Your Self Improvement Blog

What kind of an impact on people? Whether you’re trying to make an impression with the guy or girl at the bar, whether you’re trying to win over a someone at an interview or trying to handle conflict, how good are you at the fine art of communication? Because effective communication can and will change your life.

There’s lots of research that shows that, when we communicate, the impact that we have depends on a lot more than the words that we use. Body language counts for fifty six percent, tone of voice for thirty six percent and our actual words only account for eight percent of our ability to impress. In other words, chatting on Facebook, connecting on LinkedIn, firing off emails or sending texts is passing on information or gossip – it’s neither real nor effective communication. Truly effective communication involves influencing and impressing. It is done more at a subconscious than conscious level, there are many factors at play that simply cannot be involved when we’re “connecting” at a distance. Indeed, even chatting by ‘phone is much better than the media that I’ve just mentioned. At the very least, tone of voice is brought into play.

However, what if you have actually got physically in front of people – how are you going to manage your body language and tone of voice? How are you going to cope with all the stuff that you need to do to make the biggest and best impression? The answer is that your mind copes automatically. And, I’m sorry to say, that’s bad news for most of us because our automatic minds are stuck replaying the reactions that we learned during our childhood – and they’ve nothing to do with being effective in the here and now. You’re going to have to learn how to focus your mind.

The deepest part of your mind automatically creates your body language, automatically manages your tone of voice. If you don’t believe what you’re saying, then that message is subconsciously communicated – people will see through you. And, unfortunately, the vast majority of normal people don’t believe in themselves and they have the lives to prove it. That’s because, as children, we were all conditioned to believe that we needed to better ourselves – the underlying message, repeated again and again, was that we were not much good in the first place.

You’re going to have to ignore the subconscious nonsense that will otherwise cancel out your effectiveness. You need to drag your subconscious away from the past and into the present. As a result you will have presence – the hallmark of all great communicators. Your personal development goal then, must be to train your mind to focus on now. You can start by taking a few minutes a couple of times each day to stop yourself in your tracks. Find a quiet spot and simply see the steam rise off your coffee, feel the warmth of the cup on the palms of your hands, taste the bitterness, smell the aroma. Your presence depends on your ability to pay attention, a few minutes spent focusing each day when it doesn’t matter will enable you be so much more effective when it does.

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