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| What's going on inside their heads? |
Can you guess what the most common characteristic of any successful relationship is? If your answer had anything to do with good communication, you’re spot on. Communication is important for sustaining not only a healthy relationship but also a healthy community and even a nation!
In fact, one of the first things that enemies seek to do to one another as soon as a war starts is to break down the other side’s communication centres. Without effective communication, any relationship, community or even nation will end.
So let’s look at 10 golden rules of communication that you can use to build better relationships in your life.
1. Compassion
Compassion is the foundation of any healthy relationship. Compassion helps you to understand people over trying to disagree with them for the sake of proving yourself right and them wrong.
Compassion also helps you to listen past a person’s spoken words and to hear the meaning behind them. To practise greater compassion, focus on the emotional needs of the person you are communicating with: the needs for certainty, significance, purpose and variety.
2. Good Listening
Wouldn’t it be great to know what is going on inside the mind of the opposite sex? Conversation Chemistry will teach you important forms of communication to create and maintain the relationships you want.
There’s a reason you have two ears and one mouth, and that’s because listening is at least twice as important as talking. People who talk a lot and listen very little rarely learn a lot, especially about the surrounding people.
If you make a habit of listening to people and turning off your inner dialogue about what you will say next, you’ll become much better at understanding people and communicating with them.
3. Responsibility
Good communication requires you to take responsibility for your own perceptions and to allow other people to be responsible for their perceptions. Any attempt to overstep these boundaries will cloud your understanding and keep you from communicating with the other person.
4. Reciprocity
Communication requires good listening skills, but it also requires the ability to make yourself understood by the other person. Reciprocity allows you to do this and also gives you the opportunity to repeat what you believe the person is saying to you and clarify with THEM that you understand them.
5. Honesty
Few things prevent clear communication more than dishonesty. If you or the person you are communicating with are leaving out important facts, giving the wrong impression or just flat-out lying, the communication between the two of you will suffer.
6. Consistency
Consistency means practicing the principles of good communication regularly. People and circumstances are changing all the time and you must practise communicating with the people important in your life so that the relationship can grow and mature.
7. Clarity
As mentioned before, it’s important that you are clear in communicating yourself to the person listening to you. Sometimes, lack of understanding happens because the person you’re talking to is a poor listener ... but it should never be because you are unclear about your perspective or whatever else you’re trying to communicate to them.
TIP: The best way to practise clarity of communication is to keep a journal of your thoughts and write in it every day.
8. Humour
Humour makes communication interesting and exciting, and tasteful use of it can add a lot of life and dimension to your conversations. Just make sure that you know when to use humour and when not to.
9. Problem Solving
Much of the communication you engage in your life will be for the sake of coming up with a creative solution to some kind of problem. Good problem-solving skills are necessary for you to be adept at the skills of listening, compassion, reciprocity and clarity.
10. Respect
The author Napoleon Hill said that disloyalty marks a person as low as the dust of the earth. When you speak to other people, make sure that you’re speaking to them in a manner in which you would expect people to speak to you. Always speak about people in their absence as if they could hear you.
