The point of communication is to inform someone so that you have a shared understanding of your message. By the time you finish speaking, your audience should understand what you said as well as why you said it with the goal being that they should feel the same way about your message as you do.
Good communication is an art and a science. There are clearly defined rules that can help you communicate better and at the same time, some progress only come with the experience.
If you have a problem with communicating, it is likely that you are failing in one of the following ten ways. Over the next several weeks, I’ll be sending out practical tips that can help you get ahead of these failures and start communicating with more clarity and effectiveness.
Here are the ten reasons you are a failed communicator:
- Failure to establish rapport. By far the most important as it’s going to make or break peoples first impression of you. I’ll be sending out an email later that gives you three tips that I used when I first began public speaking several years ago to build rapport when meeting with people or a crowd of people for the first time.
- Unnatural body language (stiff, unconvincing, mechanical).
- Content is intellectual and not emotional.
- You appear uncomfortable (nervous, unconvinced).
- Failure to make eye contact or your countinance isn’t expressive.
- No sense of humor.
- You aren’t prepared and your message gets lost in your speech. You don’t say anything while talking.
- You don’t know how to use silence or pausing.
- Your energy is low. No enthusiasm in your talk means no rhythm and mismatched volume and pitch.
- You use words that don’t mean anything to your audience.
Extra Point :
- You haven’t learned how to read an audience and so you are either boring or overbearing.
Want to learn to better communicate or have questions about this post? Contact me HERE.
Book Recommendation: You Are the Message by Roger Ailes
