The Importance of Communication Skills in Life and Career

Communication skills are the 'be all and end all' of any successful relationship or career path. It doesn't matter if you are extremely knowledgeable about a particular topic. Unless you have the ability to relate it to others so that they understand exactly what you are trying to communicate, you will not find that knowledge useful.

Career:

One needs exceptional communication skills to prosper in each and every aspect of one's life. Imagine you're a software developer and wish to become the Project Manager, you need communication skills. The higher in the echelon of corporate ladder you wish to climb, the better you need to have the ability to grasp what the client wants and how you can convey your opinions to them. The higher you go, the more visible you become in the success hierarchy, hence the better spoken you need to become.

Irrespective of whether you work on a part time or full time, blue collar or white collar job, communication skills are the key to be an achiever.

Relationships:

In relationships, communication is the key. No alliance, be it friendship, family love, or life mate love can withstand lack of proper communication. It is the quintessential part of our existence.

If you love someone, you say it to them. You need to be able to express yourself the way you want others to understand you. It's exceedingly imperative, hence, to work on building your communication skills.

It is not difficult to be a good communicator. You just need to be clear about what you want the others to understand. Don't let your thoughts cloud each other or overlap each other. Be clear in your concepts.

Remember these points before saying something important:

1) Are you clear as to what you wish to make the other person understand?

2) Get the thoughts cleared in your mind.

3) Talk simply and enunciate.

4) Observe the other person's reaction. Do they comprehend what you're saying?

5) Do you feel they're in agreement with your views on the matter? If not, you might have to change the way you put across that point.

6) Always remember this: you need to talk so that the other person feels it's a beneficial thing for them, or that you're agreeing with them.

7) If you're disagreeing with someone, start off with "I completely agree, but..." or "I understand what you're trying to say, but there's another thing I'd like to add...". You don't need to necessarily agree with them, but saying things like these will make them feel you're not opposing their viewpoint.

8) Be sure of your viewpoint, but try to understand the other person's perspective too.

9) Try to say the other person's name once in a while during the conversation -"You have a good point there, Mr. Arnold." People like hearing their name, it makes them feel included, so it puts you in their good books and they try to see your point of view too.

Being a good communicator is a mandatory requirement in today's scenario. Be it life or love, you need to be able to express your feelings or opinions lucidly. Remember the tips given above, and communicating your thoughts will become a cinch.

'Communication is not only the essence of being human, but also a vital property of life.' - John A. Piece

Setting the Correct Tone in Training

Have you ever made a bad first impression with your training group? Providing a positive environment condusive to learning is your top priority. But, it can all go wrong.

The next question is: What sort of atmosphere do you want to create? Formal; informal; serious; light-hearted?

Clearly much will depend on the nature of what is being taught.

Public Speaking and self-development course should best be delivered in a friendly and supportive environment.

Clinical procedures or material with legal implications needs a more fixed, and formal environment.

To produce the correct learning environment, the trainer has two suggested tools at hand: (i.) His or her own demeanour and attitude (ii.) The physical layout of the room.

Focussing primarily here on (i.), the trainer can greatly influence his learning environment by tone of voice, physical demeanour and also by dress.

As a participant, coming into a room where the trainer is wearing jeans and a T shirt, there is going be very different expectations to entering a room where a trainer is wearing a business suit.

Therefore, it's absolutely vital that we ensure we are dressed appropriately. For male trainers, whether they choose to wear a tie will also have an effect. As a rule of thumb, if unsure how to dress, it will always be better to dress too formally rather than under-dress. If you arrive at a session and the delegates are dressed informally, without ties for example, then it's simply a case of stepping out of the room and removing your tie - and everything is fine. On the other hand, you may look a bit silly putting a tie on in front of everyone if you have arrived under-dressed! (I suppose it is better to give an impression of being over-prepared rather than under-prepared!)

In truth, as a 'teacher', your students would possibly expect you to be more formally dressed than they are. You should also consider your personal and natural style of delivery which has a major impact on your students. Because of my nature, soft and somewhat unassuming, I never believed that I came across in severe manner. In the initial days of my training practice, a more formal dress code helped me produce an increased level of authority. On the other hand, I was aware of colleagues whose natural communication style was already fairly strong and authoritarian and so it helped them sometimes to dress down a little to remove some of their sharp edges.

So the key to pitching your training at the right level is to establish what sort of environment you need to establish to help your participants learn best. And then decide what you need to focus on, based on your own natural style and attributes, your appearance and attitude, to bring that environment into being.

The College of Public Speaking offers a BTEC level 4 accredited by Edexcel. This unique course is an ideal and inexpensive opportunity for indiviuals to get their foot on the training ladder. Workshops are run regularly in London and the South-East and welcome enquiries from around the country and abroad. For more details, please follow the following link: Training Qualification
Train the Trainer

Creating Characters That Readers Can Relate to - Keep it Real

Creating characters is an essential part of writing fiction. If you want to have characters that seem real to your readers-characters they can relate to, a certain amount of effort must go into their personalities.

Of course the best source of realism is yourself. It isn't a matter of simply placing yourself inside the story. That would be extremely boring to you and probably to your readers as well. Take one aspect of yourself-your interest in gardens, your ability to play the guitar, your love for Chinese food-and amplify it. Give this facet of your personality to your character as a side-characteristic. A standard-issue detective will have a much more realistic presence if one of these personal quirks becomes part of the detective's own preferences. An intense version of the quirk helps to draw your character in stark lines-making that person much more effective and memorable.

Using other people is an option. It might be someone you know well or someone you glimpse as they enter a building. Both have been sources of famous characters. If you use someone you know, it is often recommended you don't use the whole person. Make a composite of two or three different people. This way your character ends up being unique. You also avoid any awkward encounters if your friends recognize themselves in your story. Pulling from the personalities that surround you can make your characters far more real.

Give your characters legitimate motivations. Real people do things for real reasons. If your protagonist suddenly wants to ignore all warnings and enter a house, give your protagonist a real reason. Don't resort to "I just know that this is what I need to do." Many professional and successful writers resort to this, but nevertheless it is an indication of only one thing-bad writing. Don't use convenient bursts of unexplained intuition to move your characters through your story. Give them a real reason to go into that house.

One of the best things you can do for you characters to make them more real is to not make them perfectly good or perfectly bad. Real people usually have a little of both. Good people have shortcomings. Bad people have admirable traits. If your characters are purely one or the other, they have a tendency to be caricatures or even worse-melodramatic. Inevitably, they will be less interesting if they do not have conflicting facets.

You want characters that seem real. If your readers are going to relate to your protagonist, you have to research yourself and the people around you. But also give your characters genuine motivation and genuine flaws. All of these things can bring your characters to life. These are what can make your readers feel like they are reading about real people.

Is an Avalanche of Self Doubt Threatening Your Creativity?

The chicken and the egg...

If you have no speaking career at this stage, maybe a great book will catapult your speaking career forward? Or maybe you need to develop your speaking career further first and then do a book. If you have already started to invest in getting yourself geared up to become a pro-speaker, then a really good book will certainly help you in this area. If you have some great concepts, passion for your beliefs, and a history of success behind you, then you need to get yourself out there already presenting your ideas and knowledge, writing articles, and establishing a presence for your brand in the market place. You don't have to wait for a book to be able to do that.

You'll need to decide if you want to invest in literature as a tool for promoting your speaking career. The Return on Investment in a book is not measurable... Simply because you have not yet committed to doing anything with it, and because the payoff most likely won't be in sales of the book itself, but more from other things, such as speaker fees increasing, more exposure by media as an expert in your field, or increased enquiry for your consulting services.

The best case scenario is this: You make your book happen (write, edit, produce it etc), put some serious effort into promoting it and you get a lot of people talking about it. The Public Relations required to launch it well could mean an additional investment of anything from $200 - $20,000 - depending on so many variables.

Once your book is on the market and you have some build-up of publicity around it, then your speaker services become more in demand, and your fees can increase accordingly. Authors definitely can command a higher fee than a speaker or consultant who is unpublished.

You could use one book successfully to launch yourself onto the world market if you (as a speaker) and it (the book) are good enough and determined enough to make that happen. You can also drive bargains with corporate business sponsors to get their endorsements and sponsorship funding to help really offset the costs and spin it into a major deal worth thousands... ie, Employment and Manufacturers Associations, Chambers of Commerce, business development agencies, private companies from within your industry - if they love it, this could easily happen.

Note - This is NOT an overnight success thing - in fact most overnight success stories are at least 1000 nights in the making.

Worst case scenario is this: You make the book happen, spend $20,000 on getting it to market etc, and you sell 530 copies*, give several hundred away, get a handful of low-medium paid speaking engagements out of it, and then decide to move on and write or speak about something completely different. For your investment, you end up with some reasonable interest in your ideas, and it ultimately leads to a fantastic job offer by someone who notices how amazing you are at what ever you do. In 5 years time, you still have a few boxes of books sitting on your garage floor, but have enjoyed some really interesting experiences during your career as an author.

*500 copies sold would give you roughly half of your investment back... not great ROI, but like I said, you have to decide what your expectations are of this book.

Don't go into this assuming you will make lots of money... most likely you wont. Or if you do, it could take 2 - 3 years to cover your costs.

On the up side, a great example of the success of one of our authors is how he managed to tap into the financial market players, got an agreement by one very large company to take 5000 copies on release, with their name and endorsement note in the book, which more than covered the cost of the entire exercise. In the process, this early success catapulted him to the attention of other companies and media who all started to sit up and pay attention BIG TIME. John has done some heavy pushing of his book at the market he's targeting... he's aiming to sell 10,000 in it's first year, and I'm quite expecting that he will do it too.

Getting a second opinion If you have a book already written, but are unsure of whether or not it really will set the world on fire - put it in front of a few people... you can easily do that. You can also spend some time in the bookstores locally and see what else is out there that comes close to your book content and concept. You really do need to do this. However you also need to decide what's in your heart, where this is likely to take you and how much are you prepared to work at making it brilliant.

Maria Carlton is an award winning business operator, brand communications expert for SMEs and international bestselling author and speaker. Her books and seminars make people think, take action and move forward easily. Maria is also founder and CEO of Maruki Books - specialising in assisting professional experts to create and market non-fiction books.

Top 6 Healthy Writing Tips

Your article writing skill is an art a combination of thoughts and ideas written or type written on paper. Being a writer, to be effective in writing you must be at your best to capture and hold the interest of your readers, continuously satisfying their appetite. Consider your readers as your listening audience attentively listening to what you have to sayA, your writing presentation should actually be the same as if you were verbalizing your speech, the only difference is your conversation is in a written format in oppose to being audible.

1. From experience the first thing about writing which appeals to a reader is the title of the article, once that sparks the interest your message is sent and curiosity sets in, the result will begin immediate handling of your material which quite often ended up becoming the possession of the curious reader. The power of your title page should be your strongest and foremost focus in article writing. Capturing the attention of your reading audience is essential to get your message across, weather you are writing a book posting an ad or drafting an email, the stronger your headline appeal, or you title page is the more readers you will attract.

2. You must harness your creative ability which will motivate your writing skills as you create your own writing pattern which will become your unique brand in delivering to your reading audience quality articles they will want to become part of their library collection for reference. Creative writing is all about the subject of your choice that you choose to write about for whatever reason the subject may appeal to you, and the message you intend to send in writing, whatever the subject you should be comfortable to write about it and should have sufficient knowledge about the subject to convey enough facts to benefit your readers. If your story is based on facts you should do your diligence to write facts and not a combination of facts and fictions.

3. Build your vocabulary to have a reservoir of word flow to easily complement each other in rhyming what you have to say creatively; a strong vocabulary is like tapping into a word power box for the most suitable words to polish your sentences and shine your paragraphs to reflect a vivid picture of your story. It is the power of your words which will captivate the mind of your readers to have them reading gradually digesting the juices from the material in your article. Each paragraph will create an anxiety to get to the next to see what its content is, in the same time creating an appreciation in the mind like as refreshment to the reader.

4. Keep a secondary reminder in form of a notebook, a diary, or your daily journal in addition to your word vocabulary from which you will from time to time retrieve thoughts you were fascinated with, may be from looking at a scenery, a landscape or from some attractive colorful foliage in Autumn, or some beautiful flowering plant in summer. As a writer you will discover that the art of writing is developed by the things you see, hear, and imagine, these impulses insight your writing motor skills to express yourself in literature you may revisit in form of reading to reminis a point or time of inspiration.

5. Refreshing yourself to write effective articles should be a regular practice as a writer, this prevents boredom and allows your mind to recreate its thoughts by shifting its focus briefly to something else; e.g. I walked out to my garden and began to admire the full bloom of my "Rose of Sharon" in Lilly white dabbed with pink streaks in the center of each bloom, the plant is deliberately groomed round to tastefully allow the fullness of the blooms to cover over the green leaves to reflect a blanket of Lilly white, this and the full blooming Hydrangea plant were the most refreshing to look at and to smell the petals, I return to my writing fully refreshed.

6. Your work station be it fixed, make it comfortable and professional for your writing purpose, finding your references should be easy, create labeled files you can quickly access when needed, I recommend printed backups as well in the event your desktop sustain a crash or come under malicious attack be organized. You may also have a portable workstation you move about with, in form of a laptop organize your files giving them relevant names to relate to your article to easily retrieve those notes, keep your fiction and nonfiction ideas in separate files at all times use note pad for more precise notes.

Lucilda Evans is a certified graduate from the Toronto school of business in legal terminology and office practices, a certified public speaker and licensed level2 IFB in the Insurance Industry. Art and Fashions designs has been her life long passion, the combination of these skills resulted in the creation of her original line of multicultural dolls, designed for the pleasure of doll lovers and the safety of young children as her contribution to the world.