Awareness of body language

Improving communication in the workplace

Awareness of body language and state of mind

As discussed last week on the importance of making others feels good in your presence to improve communication, let us consider the importance of body language on the quality of communication.

Whether in face to face or telephonic conversation, before the actual discussion, we are communicating through our posture, quality of tone, eye contact, and facial expression. That is body language. Body language is something others are seeing from you. Your body language is the outcome of your state of mind at any point in time.

If you are happy, energetic, and with enthusiasm, your posture, tone quality, and facial expression would be pleasing to others. Alternatively, when you are angry, fear, sadness, anxiety, your posture, tone, and facial expression would be terrible to others. That sets the quality of communication.

State of mind and body language are interrelated and good news is that you can change your state of mind by changing your body language and vice versa.

For example, when you feel dull, you use to sit with bending posture and your voice may be low. When you stand up, stretch and take a long breath, you feel relaxed and your voice, the expression will be positive.

The point is that you can change your state of mind by changing your posture and vice versa, and this needs to be aware when you are communicating with others as a conscious effort.

Other aspects of effective communication let us discuss next week!
 

How to display respect to others?

Improving Communication in the workplace
 

Displaying Respect 

As discussed last week, preparing others for listening is the first step towards effective communication, and one of the processes is    " displaying respect to others".

How you can display respect to others?:

There are many ways you can show respect to another person; one of the powerful methods is “ Make another person feel good in your presence” through your gestures.

How you are treating another person will make him feel good about himself, and his listening ability improves when you interact with him.

My experience on the other person’s gesture and my self-esteem as happened some years back.

My colleague and I went to our HR manager to discuss some people-related issues. Before the meeting, we checked his availability. When we enter his room, he was busy on his laptop, and he did not ask us to sit. Despite that we sat for more than 10 minutes, he did not have the courtesy to ask us to wait by stating his urgent work. In between his typing, he instructed something to us regarding the people issues, and we were not in a position to listen, and after a while, we left. In this entire process, he never looked at us, and we felt bad about it.

As we understood his urgency, we expected that he could have requested us to wait for a few minutes, and once he finished the task in the laptop, he could have closed his laptop and had given undivided attention. Those small gestures might have made us feel good.

It is natural to neglect others due to urgent work, but it does not matter for the other person. It is essential how another person is feeling in your presence. It looks like common sense and soft aspect, but that makes much difference in other people’s mind. If you do not make another person “feeling good,” you are not preparing him/her ready for your subsequent communication.

If you are rude, always reacting and unappreciative, then people may not feel self-esteemed in your presence. When people are not feeling good enough in your presence, their listening ability also reduces.

Hence, first, make other person feeling good with you by giving respect through your gestures.

Just be aware of your gestures as we need to evolve as a good human being.

Other aspects of effective communication let us discuss next week!

Emotionally connecting with others.

As discussed, to make effective communication in a professional environment, three factors are essential viz, your subject expertise, emotionally connecting with a person, and logically connecting with facts.

Having discussed the need for developing your expertise, let us understand“emotionally connecting with the person.”
 What is meant by emotionally connecting with the person?

It is preparing yourself and another person to be in a comfortable zone before and during an interaction.

Unless both are in the same level of comfortable zone, there is a chance for misinterpretation of communication.
 
Some of the factors help to be in a comfortable zone.
 Displaying respect / making others feeling good
Your friendly body postures
Your undivided attention to others
Listening and prompting
Addressing the lingering question of what is in it for me
Feedback

Naturally, not all people are capable of deep listening while interacting since many emotions are being processed inside the minds like fear, curious, the anxiety of what next, etc.

When different emotions are being processed internally, listening capability is reduced, and misinterpretation happens. So, it is essential to make others prepared to be in a comfortable zone during interaction by using the above factors.

Even if you are expert in a subject and excellent in logic and not equally good in connecting with others, your communication will get failed. It would help if you learned the art of connecting with others with simple, robust processes in all factors.
 Let us discuss the techniques with simple examples in next week!
 

when will people listen to you?

Often I use to hear from people says,” My team is not doing what I am asking them to do."

This apprehension has a lot to do with our communication process than the other people's attitude and capability to execute.

Let us understand the process of effective communication.

People will listen to us only when our communication contains ALL  the below elements.

• Expertise in the subject or creditability proof 
• Connecting emotionally with the person
• Logically connecting with facts

 Let us discuss in detail each element.

Expertise in the subject or creditability proof :

Naturally, we give more importance to the person who is saying than what is being said. If others believe that you have expertise in the subject, then there is likely a chance for active listening and in turn, execution as per communication.

We need to make others believe that we are the right person to talk about the subject. 

For example, as an accounts manager, if you instruct your team about using accounting software, people are internally checking your expertise on the software. If they feel you do not have sufficient knowledge about software, their active listening will come down.

In most of the organization, it is a challenge for the newcomers to get the confidence of their team since the team has suspicions about the newcomer’s expertise. It is the prime responsibility of the newcomer to prove his /her technical/managerial expertise to win the confidence of the people.

People may respect you for your age or position. However, their mind is working on to gauge your expertise, and accordingly, the intend of communication is received.

Hence, you need to invest your time and effort in developing competence in your core area to improve communication effectiveness

Let us discuss other success factors next week!