By: Peter Murphy
Almost everyone can talk from a young age; it is quite a different matter altogether to be able to communicate well. Especially if you are trying to communicate in a work setting or with people you do not know well.
You will really need to develop a few more advanced verbal communication skills in order to get your point across to people and to enable other people to also communicate with you so that you achieve whatever it is that you need to achieve.
Very often, subtle changes in the way you phrase things can greatly improve the effectiveness of your verbal communication. Below are some examples of these subtle aspects of speaking and listening.
1. Presupposition
People often doubt their capabilities and this can make them appear reticent and unwilling to progress because they fear doing something wrong. If you are a communicator with responsibility for other people, such as your staff, and your job is to get people to do certain things to the best of their abilities, you can make very good use of presupposition.
Most people are very willing to comply, so it can be very useful to turn your words around make them a statement rather than a request. For example, you should say “when you have improved your communication skills, you will notice how your confidence grows”.
The use of ‘when’ rather than the more doubting ‘if’ or any other phrasing implies that you believe that their communication skills will improve; this is a powerful way of sending a positive message and boosting the confidence of the recipient.
2. Avoid Double Binds
We have all tried to communicate with people who have a negative attitude; it is as if for every positive statement you make, they can counter it with negativity. That leaves your listener paralyzed, unable to act because they feel that they will fail, whatever they attempt to do.
You need to challenge these negative beliefs and replace them with more positive potential outcomes of which your listener has apparently not thought.
3. Tag on to the Yes Set
This is a useful little technique for communicating with a doubting audience. What you need to do is tag on a suggestion to something which is definitely true. For instance, you might say ‘as you read in this article, you can improve your verbal communication skills’; you have already read the article; that’s fact.
It therefore follows that you can improve your verbal communication skills. If one statement is true then the other statement has also to be true, your brain will tell you.
4. Give the Illusion of Choice
Sometimes, there really is not a choice to be had, but simply issuing an order can annoy people; therefore, you should give the illusion of choice; this technique works really well with children. Asking ‘would you like to go to bed in five minutes or ten minutes?’ appears to offer a choice but the result is a child in bed in ten minutes maximum.
A similar effect is to dangle a carrot of a positive result in front of people to get them to do something; for instance, one might say, “when people listen attentively, they usually remember more’; this will give people much more incentive to listen well than simply commanding them to do so.
5. Analogies and Metaphors
People often have rather short attention spans; keep them listening carefully to you by making a story of what you say; make your words live for your audience so that they stick in their minds with plenty of images of metaphors to which they can relate.
6 Be Positive, Not Negative
Nobody really likes to be told not to do something; it also does not give constructive advice to forbid something. It’s a much more effective strategy to tell people what they need to do, so be positive when you communicate.
Following these few guidelines will help to ensure that your verbal communication skills are as effective as possible.
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