continue or break down here.I lose my temper and storm
out. How could he also think that? Maybe I really am stupid!I acknowledge his comment and
respond “Yeah I hear watt numbers thrown around a lot on TV ads, but really don’t know what
that all means. Is 150 good?”
In the first scenario, I was unaware of how self-conscious I had been feeling since I had been made
to feel stupid at work (which was also likely just a communication breakdown). Because I didn’t
stop to think about my own state, the insecurity festered and caused a catastrophic meltdown when
my friend triggered those latent emotions.
In the second scenario, I had spent time thinking about how the coworker didn’t really mean I was
stupid, and she was having a bad day and probably taking that out on me a little bit, and I really
know what I’m doing. I also knew that I was liable to respond negatively to criticism because of
my earlier experience. Even though those feelings were triggered, I was aware of them and didn’t
let them control my reaction to a completely harmless comment from a friend.
See how important it is? The same goes for others. In the example above, if I had known that my
coworker was upset about her favorite baseball team losing a few hours ago, I would know thatany
mercurial reaction she had was not actually an indication of how she felt. Of course if everybody
in this story knew how they were feeling, all of the poor communication would have probably been
avoided.
