What is Verbal Communication?
Verbal communication can be defined as communicating your thoughts through words. Such thoughts may be ideas, opinions, directions, dissatisfaction, objections, your emotions and pleasures.
For example, whenever you conduct a meeting, have a conversation over the phone, talk to a friend, or any other form of conversation that you perform with others using words. In this article you will learn how to acquire better verbal communication.
The Importance of Good Verbal Communication
Why is good verbal communication so important?
When it comes to business, verbal communication is very important for the reason being that you are dealing with a variety of people through out the day. In some cases you may deal with people who have different culture, ages and with different levels of experience.
Now take for example the way you converse with a family member or friend around your same age, you interact with them with a lot of confidence, there is without doubt that verbal communication is expressed with much ease, and perhaps you may speak differently from the way you speak with a person related to business.
Imagine if you expressed yourself the same way with a customer who has different culture, is much older than you and have many years of experience in his field. Most likely your thoughts will be difficult to express. Thus it is necessary to have proper skill when using verbal communication while dealing with different people.
How to acquire better verbal communication
First of all you need to be aware of the fact that you must be flexible with people depending on the circumstances. Let us say you are presenting a speech in front of an audience at work, and you express your thoughts using business vocabulary. Now what if your audience where to be unfamiliar with the terms you are using, it is without question you will notice the audience lose focused attention to what you are saying , so then you must be flexible and change the way you are expressing your thoughts by using words that are more comprehendible to the audience.
It is suggested to build skills by attending a college course related to business communication. When you are attending the class you will then be forced to communicate more organized. Try to use the opportunity to overcome the fear of talking to a big crowd and a stranger while you are in class.
Besides attending a class that teaches business communication, you may also want to consider working in a job-field that involves working with strangers, such job can be a form of practice to gain confidence in yourself and help reduce shyness and intimidation.
Another form of practice can be talking to older relatives and friends, about a topic that involves expressing emotions and strong opinions or a discussion that may concern experiences. Such communication helps you to accumulate skills to express yourself in a more formal and proper manner.
When practicing with your relatives or friends it is important for you to back up your opinions or statements with facts. In order to have references about your subject it is suggested to read and study about it. Like for example, if you where to discuss the issue that we are all facing today such as the world’s economy for instance, then you may obtain the facts from the news paper, the news, Internet, and you can even get it from books.
You always want to support your opinions with facts since it makes verbal communication much easier to express when it comes to expressing an idea. Such suggestions if applied may result to improve your verbal communication.
What You Need to Do?
Now that you know how to acquire better verbal communication it will even be of better help to improve your verbal communication skills if you applied the following techniques
• Listen, you must learn to listen well, since verbal communication is considered 25% speaking and 75% listening. In order to have good verbal communication, listening is certainly key to such success.
• Speaking properly should definitely be applied when it comes to good verbal communication, not only because you want people to listen to your thoughts, but for the reason that you want people to understand you.
How do I listen in verbal communication?
When you are listening, you will want to consider using these helpful tips. First, you may want to start off with good eye contact, look at the person not at something else, this shows you are really listening.
Not only do you want to listen to the person but try to feel and fully understand the words. You also prove you where listening by restating what the person said, you can start by mentioning,
Use the phrase, “What I understood is…”, once in a while, when you want to ask the person to clarify what he already mentioned. Finally if you feel you have to express your opinion do so but after the person is finished talking.
It is very common for people to be misunderstood, and it can be blamed for the reason that many people don’t speak properly. Unfortunately, due to poor communication skills, a person can offend someone and the results can be dramatic, your words can simply be held against for, for the rest of your life.
Though the results of not speaking properly can be drastic, speaking well can still be achieved. First tip you should consider is being careful when you speak, try to be as clear as possible and avoid blurting out expressions without thinking through it.
How many times have someone said something they regret because they simply reacted with their mouths when they saw the opportunity to speak. This could have been prevented if the person would of been careful and thought about things thoroughly before reacting immediately.
Remember the term, "Think before you Speak", this term probably brings you to a memory in your childhood, even so it is still very wise to apply it, to avoid saying something you may later regret.
