Whether you are a leader, follower, neither, or something in between, effective communication is an essential part of life. You communicate with your spouse, people at the store, your children, friends, coworkers, neighbors, employees, and many others. Communication is a constant part of life. In this post, we are going to discuss what most people forget about effective communication!
Your communication with others will have a positive or negative impact on your life. It can lead to you accomplishing your goals and dreams or frustration and anger.
Let’s Learn About Effective Communication!
What’s important is knowing how to effectively communicate with each person. To be an effective communicator, we will focus on:
- Why you should know your audience
- Appropriate methods for effective communication
- Communication breakdowns
- Effective listening habits
Why You Should Know Your Audience
Effective communication starts with knowing your audience. To understand why you should know your audience, here are questions you can ask.
Who is your audience?
Your audience is the person or group of people you are speaking with or directing your communication towards. When you talk to your significant other, he/she is your audience. While you speak to a large group, they are your audience. When you write an email or letter, the recipient is your audience.
Why should you know your audience?
To answer this question, let’s consider the following questions. Have you ever gone to a store to learn about a product and the store representative spoke to you as if you didn’t know anything about their product when you actually knew a lot about it? Or, have you spoken to someone that acted as though you knew exactly what they were talking about, but you didn’t have a clue? If you have experienced either of these situations, the person speaking to you failed to know their target audience before opening their mouth.
Find out all you can about your audience before you communicate with them. This is key teachings when you are in sales. Salesman that know their audience and speak to them appropriately are exponentially more successful than those that don’t. This is equally important to all professions and situations. [Read more…] about What Do Most People Forget About Effective Communication? Learn here!
Our guest today is originally from Tucson, Arizona. As a young man he dabbled in filmmaking and graphic art. It wasn’t until later, in his career at Southwest Gas, that he saw Organizational Development as the route he wanted to pursue. He had already acquired a degree in Psychology and went on to accomplish a Masters of Science in Leadership. At that time with Southwest Gas he held a PHR (Professional in Human Resources) from the Society for Human Resource Management.
