How to Improve Communication Skills

Effective communication skills are fundamental to success in many aspects of life.
Many jobs require strong communication skills. People with good communication skills also usually enjoy better interpersonal relationships with friends and family.
Effective communication is therefore a key interpersonal skill and learning how to improve your communication has many benefits.
A Two-Way Process
Communication is a two-way process. It involves both how we send and receive messages. Receiving includes both how we take in the message (reading or listening, for example), and the ‘decoding’ of the message.
Improving communication may therefore also involve either or both elements.
However, many of the most common issues actually lie in receiving rather than sending messages.
Identifying Problems
Many people appreciate that they have a problem with communication skills, but struggle to know where to start to improve. There are a number of ways that you can identify particular problem areas, including:
Ask your friends, family and colleagues to advise you. Most people will be happy to help you with your journey towards self-improvement. They may even have been waiting for just this opportunity for some time.
TOP TIP!
You may find it helpful to use a structure like ‘Start, Continue, Stop’ when seeking feedback.
Ask people to tell you one or two things that you need to start doing, one or two to continue, and one or two to stop.
This ensures that you get action-focused feedback that is also relatively brief.
Use a self-assessment tool like our Interpersonal Skills Self-Assessment. This will help you to identify the most important areas for improvement.
You could instead simply work to improve the most common problem areas and see what happens.
Four Key Areas for Improvement
There are generally four main areas of communication skills that most of us would do well to improve. These are listening, non-verbal communication, emotional awareness and management, and questioning.
1. Learn to Listen
One of the most common areas to need improvement is listening.
We all have a tendency to forget that communication is a two-way process. We fall into the trap of ‘broadcasting’, where we just issue a message, and fail to listen to the response. Quite a lot of the time, we are not really listening to others in conversation, but thinking about what we plan to say next.
Improving your listening skills is likely to pay off in improvements in your relationships both at work and at home.
2. Studying and Understanding Non-Verbal Communication
Much of any message is communicated non-verbally. Some estimates suggest that this may be as much as 80% of communication.
It is therefore important to consider and understand non-verbal communication—particularly when it is absent or reduced, such as when you are communicating in writing or by telephone.
Non-verbal communication is often thought of as body language, but it actually covers far more. It includes, for example, tone and pitch of the voice, body movement, eye contact, posture, facial expression, and even physiological changes such as sweating.
3. Emotional Awareness and Management
The third undersung area of communication is awareness of our own and other people’s emotions, and an ability to manage those emotions.
At work it is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that everything should be logical, and that emotion has no place. However, we are human and therefore messy and emotional. None of us can leave our emotions at home—and nor should we try to do so. That is not to say that we should ‘let it all hang out’. However, an awareness of emotions, both positive and negative, can definitely improve communication.