How to Improve Your Communication Skills: 6 Tactics

When it comes to communication, many people don’t realize how important this skill is to succeed in life.
Every human being needs to communicate with others and needs to know how to say the things he/she wants to say in order to express their feelings and needs. Being able to express things properly can make a world of difference.
Perhaps the most important area where communication matters is in the business realm, like when you are looking for a job. Knowing how to communicate is an important skill that recruiters want to see when you are applying for a job. Whether you have your own business or are a freelancer, communication can help you to attract clients and to keep them with you.
So, we have provided some important tips and methods to improve your communication skills :

1. Express coherently. You need to express well in both written and spoken language. One effective way of improving your vocabulary is by reading. Buy the newspaper every morning, open your twitter account, Instagram or Facebook and take a look at the newsfeed you’ll find there. Buy some interesting books . Reading will increase the amount of words that you know, and that will give you more ways to express your thoughts in a coherent form.

2. Be clear about what you want to say. Make sure to express your complete thoughts; do not leave a chance for people to think what they want to think because you did not express yourself completely. Incomplete ideas can lead to misunderstood messages, and we don’t want that to happen if you are looking to improve your communication skills .

3. Know yourself but get to know other people. It is important to know the culture of the people you want to speak to, especially if they are not from the same place/country/region that you come from. Avoid stereotypes, and be open-minded when knowing and speaking to people that are different than you.

4. Teach. For example, teaching English is a great way to improve your own communication skills. When you teach others, you will point out their weaknesses and in doing so will be able to improve upon your own weaknesses as well. Teaching is also a great method of communicating and you will learn what communication strategies work and which don’t base on the feedback you get from students. You don’t need to become a full-time English teacher, you can find lots of ESL/English teaching jobs and opportunities to teach English online part-time or as a freelancer.

5. Prepare for meetings. Ensure that the ideas you want to say are the right ones by preparing for meetings in advance. List them and prepare some notes and your speech will come out in the right order. If you are having a business meeting, it is a good idea to give the audience some documents or papers with the information you’ll be speaking about, so everyone can follow you.

6. Really, LISTEN. To really listen means you will refrain from doing anything else that could be distracting. For example, make sure not to use your cell phone. This is a very common mistake people make, and when people don’t focus on listening, problems are very likely to happen.
Remember that the more you practice, the better you’ll become. If you can learn to excel at communication, everything in life will become that much easier.