Effective Communication Skills

Overview

As communication is an everyday experience for most of us, we might reasonably consider ourselves to be experts. However, not every interaction we have produces the results we want or expect. Even when we get the words right, the messages don’t always get through as we intend. Information gets lost on the way, meanings become distorted, people fail to be convinced by our arguments.  Quite often that is because we are seeing communication as one-way traffic rather than two-way. Building rapport, gaining trust and influencing others means that we have to engage positively with the person to whom we are speaking.  And it means understanding more than just the words we are hearing.  This programme looks at the intricacies of the communication process and how, with conscious effort, we can improve the outcomes.

Aims

To help participants develop their communication skills to achieve better outcomes in their dealings with others through a process of building rapport, gaining trust and handling conflict in a confident and constructive manner.

Learning Objectives

By the end of the programme, you will be able to:

• Define communication and list the barriers to its effectiveness
• Explain the importance to effective communication of:
  • your choice of language
  • the way in which you listen to others
  • your tone of voice and your body language
  • other non-verbal means of communication
• Explain the relationship between trust, rapport and your ability to influence others
• Describe how our ‘ego’ states influence the messages we send
• Explain and demonstrate how our ‘life positions’ and our use of assertive language can help to resolve conflict
• Handle conflict in a confident, constructive and assertive manner.

Workshop Content

• An introduction to communication 
• The principles of effective communication
• Building trust and influencing others
• Handling conflict
• Review and close.

Participants complete two self-assessments during the event, the Influencing Styles Questionnaire and the Transactional Analysis Questionnaire, to help provide an insight into their communication preferences.