Improved Communication Skills

Communicate Complex Ideas Successfully Speaking to an audience can be fun and exciting. However, lack of preparation or not clearly defining the presentation's goals and its audience can make even the best-intended presentation a complete disaster. Preparation – The Key to Successful Speaking... To ensure your presentation is effective, first determine your objective. Ask yourself: * Why am I giving the presentation? * What do I want the audience to take away from the presentation? Second, determine your audience. Their familiarity with the presentation topic will determine the level at which you present your speech. How to Structure Your Presentation Once you have determined your presentation's objective and overall goal, as well as the audience, it's time to structure your presentation. You will need to start this process by determining the length of the presentation. Take the allotted time and break it into smaller segments, with each segment tackling a specific

Ensure Your Words Are Always Understood Think of the last really memorable talk or presentation that you attended. Now, was that easy to do, or did you really have to rack your brains to remember one? Sadly, too many presentations are easy to forget. And that's a big problem because the only reason the presenter gave the talk was to communicate something to you! However, there are three basic things that you can do to ensure that your verbal messages are understood – and remembered – time and time again. Although somewhat obvious and deceptively simple, these are: * Understand the purpose of the presentation * Keep the message clear and concise * Be prepared * Be vivid when delivering the message Understand what you want to achieve Before you start working on your talk or presentation, it's vital that you really understand what you want to say, who you want to tell and why they might want to hear it. To do this, ask yourself: Who? What? How? When? Where? Why? Who

Hear What People Are Really Saying Listening is one of the most important skills you can have. How well you listen has a major impact on your job effectiveness, and on the quality of your relationships with others. We listen to obtain information. We listen to understand. We listen for enjoyment. We listen to learn. Given all this listening we do, you would think we’d be good at it! In fact we’re not. Depending on the study being quoted, we remember a dismal 25-50% of what we hear. That means that when you talk to your boss, colleagues, customers or spouse for 10 minutes, they only really hear 2½-5 minutes of the conversation. Turn it around and it reveals that when you are receiving directions or being presented with information, you aren’t hearing the whole message either. You hope the important parts are captured in your 25- 50%, but what if they’re not? Clearly, listening is a skill that we can all benefit from improving. By becoming a better listener, you will improve your product

Speaking, Listening, Writing, and Reading Effectively Communication skills are some of the most important skills that you need to succeed in the workplace. We talk to people face to face, and we listen when people talk to us. We write emails and reports, and we read the documents that are sent to us. Communication, therefore, is a process that involves at least two people - a sender and a receiver. For it to be successful, the receiver must understand the message in the way that the sender intended. This sounds quite simple. But have you ever been in a situation where this hasn't happened? Misunderstanding and confusion often occur, and they can cause enormous problems. If you want to be an expert communicator, you need to be effective at all points in the communication process - and you must be comfortable with the different channels of communication. When you communicate well, you can be very successful. On the other hand, poor communicators struggle to develop their careers beyo