Whether you’re preparing to speak at a conference or delivering an internal presentation to your team, good communication is crucial.
Even if you’re already quietly confident in your speaking abilities, there’s always room for improvement.
Great communicators make for great leaders so here’s how to develop your communication skills even further.
- Don’t Always Rely on Visual Aids to Get Your Points Across
- Study and Understand Non-Verbal Communication
- Master the Art of Timing
- Learn to Listen More and Talk Less
- Emotional Awareness, Intelligence and Management
- You Need to Over Communicate
- Attend a Workshop, Course or Event
1. Don’t Always Rely on Visual Aids to Get Your Points Across
Sure, visually appealing presentations are a good way to engage an audience, but try not to rely on the visuals too much. Instead, put a big focus on your words. Utilise compelling storytelling and use your body language to communicate points to the audience.
Also, if you are using a visual aid, for example a PowerPoint, aim to keep your eyes on the audience and only looking back at your visual if you need guidance on your next point.
Steve Jobs banned them at Apple and Sheryl Sandberg did the same at Facebook when meeting as a team. As Jobs stated: “People who know what they’re talking about don’t need PowerPoint.”
2. Study and Understand Non-Verbal Communication
Communication is more non-verbal than it is verbal. Big statement, but one that is based on factual and statistical research. Some experts estimate that 70 to 93% of communication is non-verbal.
It might sound strange but to develop your communication skills, you need to understand non-verbal communication. It’s not just observing body language either. Really focus on the tone and pitch of your voice, body movement, posture, eye contact and facial expressions. Paying attention to these little nuances ensures you can convey your messages clearly and means you can understand others better too.
Don’t slouch, fold your arms or make yourself appear smaller than you are. Whatever the context, fill up the space you’re in and maintain eye contact.
3. Master the Art of Timing
Look no further than stand-up comedians for examples of effective communicators. Their job is to keep the audience engaged from start to finish. How?
They’ve mastered the art of timing.
They don’t hammer home a point repeatedly as the audience will lose interest. Like them, you need to feel out the audience you’re communicating with. Determine when you should move on to a new topic and when you should reiterate something you mentioned previously. The timing can decide how a conversation goes and how someone will take your comments.
4. Learn to Listen More and Talk Less
There’s often a tendency to forget that communication is a two-way street. You can’t just ‘broadcast’ your message to someone and fail to listen to their response. We’re all a little guilty of not really listening to others in the conversation, when really we're thinking about what to say next.
Listening isn’t just hearing what the other person is saying. It’s also about how the words are spoken and the non-verbal signals sent with them. To develop your communication skills, give the other person your full attention and genuinely concentrate on what they are and aren’t saying.
Respond to their thoughts and value them. Use techniques like reflection and clarification to avoid confusion as it also shows that you’re listening - not lecturing.
Learn more about active listening and how this can benefit you and those around you.
5. Emotional Awareness, Intelligence and Management
Being emotionally aware of yourself and the people you’re speaking to is a good start. It means you’re emotionally intelligent but like any skill, you can develop it further to help you become a better communicator.
Everyone you talk to will present a different personality. Some will be loud, brash and outspoken while others will be nervous, quiet and remain in their shell. This means you need to understand these things beforehand and tailor how you communicate with them. Focusing on this will make you more self-aware of both your emotions and those around you.
It also makes you more empathetic as you can share their emotions and understand what makes them tick. However, to develop your communication skills, you need to do more than just be emotionally aware or intelligent - you need to manage and master them as well.
Discover more about emotional intelligence and why you should care about it.
6. You Need to Over Communicate
There are going to be situations where you feel as though you’re clearly communicating something when in reality, you’re not clear enough. A Stanford University Study asked half of the participants to tap the rhythm of 120 famous songs. The second half had to guess the songs the tappers were tapping.
The first group thought the listeners would guess 50% of the songs. In reality, they guessed less than 3%. There’s an important lesson here - the things we think we’ve communicated to others clearly might not always be the case. They could still be confused, even if you think they understand everything. That’s where the power of storytelling and knowing your audience comes in.
If it looks like they don’t understand, reiterate your message. Try to give more than one perspective as well so your audience can see it from different sides.
7. Attend a Workshop, Course or Event
Sometimes, the best way to develop your communication skills is by learning from some of the best communicators around. Whether they’re mentors, coaches or successful business people, their experience can rub off on you and you might find new tactics to try out for yourself.
A good way to do this is attending workshops, courses and events. They’re usually hosted by people that excel in communication and have the experiences that they can share with you, offering the chance to incorporate them into your own communication style. We've got a range of verbal communication courses that will spark your interest and enable you to master verbal communication.
Develop Your Communication Skills With Our Free Handbook
Whether you want to tell a story during a presentation, have an important point to get across or you're required to speak at an event - our guide has all the essentials covered.
We’ve included plenty of tactics you can refer to which will help you develop your communication skills in no time.
Get your copy using the link below.
