How to communicate effectively

Communicate Effectively

Here are some basic techniques for clarifying your dialogue with other people. Constant practice in using these simple verbal skills, not only in your professional or working role but also in your personal and social life, will enable you to recognise negative attitudes in yourself and others and help you to establish effective channels of interpersonal communication.

The following are not hard-and-fast, set techniques to be learned by heart, but a firm foundation on which you can build your own, idiosyncratic approach. You’ll find your spontaneous, intuitive responses will lend themselves to being broadly classified under the following general headings:

Re-statement (clarification)
This is as it were to distil the essence of received statements and to reflect the meaning back to the other, by repeating the input to make sure you’ve accurately got the underlying message, e.g.:
‘Let’s make sure I’ve got this right? Do you think your boss actually doesn’t like you as a person? Is that what you mean?’

Paraphrasing
This involves requesting the other to re-phrase a statement in order to explore and /or to emphasise important aspects of the message:
‘You seem to be saying you’re quite pessimistic about your prospects as an employee. Is that really the way it seems to you?’

Reflection
The people you meet in your personal or working life can learn to respect their own intuitive feeling states and to reflect them back as ‘givens’ in the real world. You can act as a model for this kind of feedback – it can be most effective. For example:
‘You don’t sound at all confident about your future in the firm!’

Summarising
This involves you, after allowing the other to express him or her self without interruption and at some length, in perceiving a common theme that ties several statements together and then checking them out, e.g.:
‘All right, then. So, on the one hand, you think you’ve got what it takes to succeed in work but on the other hand you believe your boss is prejudiced against you. Am I understanding you correctly?’

Finally, here are some general guidelines for clarifying your personal and professional dialogue with others. Get into the habit of incorporating them into your speech patterns – you’ll find they’ll make a great deal of difference!
1) Whenever possible, express your thoughts or a feeling by making statements instead of answering questions. For example, instead of ‘Do you need..?.’, say, ‘I have a feeling that you need.’
2) Focus on what’s really happening at the moment by using the present tense. For example, ‘Right now, I’m glad you’re here!’ rather than, ‘I’m disappointed you didn’t come last Tuesday’.
3) Avoid generalisations by using the first person singular – ‘I feel’ (true personal statement) rather than ‘It feels…’, or, ‘We/they/everybody’ feels’… (false general attitude)
4) Substitute the word ‘and’ for the word ‘but’. For example, ‘I want to talk to you but I find it difficult’ (indication that you have a problem ) becomes, ‘I want to talk to you and I find it difficult’ (clear, honest admission of present situation)
5) Take personal responsibility for your projective processes by replacing statements like ‘What you just said made me feel sad’ with, ‘When you said that, I began to feel sad.’

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