In my opinion, learning to communicate well will be essential if you want to move forward in life, achieve your dreams, become fully yourself and develop your full potential.
How to exercise leadership and rally people to your cause if you don’t know how to communicate well? How do you find your place if you don’t know how to express yourself? How do you find the right arguments if you can’t even defend yourself?
Knowing how to keep quiet is the most important quality of good communication
Most of the time we will tell you that to communicate well, you must know how to speak well, have a good vocabulary, good speech, etc., well, it’s rubbish. The most important quality in communication is listening!
To have good communication, you have to know how to listen and to listen well, you have to be quiet! How could you be a good listener if you are still talking or thinking about what to answer while the other person is speaking? From a neuroscience point of view, it is not possible to really listen to a person if we speak constantly. So the most important quality, if you want to communicate better, is to learn to be quiet.
“Get used to listening without distraction to the words of others and as much as possible in the mind of the speaker. ”
– Marc Aurèle
The art of communication is to be empathetic with your interlocutor to put yourself in their place in their world and forget their own. Empathy is seen as a gift, a somewhat magical ability when in fact it is mechanical and everyone learned to exercise it when he was a child since we trained without knowing it to repeat what our parents said or did. We were creating a neural path that would allow us to use it later or not. We were simply educating our brains for empathy. Neuroscience teaches us that this education is essential when we want to communicate efficiently.
Without knowing cognitive neuroscience, the Greeks spoke of ethos, pathos, and logos for effective communication, which means:
- Inspire confidence (Ethos)
- Enter empathy (Pathos)
- Speak (Logos)
As I express in detail in my video below, it is, therefore, necessary to inspire confidence, enter into empathy with your interlocutor, and then we talk. What everyone does now when a problem occurs, we speak immediately by imposing their vision of the world. When we do this, we are missing the plate and do nothing to maintain good communication.
By knowing how to listen to others, and therefore by learning to be silent, you can get to see the world as others see it. It enriches your understanding and extends your capacity to empathy. Thus, you come to a deeper level of understanding of the situation they find themselves in, which will help you find the right words later.
How to optimize listening in communication?
Put yourself in the place of the other. You have to open up and look at the problems from the other person’s point of view, telling yourself that if you had seen the problem from their point of view, you could have solved it more quickly.
Avoid comparing this person’s experience with your own experience. You might think that this is the best way to help him and approach the situation, but this type of reasoning is simplistic and may give the impression that you are not really listening.
Do not try to help him immediately. Some people think that they have to think about finding a quick and simple solution to the other person’s problem. You can only really help him if you listen to him well. Instead, focus on absorbing everything that this person is telling you.
Express that you are listening to them. Show her that what she says to you is important to you by shaking your head at the right time or saying little words like “agree” and “I understand” so that she knows you are listening.
Remember what she told you. You don’t have to remember every little detail, but you don’t want the person talking to you to feel like they have to repeat the same thing a hundred times.
Know what you should not do. It can be just as helpful to know what to avoid when listening to someone. Here are several things you should avoid:
- don’t interrupt him in the middle of a remark,
- don’t make him question him. Ask questions when only during white and when she is not speaking
- do not try to change the subject
- avoid saying lines like “it’s not the end of the world”. This only minimizes that person’s problem and they will feel bad.
Remember that you don’t have two ears and a mouth for no reason. This means that you have to listen more than you have to speak.
