Improve your communication skills

Effective communication skills are essential to the success of any personal relationships or business operations. It helps one to understand how to communicate his message in the best possible way that a receiver will receive his message close to a hundred percent clarity. Effective communication applies not only to verbal communication but it has a lot to do with written and electronic communications to practically all levels of interpersonal interaction. Facial expressions, hand and body movements, eye messages are part of the communication process by which people interact.

Communication skills are becoming increasingly globally important in universities, industries, personal relationships and in any workplace. The main key for any person wanting to have effective communication skills is to acquire and enhance their personal domains on understanding, respect and tact about the culture and attitude differences of the other person. The secret of successful communication is acceptance of people diversities affecting their perception and cognition skills characterized by culture, beliefs, education, environment and experiences.

What you have witnessed and acquired from personal observation and environmental influenced constitutes your unique responses and evaluation to any given situation. The ability of any person to apply effective negotiation, correction or instruction depends on his ability to eliminate discriminating thoughts over the other person’s context. Communication in any inter-cultural setting obviously brings people to a head based learning process which is characterized by the desires of a person to try to learn communicating within the other person’s context.

The ability to communicate is vital to all career development, marriage or relationship break ups and growth of any organization. Gaining, holding and expanding your client base needs a good and strong customer service to directly meet the needs of your present and potential customers. It won’t be a surprise to find out how much time it takes one to create a memo, an email or a note communicating with our colleagues, managers and customers. And you will be more surprised how much time it takes a person to comprehensively and effectively relay his message or response to that email. There are a number of approaches, techniques and advices available in the internet that may professionally help you unblock barriers to progress in developing your skills to effective communication.

What I would like to focus in my article is only the nondiscriminatory attitudes of respect, tact, patience and the desire to learn the culture and beliefs of others. No special skills just a little change of attitude. I have been reading excerpts on forums regarding people complaining about their Virtual Assistants from India or some place not only because of the language barrier but because they were already thinking low of the person itself. If you can read the forums it sounds as if the Virtual Assistants they were using were indeed too low in their social status. There could be great difference in the economic growth of any countries but interpersonal skills is not one way.



Interpersonal skills deal with both the one sending the message and the one receiving the message. I guess people sending the message should enhance their desire to learn to communicate in the language or kind of communication pattern the other person may understand. It cannot be done in one setting I guess. So if you like to mold and perfect your communication levels with your Virtual Assistants then I guess you should try to send easier task first and train to optimize efficiency. During the sending and completion of task assignments you both will then progress to understand each other better.

Don’t expect too much or get more than what you paid that Virtual Assistant for. I have seen a listing of what other people are looking for their Virtual Assistants yet they are looking for ways to save on their expenses. How can a Virtual Assistant complete 20 to 25 tasks when you are giving him lower rate? Commitment is very important to be more efficient. Giving lower rates will make the Virtual Assistant look for other contracts to generate and achieve the income level he needs. Know that over commitment impacts efficiency and productivity. The best way is to raise the rate, train, gear him up to how you expect things should be done and you will have a perfect relationship.

Effective communication is very important and so is attitude. You must have realized this in your interpersonal relationships with friends, colleagues and family. This is even true to parent-teen relationships. Start filling in compassion when you work with other people. Start putting in a little human touch and not a keep-off-the-grass notice when you are communicating with someone. Start looking at him eye-to-eye and try to discern how to reach out to him effectively and how he is responding to every word or phrase that gets out of your mind. Phrasing and rephrasing are important. It helps suppress unintentional insults.

So before you let even one word get out of your mouth please try to imagine the effect and the other person’s reaction. Know that maturity, understanding and flexibility or the capacity of the person to adjust or exercise patience is always with relevance to age. Look how you’ve grown and reacted to similar situations from childhood to now. Effective communication also has a lot to deal with the age of the sender and the age of the receiver. Know that you don’t need to be a professional to do this. You only need to practice compassion and the desire to learn the other person’s culture to be able to communicate with him effectively.

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