Simply said

If you want to improve your ability to relate to others, to understand them better and to be understood more clearly, the easiest and most effective way to do this is to focus less on yourself and more on the other person.

When you communicate, instead of thinking about it: What do I want to say?, you should ask yourself:

• Why are you reading my email or participating in this meeting?
• What do you hope to get out of this presentation?

If you focus on what the other party wants to gain from the discussion, you will be able to communicate better because you will be able to convey and make clear the relevant information that the other party needs.

When you communicate, you can talk about three things:

• about yourself
• the message
• the audience

Your message will not be of interest to your audience. They care about how your message will affect them, what it will change in their lives.

The message

If you do not make your main message very clear, your listeners will not know what they need to hear. Develop a clear message that uses short simple language and focuses on the needs of your audience. Limit your main message to one sentence, preferably less than 10 words.

“You are all here today because you think X is important. I thought it would be useful if we could talk about it for a few minutes…”

Your goal in communication is not to be cute or clever. The goal is to be clear. We all spend most of our time with people who do what we do. So we start to think the language we use with them is understood by everyone. The follow-up question can help us identify this:

Will my audience be able to repeat this message to someone else later?

If not, what you are saying is too long, too vague or too complicated.

Message structure

The structure of your message is important to get it across effectively:

1. Say what you are going to say

Start with something that will grab their attention. The best way to do this is to:

• name a problem
• quote a startling statistic
• ask a rhetorical question

These will get your audience thinking: why is this important?. This step will help them find the important information while you are getting your message across.

2. Get to the point

Once they are listening, tell them what you want. Don’t save the big surprise for the end.

Tell them where you want to take them and they’ll understand the journey better.

3. Tell them what you said

After you’ve delivered your thoughts, say the essentials again that are necessary for them to understand what you need them to do.

Verbal communication

There is no right and wrong in communication. Since all communication depends on the environment, communication can be effective or less effective. The following are three key elements to show your commitment and presence in communication.

Eye contact

It is our natural instinct to make eye contact with those around us, an essential element of speech without which our message will certainly not get across.

Whether you’re talking to one person at a time or several, there is a rule of thumb that can help you make more eye contact and manage it more effectively without extra stress.

• Look at one person for a full sentence

Talking to one person, no matter how many people are in the room, automatically puts you at ease. It also helps you avoid distractions. If someone does something distracting, it won’t throw you off.

If you’re scanning everyone and talking to everyone, you’re not really talking to anyone. If you concentrate on one person for a whole thought, you will appear more focused and confident. You are saying: it is important to me that you understand this message.

If you know there is one key decision-maker, give him or her more attention than the others, perhaps 50-60 percent of your total attention, but don’t ignore the others. It takes less effort to be nice to everyone than to figure out who to be nice to. The same goes for eye contact.

If you feel that a person is uncomfortable with too much eye contact, look down at your paper (if you have one) and take some notes.

Speech

By varying the speed, volume, tone and inflection of your speech, your voice helps to reinforce your impact.

Most people, when nervous, speak too fast. The speed of your speech is related to how you use eye contact. If you scan people too quickly, you will speak faster, but if you speak to one person for a full thought, you will slow down your pace.

Two factors can cause an audience to become overwhelmed:

• the strength of the speaker’s voice

Volume is the most basic component of speech. If they cannot hear what you are saying, it will have no effect.

At the very least, always speak at a volume that the person furthest away can hear, even if you are looking at the person closest to you. Open your mouth wider and breathe in more.

The absolute minimum is to be loud enough to be heard. Raising your voice lends urgency to a key point. By lowering the volume, on the other hand, you are saying “This is important”.

Your facial expression affects your tone of voice so smile. If you smile genuinely, your voice will automatically sound more positive and exude more energy, and your tone will sound more optimistic.

• lack of pauses between sentences

Sometimes your pace may be perfectly fine, but you don’t take long enough pauses between sentences. Pauses between sentences are essential.

If you pause at the end of a sentence, you give the listener a chance to process the information. If you continue speaking without a pause, the listener will quickly become overwhelmed and will not be able to take in more information.

People will then either get completely distracted because they are exhausted, or they will stop for a moment to think about what you have just said and get completely lost and lost.

You might think that if you talk faster, you can get more of the message across. In reality, we deliver less because our audience has limits to how much they can take in.

Body language

Your presence should suggest that your focus is on your audience, not on yourself. When you participate in a conversation, your presence should be felt by everyone.

• sitting

If you can feel any part of the back of the chair at your waist, you are most likely leaning back in your chair or sitting hunched over. If you slouch during a meeting, you will tire more quickly. The full weight of your upper body is on your lungs and you can’t breathe as easily.

Stretch out and sit up straight. This will increase your height at the table and make it easier to breathe, which will help you to keep your energy up during the meeting.

Sit with your forearms just wider than your shoulders on the table. Keep your hands apart. As soon as your hands touch, they are likely to start making compulsive movements that can make you look nervous. Because we all have a certain amount of energy inside of us, and that energy is drained from our bodies one way or another.

Here’s a simple trick to help you remember where to put your hands. Put your notes directly in front of you and keep your hands on either side of your notes.

• standing

If you want to project confidence to your audience, assume a firm but neutral posture. Stand at arm’s length and keep your hands apart.

If you clasp your hands together, whether sitting or standing, you may appear more anxious or withdrawn. The best solution is to drop your arms next to you. Since it will feel uncomfortable to stand with your arms hanging by your side, you will be more inclined to use your arms for natural gestures.

Listening

Your goal in communication is to meet the needs of the other person. The only way to find out what the other person needs is to ask and listen. Therefore, effective communication is not only about how you send information, but also about how you receive the information.

When you listen to someone, body language is also important. Eye contact and an occasional “hmmm” or “interesting” or “really” is enough to let the other person know that you are still listening.

We’ve all had the experience of talking to someone who sits silent and frozen in stone, or stares at the floor, or looks straight through us as if they’ve fallen asleep or into a coma. Don’t put the other person in that position.

How can you focus on the conversation at hand? Take notes. Your notes will also help you remember what was said. Taking notes also helps the other person to feel listened to. People feel that you are listening when they see you taking notes of their thoughts. Note-taking is another communication strategy that tells the other person that you care about them.

Written communication

As a writer, your aim should be to make your ideas easy for the reader to understand.

Always ask yourself:

• Why is the reader reading?
• What should the reader do with the information I am sharing?
• How can I make it easier for the reader to understand the main message?

The reader needs to be able to read through the line and page without stopping. Any time the reader needs to step back and re-read a sentence or go back to an earlier point in the paragraph or document, the reader is working too hard.

Because your writing should focus less on yourself and more on the other person, there should be much more “you” than “I” in your writing, at roughly a 2:1 ratio. Aim for a maximum of 17 words per sentence. If a sentence exceeds this length, our brain has difficulty processing the information. A reader will probably have to read the sentence at least twice to understand it.

Paragraphs should be no longer than a quarter of a page, and any longer than that is visually intimidating.

Conclusion

Overall the book is full of useful practical tips, for me it gave me a lot of tips that I didn’t know, but I can see the point.