How to Talk Effectively & Respond with Sincere Reactions | Read review

This topic is kind of personal because everyone have their communication preference. The moment you are seeking for advices in these area, I guess you appears that you might be not confident with the way you talk, you always has the moment that regret what had spoken, struggle to explain yourself better, worrying if the listener misunderstood what you trying to convey.

To be honest, the moment you revisit & blame yourself "I should have talk better", you are actually improving your talking skills, bit by bit.

I’ve stumble onto this topic due to a recent read written by author William Howard - How to Talk Effectively: A Practical Guide to Speak Your Mind Clearly and Influence People Indirectly

So I thought I might be able to extend this topic through my personal experiences.

Why do we need to talk?

1. Understand each other
   To share the real personality of yours. To firm up the bonding in between 2 or a group of people. Perhaps you have a better chat when talk about overseas vacation, or maybe for reading, or maybe gaming. We talk to understand and find out the bonding in between.
2. To avoid conflicts…
   We used to judge people through face expressions plus motion. This is why a statement exist “first impression is important”. Most of the time the first impression broke after you’ve more talk and successfully understand each other.
3. To exchange valid information
   Especially for working environment. Sharing a proper and not confusing words is important.

How to have an effective conversation?

1. No interruption
   Sometimes we might cutoff someone who is talking, this is extremely bad habit unless the conversation is a gossip channel. When someone is sharing and you found a misleading/incorrect statement, noted down and clarify only after the person finish talking.
   Interviewer Manager: "It seems you've no experience in working with other teams other than your own team. But in our company culture, you will need to work with different people from different department, also from different stakeholder. etc etc"
   Wait for her finish talking, and you can clarify your experience better. "Just now you've mentioned about my experience working with other departments, actually I always do, due to the PM roles in my current company, project came in might not fall to my own team but also required development from different teams to complete a project. "
2. Eye contacts
   This is quite a personal preference. Like for me, whenever I have eye contact in a conversation, the talker usually get stress and asked if I got any questions. hmmmm. But if your eye contact doesn't made someone feeling uncomfortable, do it.
3. Reaction and feedback while listening
   Continue from point 2, as since my eyes is not appear as "friendly", most of the time I might avoid eye contact, but I will continuously giving feedback like nod or simply a "yes". This way the talker know that I'm listening and they would appears continue talking confidently.
4. Applying your own emotion to a story
   You are really welcome to apply your own emotion when someone is telling story, if there's a good news you can be happy and congrats to the story teller. If it’s a bad news, show your sympathy. I guess you won’t prefer to have zero reactions when you are sharing something to others too, right?
5. Control your ego
   When we come into working environment, sometimes we received bad email from customers or colleagues who are cursing and scolding about malfunction system or miscalculation etc, you will be angry and wanted to defend for yourself. However, scolding back is always a lowest recommended option. At this moment, take a deep breath, instead of scolding back, try to understand and suggest further what can he/she try or info that necessary for you to help them better.
   Boss "I need this urgently, can you arrange this project asap? Why is it so difficult to get this arrange?"
   You "Unfortunately there’s no resources left for this request, we are occupied with few projects at the moment. Here is the list of existing projects and their schedules, I would suggest to have the Project Z have lower priorities so that we can push this new project as a high urgent Project instead"
   Tips: Stay calm and focus on solution, not your ego to defend yourself.

Conclusion

We fall into conversation everyday to exchange bonding and information, not to hurt others. From a talking session, we can easily find out if the talker’s is a gossiper, a self-focus, a steady person. A long term relationship will be built when there’s communication exist.

Be a listener, provide sincere reactions, and be an effective talker.

Valuable quotes from the readings

• How you communicate has an impact on how you represent yourself to the world.
• Speaking up for yourself helps you to get more respect from the people in your life.
• The more you fail to deliver on your word, the less likely you are to get trusted by others.
• How you communicate to people has an impact on how much they respect you.