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Effective Communication Skills and Strategies Training
How to be a Powerful Communicator
By Brian Tracy
Your ability to communicate effectively with others will do more to make you successful than any other skill that you can develop. I’ve studied success and achievement in America for more than 30 years. I’ve spoken to more than a million people, individually and in groups, and I’ve taken extensive courses on the art of speaking and persuading others. I’ve read countless books and articles on how to influence, direct, control, negotiate and persuade other people in work and business. What I’ve learned over the years is that fully 85 percent of what you accomplish in your career and in your personal life will be determined by how well you can get your message across, how capable you are of inspiring other people to take action on your ideas and recommendations.
And more than anything else, we’re talking about happiness. You feel happy to the degree to which you can express yourself openly and honestly to others and to the degree to which others are influenced by what you have to say and how you have to say it. You can be limited in every other respect, education, contacts and intelligence, but if you can interact effectively with others, minute by minute and hour by hour, your future can be unlimited.
However, before I share with you some ideas, techniques and skills that you can use to accelerate your progress toward your goals, there are two major myths or fallacies about communication that we need to get rid of.
The first myth is that many people think that because they can talk, they can communicate with others. Men especially, according to the research, think that by speaking louder and faster, they’re more effective in dealing with other people. Many people think that because they have the “gift of the gab,” they have no problem talking to others on any subject, they’re good communicators.
This is often exactly the opposite. Many people who talk a lot are often poor communicators, even terrible communicators. Many people in sales and business think that being able to string a lot of words together in a breathless fashion makes them excellent at getting a message understood by others. However, in most cases, these people are seen by others as boring or obnoxious, or both.
Let me say this clearly and distinctly: The ability to talk is not the same as the ability to communicate. As I will discuss later, the ability to communicate means the ability to both send and receive a message. The ability to communicate means having the ability to make an impact on the thoughts, feelings and actions of another person. Many people who consider themselves excellent talkers are not very effective at all.
I give seminars all over the country, to both large and small audiences, and in every major and minor city in North America and Canada. I share ideas and strategies with more than 100,000 people a year. And at almost every seminar, someone comes up and tells me that they want to speak to audiences the way I do.
When I asked them why they want to do this, they always tell me that it’s because they enjoy talking to others. When I tell them that it will take at least a full seven years of study and practice to become a successful professional speaker, they’re usually dumbfounded. They don’t believe it. They can’t image that anything that comes as easily to them as speaking aloud, can require thousands of hours of practice to become good enough at it so that others will want to come out and hear what you have to say. But it’s the truth, nonetheless.
So the starting point of dispelling the first myth, the myth that speaking is equal to communicating, is not to allow yourself to become complacent. Being able to speak aloud to one or more persons is only the basic requirement for communication. It’s the starting point. It’s the jumping-off place. Communicating effectively is something else again.
The second myth about effective communicating is that it’s something that people are born with. Either you have it or you don’t have it. If you’re not extroverted gregarious and outgoing, then you don’t have what it takes to be a good communicator.
Again, nothing could be further from the truth. Communicating is a skill that you can learn. It’s like riding a bicycle or typing on a typewriter. It takes time and practice, over and over again. But if you’re willing to work at it, you can rapidly improve the overall quality of every part of your life, as you will soon see.
Effective communication requires both a sender and a receiver. This is the first thing that you need to learn. Although it happens rapidly, the same process takes place when two or more people communicate. First, the sender thinks of an idea or image that he or she wishes to convey to the receiver. The sender then translates the idea or image into a form, or words, either written or spoken. These words constitute the basic message which is transmitted to the receiver. The receiver catches the words, like a baseball player catching the baseball, and then translates the words into the ideas and pictures that they represent in order to understand the message that was sent.
The receiver then acknowledges receipt, and replies by translating his or her ideas and pictures into words and re-transmitting them to the original sender. When the sender has been received and the receiver has acknowledged it by transmitting a response that the sender receives, accepts and understands, the communication is complete.
If this sounds complicated, it is. Probably 99 percent of all of the difficulties between human beings, and within organizations, are caused by breakdowns in this communication process. Either people do not say what they mean clearly enough, or other people do not receive the message that was sent in the form in which it was intended.
An enormous number of factors can interfere in any communication and every one of them can lead to a distortion of the message in some way. Probably every problem you’ll ever have will be somehow associated with a failure or breakdown in the communication process.
Let me explain. According to Albert Mehrabian of the University of Southern California at Los Angeles, there are three elements in any direct, face-to-face communication. They are the elements of words, tone of voice and body language. You’ve probably heard that words only account for 7 percent of the message. Tone of voice counts for 38 percent of the message and body language counts for fully 55 percent of the message. For an effective communication to take place, all three parts of the message must be congruent and consistent with each other. If there is any congruency, the receiver will be confused and will have a tendency to accept the predominant form of communication rather than simply the literal meaning or words.
For example, someone can say, “I love you very much.” However, the tone of voice can dramatically distort the meaning of these words. By placing an emphasis on different words or by “coloring” the statement with emotion rather than making it cold and distant, the meaning of these words can change significantly.
Here are several way the same words could be said:
“I love you very much.” “I love you very much.” “I love you very much.” “I love you very much” and “I love you very much.”
In each case, the emphasis and tone changes the message that is being communicated. Very often, you will say something to a person and the other person will be offended. When you try to show that the words that you used were inoffensive, the other person will tell you that it was the tone of voice that was the issue.
The third ingredient of conversation, body language, is also very important. The way you sit or stand or incline your head or move your eyes, relative to the person with whom you’re communicating, will have an enormous effect on the actual message received.
For example, you can dramatically increase the effect of your communications by leaning toward the speaker. If you’re sitting down, this is easy. If you’re standing up, you can accomplish the same effect by shifting your weight forward onto the balls of your feet and leaning slightly forward toward the person that you’re talking to. When you face the person directly and also give the person direct eye and face contact, combined with focused attention, you double the impact of what you’re saying.
In fact, one of the easiest ways for you to break off a conversation, almost like knocking a needle off the record, is by just turning away from a person and looking into the distance when he or she is speaking. It will usually cause the other person to stop speaking abruptly. They will feel that they’ve just been abandoned in the middle of their conversation.
So your choice of words is important, but even more important is your tone of voice and your body language. The more you can coordinate all three of these ingredients, the more impactful will be your message and the greater will be the likelihood that the other person both understands and reacts the way you want them to.
About the Author
Brian Tracy is one of the world’s foremost thought leaders on personal and business success and has transformed the lives of millions. He is the CEO of Brian Tracy International, a company specializing in the training and development of individuals and organizations.
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In addition to being a top selling author of over 50 books, Brian Tracy, as a Keynote speaker and seminar leader, has given more than 5,000 talks and seminars in 55 countries worldwide.
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