How To Communicate Effectively At Work And At Home

Impact With Communication

How can we and others benefit from effective communication? Jay Sullivan presented as an example that many of us are conditioned to be smart. We are learning throughout our life, specifically at school, that being smart is good, getting rewarded for good grades. In business, however, we're not getting rewarded for being smart. We're getting rewarded for using smartness to make an impact.

You Can Learn To Be A Good Communicator

Being a good communicator is not a quality you have to be born with. Everyone can become a good communicator, or a better communicator, by transitioning from talking about yourself to talking about someone else. This applies to extroverted and introverted people.

When You Are Shy

If you consider yourself a shy person, there are tools to become a good communicator. Consider that you are comfortable speaking with one person. When you speak in front of a group of people, you are having an individual conversation with each person in the group. The people you are talking to, says Jay Sullivan, are not looking at you. They are looking through you to get something of value. When you think you have something of value to contribute, focus on that message and focus on one person within the group for each sentence you speak.

What Might Be Helpful For You Today

When starting to talk to a person, people often begin with something like, "I would like to share this with you." At this point, Jay Sullivan emphasizes the importance again to focus on the other person instead of yourself. It is better to start the sentence with, "What I thought might be helpful to you today is this..." that way you focus on your audience and the value want to provide.

Get To Agreements Instead Of Commanding Decisions

When Jay Sullivan was in law school, he took a course in mediation and studied it in small claims court, where people would get to agreements about how to resolve a challenge, instead of being told to comply with a decision made by a judge. Jays' observation was that when you agree, the compliance rate is near 100%, vs. about 50% when told what to do. This is a successful concept for both professional and personal life. Seek to communicate with the other person and identify points you can agree on.

You can find the "That Makes 2 Of Us" Podcast on Apple Podcast, Spotify, and Instagram.