How to communicate effectively practising 3 simple steps
- Gulchin
- Feb 9, 2020
- 3 min read
Being able to communicate effectively is perhaps the most important of all lifetime skills. Nowadays, it stands more than just passing and receiving information. It enables us to excite, persuade, sell and many more critical deliveries in our personal and professional lives.
One of my favourite books to read on this topic is “The Bullseye Principle” written by David Lewis and Riley Mills. I will summarize top 3 methods Bullseye principle suggests to follow on day-to-day communication that may benefit to you:
1. Define your Objective & Intention for every single conversation before speaking
Clear objective and intention are two the most important elements of persuading your audience in conversations. Every one of the objectives you have chosen calls for some degree of action.
To define your objective, before
presenting anything, speaking or meeting with someone, answer those questions:
What do I want?
What is in the way what I want?
How am I going to get what I want?
Once you have identified what your objective is, then define your intention and stick to it throughout the meeting.
Intention is what you want to achieve in the end of that conversation. It is the main purpose of your message. “Without a clear intention you risk of people not knowing how to feel about your message or what to do with the information they have just heard- resulting in a confusion” says David and Riley, in their book “The Bullseye Principle”. You may use this template to align your objective and intention:
During the first few weeks, it might be hard for you to apply this template immediately at every single conversation you're having, and therefore, you may need to start preparing ahead, a few hours/days prior those meetings. But the more you will be practising it, the faster your brain starts automating this process applying each time you speak to someone.
2. Don’t underestimate the power of your Audience
Conversation often happens mutually, with at least one other party participating. Therefore, you always need to analyse your audience prior to the meeting, not only to customise your conversation and manners, but also, to be able to predict questions that may arise during that dialogue.
To analyse your audience, you need to answer 3 simple questions:
Who is your audience (demographically, psychologically, situationally)?
What challenges could you face with this audience?
What difficult questions might you be asked by the audience?
Believe me, this will help you a lot, especially on preparing yourself to identify 'risks', to be able to address them before your audience starts questioning you or feels concerned.
3. Logos, Ethos & Pathos
Sounds like a magical act, right? Those are 3 terms from Aristotle's treatise Rhetoric, which he defined to be the three means of persuasion a speaker must utilise to influence another person. Let's look into each closer:
Logos – It is about the credibility of the message you’re putting out there. Your audience thinks: “Is this idea believable and logical?”, “Does that make sense?”
Ethos – says your audience’s impression of the your character and decency. Audience immediately thinks, “Can I trust him?”, “Is he honest and genuine?”
Pathos – It speaks to your audience’s emotional state when hearing your talk. Listeners filter you through questions: “Does he seem excited?”, “Does his message make feel something?”.
To succeed, in pathos, prefer using high emotional verbs while choosing an intention such as: “Excite", “empower”, “inspire” etc.. Those verbs will help with influencing your audience, maintaining engagement, while low emotional connection words, such as inform, update, report, review leaves people to feel less engaged and eventually, bored.
Outcome is not on your control. What's in your control is your effort and your intentions. - Amit Sood
No matter if you are meeting with your manager or a group of people, try to utilise those three key ideas to become a successful communicator. While delivering a presentation, weekly update or while answering questions, try to stick to your objective and intentions and prepare beforehand analysing your audience. This will help you to establish credibility and support your reputation amongst the group of people you are interacting with.
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