Unlock the power of positivity in your conversations. Explore the six keys to positive communication, a transformative approach that fosters understanding, builds relationships, and promotes mutual respect. Discover how these principles can change your personal and professional interactions.
6 concrete behaviors to improve communication
At work or at home, these tips can help you start to inspire and influence the people around you, allowing you to deepen your relationships and create a better social world around you.
- What communication behaviors exemplify our best potential as humans? What are some small actions that will help us interact more effectively?
Greet to create human contact
Communication is more than transmission: it’s also creation
- When you communicate, you are doing the work of relationship
- The work of communication often starts with greeting
- Try initiating contact with three people that you do not know very well but who are stakeholders in your organization; they can be anybody in the organizational hierarchy. Greet them and ask them how they’re doing.
Encourage to give support
Human communication is just as tangible a way of giving as giving money
- When we choose to encourage others, we are using communication to give people the social support they need to develop and succeed
- What we say and do can make an impact not only in that moment, but as a source of support for years to come
Ask to discover the unknown
When we ask questions, we are going on a quest. We are putting ourselves in a position to discover more, to learn from a position of humility and curiosity.
- One way of improving your communication is to learn to flip your questions from closed-ended to open-ended.
Listen to transcend differences
If you can choose to listen deeply, you can transcend the perceived differences that exist between you and other people.
- To listen deeply cultivate deep empathy, the ability to look at other people’s perspectives not to see whether they’re right or wrong, but to understand their vantage point
- Give somebody your full attention.
Compliment to affect people’s sense of self
What we say, what we do, affects people
- We underestimate how good compliments make people feel
- Communicating positively is about being intentional
- As a leader, a parent, a partner, or a friend, we can all choose to use our words to do a little good
Disclose to deepen relationships
The connection and closeness we feel with others is not a state that we can hold on to; it’s something we do.
- And the way we enact this sense of love and collegiality is by the act of disclosure: revealing how we think, how we feel, and who we are in an authentic way.
