Communication means expressing your thoughts, feelings and emotions in a way that you get your desired result. Communication Skills Training is therefore the key to everything you want in today’s world.
Personally and professionally it is an extremely important tool if used with the right skills sets. Communication Skills training has hence gained a lot of popularity and is at the top of every corporate training calendar.
Lets understand how communication skills can bridge the gaps and achieve common goals by some common examples.
Example 1: Sudhir is a Manager in an MNC and has been working with them in the capacity of a manager since a long time. He is extremely good at his work and has been given targets by his boss, which he wants to achieve to ensure that his promotion comes through this time, as he now really wants to go to the next level.
He however is a very closed person and has never shared the targets openly with his team. He is an extremely pushy and demanding boss and keeps telling his team members what to do. They in turn just follow his instructions blindly without ever raising their voice. They are in fact afraid to talk to him and don’t enjoy working with him.This has led to high attrition in his team. It is due to his closed and aggressive communication style that he has not able to achieve his team goals and has been stuck in his position as a manager for years.
Example 2: Young and dynamic, Roy is a manager at the same level as Sudhir in another team. He has similar targets and a similar team size and has been working with this MNC since the past 1 year. Unlike Sudhir, he is not very hard working and even has less experience as compared to Sudhir.
He on the other hand has a very different approach towards his team members. He shares the targets with his team openly and brings them togetherto discuss how they plan to achieve the targets. Every morning he invites team members to discuss the challenges they are facing and takes team huddles. They then work together towards solving the problems being faced.
He knows each member personally and professionally and supports him or her wherever they require help. He questions team members in a way that helps them find their own answers rather than him telling them.
The team discusses their conflicts openly and is very well bonded. This open communication has helped the team achieve their targets before time and Roy is due for a promotion any time.
So what’s the difference in the two examples? While Sudhir had better skills, abilities and experience over Roy; his communication style was very closed and attitude quite negative. Hence he always faced difficulties with his team and was not able to grow. Roy on the other hand was open and approachable. He realised that the only way for him to grow was through the growth of his team. This was possible only by having a cohesive team, which had good communication amongst its members, the example being set by him, their leader. This was the power of exercising and learning effective communication skills.
Today we work in an environment where we deal with all kinds of people right from an office boy to the CEO of the company. The question we have to ask ourselves is whether we want to have results like Sudhir or like Roy.
We can’t change people however we can change their response to us by changing our own skills. We have to understand that each person is different and has a different personality type. If we are able to identify the persons personality type and adapt our communication as per their style, our association with them improves and we can get better results.
Effective communication begins with assessing our self first. We need to find out how our communication is with ourselves as well as some of our behaviors, which we display very often. We need to inquire and find out what kind of thoughts we keep getting, are these positive or negative, supportive or destructive. These will give us clues on our typical patterns.
The best time to identify how we think is to observe ourselves during difficult situations, how we behave and think during present difficult situations as well as how we dealt with one in the past. We can also ask others around us for feedback as that may open up a perspective we were unaware of. We can also spend time ‘doing nothing’ as that gives us the space to understand what we do when we are doing something! These open our ‘blind areas’ to and this awareness gives us the power to change. By observing ourselves our thoughts start changing and eventually our entire outlook towards life starts changing. Our beliefs, motivation, attitude change and in turn change our behavior. As our behavior changes, the response of those around us automatically starts changing.
It is however important to remember that along with awareness, self-acceptance also plays a vital role. While it is easy to accept our good side with pride we also have to learn to accept our dark side with love. If we keep beating ourselves for the not so good, we get stuck in a negative loop and keep running the same old patterns. Acceptance is essential, as what we reject comes back again and again till we accept it. So also, our dark side keeps coming back until we accept it and let go of it.
Which all goes to say that all results finally depends upon us. We are the originator and hence what has to change to create the difference. When we change our communication the world around us changes. If you want to be a part of this change, visit us at https://theyellowspot.com/
