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Effective Communication Skills are techniques you can learn in order to improve your ability of making positive impressions on others. But the most effective communication is not a technique or a set of rules you learn and develop. This article discusses 2 abilities you already have and probably aren’t using to your greatest advantage.
A Barrier to Rewarding Communication
If any more psychometric rules and techniques enter our lives I think all of our heads may explode. And the reason is simple. The essence of Life is not made up of machines and rules.
Life is made up of people with feelings. You cannot expect to have a rewarding experience in communication if while someone is speaking to you, you are thinking about something else and not giving your full attention to what the person is saying to you.
The key phrases above are: “speaking to you” and “saying to you”. It’s “to you” so why are you thinking about something else? Why are you plotting in your head about what you are going to say next instead of listening to what they are saying “to you”?
The Most Effective Communication Skills Are Non-Verbal
Effective communication begins and ends with first arriving in your present environment and not being stuck in your head rehearsing answers to pre-determined questions you think you’ll be asked in a job interview.
The interviewer is real. They are just like you. They have feelings and emotions and desires and goals and problems in their life just like you do and not only “just like you do”, but probably very similar ones to yours. Even though you may have never met them before and you know nothing about them, you can know for a fact that the two of you already have a lot in common.
Aren’t you the least bit interested in where they came from, where they went to school, whether or not they have a family, how they came to be in the position they now hold? These aren’t questions you are going to deliberately ask the interviewer, but if you walk into a job interview as a real person who is interested in other people, it will communicate in a very powerful, non-verbal way.
The interviewer will perceive your interest and they won’t even be aware of it. It will just happen and it will have a very positive effect on the rest of your interview.
Being interested in others and listening to them are the 2 most powerful abilities you can utilize for impressing an interviewer. And you already possess these two abilities. You have used them many times before in various settings. You just have to fully apply them when interviewing for a job.
There Is a Difference Between Hearing and Listening
You can hear what an interviewer is saying to you and miss the important points because you are too busy “listening” to your own thoughts during an interview. For example, if you’re trying to anticipate the next question and how you are going to respond to it while the interviewer is speaking to you, then are you mentally present?
Or, you can listen to the interviewer with the genuine intention of understanding what they are saying to you and end up learning more about them and their Company than you ever thought possible.
If you are interested in them and you give your full attention to what they are saying to you, you will also find that your anxiety about the interview will melt away; your answers to their questions will flow more easily from you and your answers will be more meaningful to them.
Being interested and listening are the 2 skills that form the foundation for all effective communication and from using them, you will make a great and lasting impression on others.
I have interviewed many job applicants and if there is one thing I’ve noticed, it’s that not many people are comfortable discussing money. Even an applicant’s ability to listen and show interest can weaken when discussing their salary. This is completely understandable since not many people are at ease when talking about how much money they need.
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