Personal communication is one of the most fundamental of human activities. It is of vital importance in our personal life, as well as in nearly all the organizational and business settings.
Improving the way we communicate with our spouses, children, colleagues, customers and suppliers may often lead to better results, an empowering sense of cooperation, and a general good atmosphere. There are lots of conventional and well-established rules and advice for improving personal communication. However, since my personal interest is in creativity and creative ideas, this article offers some unconventional - yet extremely powerful - ideas for making the most out of your daily interactions with other people.
- Silence: Sometime, in order to communicate better, you actually have to keep quiet for a while! When we are busy talking, debating, arguing or simply chatting we often fail to stop and consider the meaning of the words being said, and may take the conversation in general for granted.
There are several ways you can use silence in your communication. For instance - in a meeting where you would normally participate and make your opinions well-known, train yourself into not uttering a single word. This is not an easy exercise, but it would let you concentrate on the dynamics of the meeting, on the participants' body language, on the possibilities or dangers of the ideas that arise (without being occupied with supporting or disputing the ideas verbally).
If you try to practice this idea with a friend or family member, you may find out how peaceful it may be to simply walk silently in the park together, or just watch each other and "talk with your eyes".
- Back-to-Back Conversation: This idea stresses the importance of body language, as well as make you pay more attention to the content and tone of the things that are being said.
Instead of sitting facing the person you are talking to, turn your backs to each other, and try to discuss a subject as you normally would. You will find out you need to listen very carefully in order to determine if the other person has finished their sentence. Also, since a lot of information is normally revealed through facial expressions, so you will be forced to find other clues in the way thing are being said to compensate for the lack of eye contact. It will also train you into making your own messages clearer for the other person to understand.
- Color-coded "Mood Cards": A basic truth of communication is that the mood of listeners often affects what and how they hear and interpret the messages. An anxious listener may tend to hear the things being said as more threatening than they were meant to be, while someone in a good mood may misinterpret a polite reprimand even as a compliment.
Communication may be a lot more efficient if we could decipher the mood of those we talk to and adapt our communication to fit it.
In your family or your workplace you may use the following approach to the issue:
- Agree on a color code to represent the mood of the participants of a conversation or a discussion (e.g. Red for angry or anxious, Blue for energetic, Green for relaxed, etc.).
- Every person gets cards with the different colors, and may use those cards before joining a talk, or when they feel a dialouge fails to take into consideration their mood.
- The speaker in a meeting, for instance, may request the participants to hold up their mood card at the beginning of a session, and may get a colorful map of the group's mood.
- Similar uses are bound to improve the quality of interactions.
- Six Hats of Communication: This is a more sophisticated method for managing dialouges or meetings. Basically, it involves the direction of the type of thinking dedicated to each part of a conversation in order to make the speech or discussion clearer and more focused. For a detailed description of the method you may read my article on ezinearticles.com called The Six Hats of Creative Communication.
