Eight tips to improve your conversation

Published: 17 Oct 2019 Tagged: CommunicationConfidence CoachconversationSpeakabletips

Communication is a basic skill when we want to express ourselves, understand people who we care about, learn or explain pieces of knowledge, and many other activities in our daily lives. Sometimes, we have difficulties on our ability to keep an effective conversation, caused by many possible factors. However, it’s easy to have better conversations with some very interesting tips below!

1. Let yourself listen to the other. This is the first tip because it’s the most important one. Whenever we are speaking, we are not hearing what the other person is saying. Therefore, allow the conversation to take turns on who speaks and who listens, so you will learn much more about the other person and the topic instead of drawing the attention only to yourself.
2. Don’t zone out. We all have our multiple daily concerns and chores to think about, but we must let them occupy our minds when not in a conversation. It can be very frustrating when we are trying to have a conversation and the other person is browsing on the internet, checking social media, watching TV or simply lost in other thoughts. Provide the same attention you’d like to have from the other person.
3. Open-ended questions are great! When having a conversation ask broad things such as ‘What is that like?’ or ‘What do you think about it?’. When you demonstrate this interest for the other person to express something, you ensure that person’s perspective is important to you, which makes you a wonderful person to have a conversation.
4. Flow with the topic. Sometimes we have a great thing to say, but someone else is already talking with about another topic. Show that person that the discussed topic is still interesting, wait for the proper moment to say what you wanted without interrupting other people’s moments to express themselves. As well, don’t let yourself become impatient while you don’t have the opportunity to say what you wanted.
5. Be honest when you don’t know something. It’s important to show how much you know about the discussed topic in order to allow the other person to remain comfortable speaking about it. If you admit you need more information, the other person will be able to adjust vocabulary, used facts and even the kinds of comparison and analogy to make you comfortable and everyone will feel in line with the topic.
6. It’s not a competition. Sometimes it can be difficult, but you should keep the conversation adequate to each person’s context. If someone is complaining about work, you shouldn’t just comment that your work is worse, or even better, you must just understand how to keep the conversation aligned to each context and provide support to the complaining person if necessary.
7. Say something new. Try to not say the same stories, comments, jokes to the same people, or else you’ll become predictable in your contribution to the conversation, which will make your company less necessary. Every new conversation is a new opportunity to say something new, as well as to listen to something new.
8. Keep it brief. Though there are many kinds of conversation, it’s important to keep it brief in your sentences, explanations and opinions. By doing that, you can be easily listened, and you provide the necessary time for the other person to speak, making a sound conversation with no one retaining all the speaking time to herself.

These eight tips will help you have much better conversations with people enjoying your company to have fun, discuss serious topics or just to have a good friend to be around. In case you need more tips and training to improve your communication skills, Speakable can help you with our Confidence Coach service, get in contact with us!