Effective Communication
The most important thing with effective communication, is to continually ask good questions!!
You need to use the correct question’s when networking. It’s completely different language & skill to just chatting to your partner or friends.
“Effective communication is the glue that helps you deepen your connections to others and improve teamwork, decision-making and problem solving. It enables you to communicate even negative or difficult messages without creating or destroying trust.”
It’s a key interpersonal skill and learning how we can improve our communication has many benefits. Communication is a 2 way process, so improving communication involves both how we send and receive messages via body language, tone of voice and enthusiasm.
Communication is one of the most important ingredients in any relationship, yet we are rarely taught how to communicate effectively. Some people seem to have an intuitive understanding of the skills involved in effective communication, others need to learn them.
The good news is that you can improve your communication by learning and practising skills!
When you ask a lot of questions that are genuine, you find out a lot of information. In Networking and Business, that information is crucial to building genuine relationships in your business and achieving results.
If you can communicate effectively, you don’t have to “sell” anything.
There’s are two different types of skills we should master. I will list them here below:
- Listen and Responding skills
- Conversation skills
1: LISTENING & RESPONDING; How do you LISTEN and RESPOND effectively?
- Shut out distractions and focus on what the person is saying (don’t be distracted by the phone, or noises or other people)
- Listen attentively to what they are saying. ask for more clarification or more information if you don’t understand.
- Always acknowledge what they say.
According to professor Mehrabian; non verbal cues account for the following forms of communication
- 55% body language
- 38% tone
- 7% actual words
This is why in networking and business it is very important to try to get our contacts onto the phone, or a conference call, Skype or best of all catch up in person.
In this day and age of social media it is way to easy to misread, misinterpret or even brush off text messages, emails etc. We need to be getting face to face with people offline ASAP, its essential!
*TRUST* Trust is an integral part of your business and using the correct communication is how you build trust. When your verbal and non verbal communications are in-congruent, people will ALWAYS believe the non verbal.
So….. if they have taken something the wrong way, or misread something, they have pre conceived ideas and it’s really hard to build trust from then on.
2: CONVERSATION SKILLS
- In home based business, network marketing or any kind of marketing business, you need to start a conversation. It can be by simply saying hello, a smile, a question. Always make it non threatening and always make it about them.
- Be genuinely connected to the conversation, ask questions in a genuine way, just like you would with people who are close to you.
- Use eye contact, be respectful and don’t ever be pushy.
Even if you are not a born communicator you can improve your skills by having conversations.
Don’t try to read people’s mind’s and never assume. Always ask questions to find out what you want to know.
EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION IS CRUCIAL to your business. Whether that’s with your contacts, your team members or your leaders. You will have great success in your business by being a good communicator, being authentic and leading your people by example and teaching them to have the same skills.
If this provided value and clarity to you, why not drop me a comment below or share with your organisations.
Janelle Emma xx
