How Good Are Your Communication Skills?

Speaking, Listening, Writing, and Reading Effectively Communication skills are some of the most important skills that you need to succeed in the workplace. We talk to people face to face, and we listen when people talk to us. We write emails and reports, and we read the documents that are sent to us. Communication, therefore, is a process that involves at least two people a sender and a receiver. For it to be successful, the receiver must understand the message in the way that the sender intended. This sounds quite simple. But have you ever been in a situation where this hasn't happened? Misunderstanding and confusion often occur, and they can cause enormous problems. If you want to be an expert communicator, you need to be effective at all points in the communication process and you must be comfortable with the different channels of communication. When you communicate well, you can be very successful. On the other hand, poor communicators struggle to develop their careers beyond a certain point. So are you communicating effectively? Take this short quiz to find out. The Communication Quiz Instructions: For each statement, click the button in the column that best describes you. Please answer questions as you actually are (rather than how you think you should be), and don't worry if some questions seem to score in the 'wrong direction'. When you are finished, please click the 'Calculate My Total' button at the bottom of the test.
Not at All Some times Very Often

15 Statements to Answer

Rarely

Often

I try to anticipate and predict possible causes of confusion, and I deal with them up front. When I write a memo, email, or other document, I give all of the background information and detail I can to make sure that my message is understood. If I don't understand something, I tend to keep this to myself and figure it out later. I'm sometimes surprised to find that people haven't understood what I've said. I can tend to say what I think, without worrying about how the other person perceives it. I assume that we'll be able to work it out later. When people talk to me, I try to see their perspectives.

I use email to communicate complex issues with people. It's quick and efficient.

15 Statements to Answer

Not at All

Rarely

Some times

Often

Very Often

When I finish writing a report, memo, or email, I scan it quickly for typos and so forth, and then send it off right away. When talking to people, I pay attention to their body language.

10 I use diagrams and charts to help

express my ideas.

11 Before I communicate, I think about

what the person needs to know, and how best to convey it.

12 When someone's talking to me, I think

about what I'm going to say next to make sure I get my point across correctly.

13 Before I send a message, I think about

the best way to communicate it (in person, over the phone, in a newsletter, via memo, and so on).

14 I try to help people understand the

underlying concepts behind the point I am discussing. This reduces misconceptions and increases understanding.

15 I consider cultural barriers when

planning my communications.

Total = 37
Score Interpretation Score Comment Excellent! You understand your role as a communicator, both when you send messages, and when you receive them. You anticipate problems, and you choose the right ways of communicating. People respect you for your ability to communicate clearly, and they appreciate your listening skills. (Read below for more.) You're a capable communicator, but you sometimes experience communication problems. Take the time to think about your approach to communication, and focus on receiving messages effectively, as much as sending them. This will help you improve. (Read below to start.)

56-75

36-55

15-35

You need to keep working on your communication skills. You are not expressing yourself clearly, and you may not be receiving messages correctly either. The good news is that, by paying attention to communication, you can be much more effective at work, and enjoy much better working relationships! The rest of this article will direct you to some great tools for improving your communication skills. (Read below to start.)

Detailed Interpretation Whenever you communicate with someone else, you and the other person follow the steps of the communication process shown below.

Here, the person who is the source of the communication encodes it into a message, and transmits it through a channel. The receiver decodes the message, and, in one way or another, feeds back understanding or a lack of understanding to the source. By understanding the steps in the process, you can become more aware of your role in it, recognize what you need to do to communicate effectively, anticipate problems before they happen, and improve your overall ability to communicate effectively. The sections below help you do this, and help you improve the way you communicate at each stage of the process. The Source Planning Your Message (Questions 1, 2, 11) Your score is 7 out of 15 Before you start communicating, take a moment to figure out what you want to say, and why. Don't waste your time conveying information that isn't necessary and don't waste the listener or reader's time either. Too often, people just keep talking or keep writing because they think that by saying more, they'll surely cover all the points. Often, however, all they do is confuse the people they're talking to.

To plan your communication: Understand your objective. Why are you communicating? Understand your audience. With whom are you communicating? What do they need to know? Plan what you want to say, and how you'll send the message. Seek feedback on how well your message was received. When you do this, you'll be able to craft a message that will be received positively by your audience. Good communicators use the KISS ("Keep It Simple and Straightforward") principle. They know that less is often more, and that good communication should be efficient as well as effective. Encoding Creating a Clear, Well-Crafted Message (Questions 1, 5, 8, 10, 15) Your score is 13 out of 25 When you know what you want to say, decide exactly how you'll say it. You're responsible for sending a message that's clear and concise. To achieve this, you need to consider not only what you'll say, but also how you think the recipient will perceive it.

We often focus on the message that we want to send, and the way in which we'll send it. But if our message is delivered without considering
the other person's perspective, it's likely that part of that message will be lost. To communicate more effectively: Understand what you truly need and want to say. Anticipate the other person's reaction to your message. Choose words and body language that allow the other person to really hear what you're saying. With written communication, make sure that what you write will be perceived the way you intend. Words on a page generally have no emotion they don't "smile" or "frown" at you while you're reading them (unless you're a very talented writer, of course!) When writing, take time to do the following: Review your style. Avoid jargon or slang. Check your grammar and punctuation. Check also for tone, attitude, nuance, and other subtleties. If you think the message may be misunderstood, it probably will. Take the time to clarify it! Familiarize yourself with your company's writing policies. Another important consideration is to use pictures, charts, and diagrams wherever possible. As the saying goes, "a picture speaks a thousand words." Our article on charts and graphs has some great tips that help you to use these to communicate clearly. Also, whether you speak or write your message, consider the cultural context. If there's potential for miscommunication or misunderstanding due to cultural or language barriers, address these issues in advance. Consult with people who are familiar with these, and do your research so that you're aware of problems you may face. See our article on Effective Cross-Culture Communication for more help. Choosing the Right Channel (Questions 7, 11, 13)

Your score is 7 out of 15 Along with encoding the message, you need to choose the best communication channel to use to send it. You want to be efficient, and yet make the most of your communication opportunity. Using email to send simple directions is practical. However, if you want to delegate a complex task, an email will probably just lead to more questions, so it may be best to arrange a time to speak in person. And if your communication has any negative emotional content, stay well away from email! Make sure that you communicate face to face or by phone, so that you can judge the impact of your words and adjust these appropriately. When you determine the best way to send a message, consider the following: The sensitivity and emotional content of the subject. How easy it is to communicate detail. The receiver's preferences. Time constraints. The need to ask and answer questions. Decoding Receiving and Interpreting a Message (Questions 3, 6, 12, 14)

Your score is 12 out of 20 It can be easy to focus on speaking; we want to get our points out there, because we usually have lots to say. However, to be a great communicator, you also need to step back, let the other person talk, and just listen. This doesn't mean that you should be passive. Listening is hard work, which is why effective listening is called active listening. To listen actively, give your undivided attention to the speaker: Look at the person. Pay attention to his or her body language. Avoid distractions. Nod and smile to acknowledge points. Occasionally think back about what the person has said. Allow the person to speak, without thinking about what you'll say next. Don't interrupt. Empathic listening also helps you decode a message accurately. To understand a message fully, you have to understand the emotions and underlying feelings the speaker is expressing. This is where an understanding of body language can be useful. Feedback (Questions 3, 4, 9)

Your score is 5 out of 15 You need feedback, because without it, you can't be sure that people have understood your message. Sometimes feedback is verbal, and sometimes it's not. We've looked at the importance of asking questions and listening carefully. However, feedback through body language is perhaps the most important source of clues to the effectiveness of your communication. By watching the facial expressions, gestures, and posture of the person you're communicating with, you can spot: Confidence levels. Defensiveness. Agreement. Comprehension (or lack of understanding). Level of interest. Level of engagement with the message. Truthfulness (or lying/dishonesty). As a speaker, understanding your listener's body language can give you an opportunity to adjust your message and make it more understandable, appealing, or interesting. As a listener, body language can show you more about what the other person is saying. You can then ask questions to ensure that you have, indeed, understood each other. In both situations, you can better avoid miscommunication if it happens. Feedback can also be formal. If you're communicating something really important, it can often be worth asking questions of the person you're talking to to make sure that they've understood fully. And if you're receiving this sort of communication, repeat it in your own words to check your understanding.

Key Points It can take a lot of effort to communicate effectively. However, you need to be able to communicate well if you're going to make the most of the opportunities that life has to offer. By learning the skills you need to communicate effectively, you can learn how to communicate your ideas clearly and effectively, and understand much more of the information that's conveyed to you. As either a speaker or a listener, or as a writer or a reader, you're responsible for making sure that the message is communicated accurately. Pay attention to words and actions, ask questions, and watch body language. These will all help you ensure that you say what you mean, and hear what is intended. - See more at: http://www.mindtools.com/pages/article/newCS_99.htm#np Thought Life

87% to 95% of the illnesses that plague us today are a direct result of our thought life. What we think about affects us physically and emotionally. It's an epidemic of toxic emotions. The average person has over 30,000 thoughts a day. Through an uncontrolled thought life, we create the conditions for illness; we make ourselves sick! Research shows that fear, all on its own, triggers more than 1,400 known physical and chemical responses and activates more than 30 different hormones. There are INTELLECTUAL and MEDICAL reasons to FORGIVE! Toxic waste generated by toxic thoughts causes the following illnesses: diabetes, cancer, asthma, skin problems and allergies to name just a few. Consciously control your thought life and start to detox your brain! Medical research increasingly points to the fact that thinking and consciously controlling your thought life is one of the best ways, if not the best way of detoxing your brain. It allows you to get rid of those toxic thoughts and emotions that can consume and control your mind. Change in your thinking is essential to detox the brain. Consciously controlling your thought life means not letting thoughts rampage through your mind. It means learning to engage interactively with every single thought that you have, and to analyse it before you decide either to accept or reject it. How do you go about doing that? By "looking" at your mental processes. That may sound like a strange, if not impossible thing to do. After all, it's not as if you can just crack open your skull like an egg and have a look at what is going on inside your brain. It is possible, however, to look at your mental processes. In fact, it is not just possible, it is essential. For example consider the following: How many "could-have", "would-have", "should-have" statements have you made today? How many "if onlys" were part of your inner vocabulary today? How many times have you replayed in your head a conversation or situation that pained you, or one that hasn't even occurred yet? How many scenarios have you created of the unpredictable future? How much is speculation taking out of your day? How passive is your mind? How honest are you with yourself? Are you at cross-purposes with yourself - going through the motions, but not really committed to the goal, saying one thing but meaning another?

How distorted is your thinking? Are you forming a personal identity around for example, a disease? Do you speak about "my arthritis", "my multiple sclerosis", "my heart problem"? Do you ever make comments like "nothing ever goes right for me"; "everything I touch fails"; "I always mess up"? If you answered yes even to just one of these, your thought life needs detoxing right now. A potential pitfall on the path towards detoxing your brain is the fact that toxic thoughts come in many guises. On the surface, a thought like "I must do well" seems positive enough. It is only when you look at it closely, and check out the feelings it generates and their effects on your body and mind, that you will be able to judge fairly and squarely if this is a thought that serves you well. If you base your thought life on assumptions like the above the foundations will be shaky and the edifice (your body mind) that you create thereafter will be highly unstable. As you think more toxic thoughts and generate more toxic emotions, that edifice will show cracks, cave in and eventually collapse altogether as burgeoning illness and disease takes hold. Right off, you need to ditch unrealistic thinking and keep in mind some key principles to kick-start the process of controlling toxic thoughts: Thoughts create your moods When you experience a fear-based emotion you will feel depressed and your thoughts will be characterised by negativity A negative thought linked to emotional turmoil will be distorted "...bringing all thoughts into captivity to Christ Jesus" (2 Corinthians 10:5) becomes the golden rule of safe thinking There are four simple techniques involved: Understanding that thoughts are real and have an actual anatomy Thoughts are real things: they have a structure in your brain and occupy space. Thoughts are the same as memories. Thoughts and memories look like trees and are called neurons or nerve cells. You build a double memory of everything as a mirror image of each other. This means that the memory on the left side of the brain builds from the detail to the big picture; and the memory on the right side builds from the big picture to the detail. When you put these two perspectives of thought together, you get intelligent understanding taking place. As information comes in from the five senses, you process it in certain structures of your brain, then you grow branches on the "trees" to hold this information in long term memory. In fact, as you reading this, you are growing thoughts, because, thoughts are the result of what we hear and read and see and feel and experience. This means that whatever you grow is part of you, actual branches in your brain that create your attitude and influence your decisions. Increasing conscious awareness of your thoughts and how you are feeling. Knowledge of the anatomy of thought naturally leads into the process of actively analysing incoming information and thoughts constantly. You should never let a thought or thoughts roam chaotically and unchecked through your head. Examine every thought you have and ask yourself: is this good for me? Is it from God or the devil or my own confused thinking? Conscious awareness of your thinking should become like a habit. A habit takes twentyone days to create. Today is the first day of that twenty-one... Doing something once you have analysed the thought. So, whilst technique two is developing a conscious awareness of what you are thinking about. Now technique three is doing something about the thought. This means making a conscious decision to actively accept the thought (if it is good for you) or reject it (if it is bad for you). This means you use your God-given ability of free will (this also has actual structural position in the brain) to do something about the thought you are consciously aware of. Thoughts have as much control as we give them. Building new memories over the old. This is the really exciting part in dealing with our thought life because, accepting or rejecting the thought is changing the neural circuitry of your brain: you brain is growing while you think and you have control over the process. Technique four happens when the brain steps in and creates a structural representation of what you have chosen to accept (adds more branches on the tree) and converts what you have chosen to reject into hot air! Lets see how these four techniques work if you have an unforgiveness in your memory trees towards someone: Technique one: this unforgiveness looks like a thorn tree and will hurt you - visualize the twisted bitter thorn tree. Technique two: be consciously aware of this thought of unforgiveness - where it comes from, how long it has been there, and so on. Technique three: ask the Holy Spirit to help you use your free will to make the wisdom decision to reject unforgiveness and forgive. Picture the unforgiveness disappearing as hot air. Technique four: now build a new de-thorned memory to replace the thorny unforgiveness with for example, quoting scriptures, singing a worship song, praying for the person, and so on.

DEFINE YOUR CAREER GOALS

Having looked inward, you should now be well informed about what makes you motivated, passionate and happy at work. From looking outward, you will ideally have new information and resources to consider your future direction.

Now, its time to set your career goals: If you knew you would succeed, what would you do? Use your imagination, visualise your success and notice the details like where you are, who is around you, what you are saying and doing. Your genuine desire and belief that your goals can be achieved are important factors in your future success.

Record your aspirations in the Career Planner: Once you've discussed your aspirations with your manager, also record them in Online Performance Management (OPM).

If you don't have all the information you need, consider what's missing: Do you need more detail on your strengths, motivators or preferences? If so, go to the exercises.
Identify Your Strengths

Do you need more information about options to suit your preferences? Perhaps you need to work through Looking Outward in detail. Or review these Recommended Reading Resources. If you are finding it particularly difficult to find direction or when considering a significant change, think whether there are other people that you could talk to who may help your thinking. Your HR Business Partner or Talent contact may be able to recommend options. (You can find your HR Business Partner on your profile within The Hub.)

Start with a long term or 'fuzzy vision' from which you can set shorter term goals: For example, your fuzzy vision might be: to gain recognition through my creative efforts. A near term goal (up to 12 months) might be: to specialise in the area of digital design and gain experience working as a senior designer. A longer term goal (up to 5 years) might be: to work with Fortune 500 companies including experience in the emerging markets

1. a