How do you quantify success?
Perhaps you want to get to the top of your profession or career, be a great leader, the best Mother, Father, Husband or Wife you can be, or simply be one of those people that others like and respect?
Whatever your personal quantification, there is just one skillset that is a foundation for success - conversation!
Think about it. We are surrounded by people, pretty much all the time. We interact with them at home, at work and at play, whatever we are doing, even when we are on our own! Indeed, the one person we interact with the most is ourselves, and we all know how difficult that can be!
The impact conversations have on our lives can’t be denied. They dominate our home and family relationships, our social interactions, and our business and career successes.
It is undoubtably the most powerful, valuable, life shaping skill we can learn!
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A fundamental life skill.
Yet how do we learn this valuable skill? I’ll let you into a secret, we don’t!
OK, maybe that’s a little disingenuous. When I say we don’t learn it, I mean we don’t learn it formally, structurally, with purpose. Instead, we absorb it, experientially.
Conversation is a fundamental life skill that we ‘pick up’ during our first few years of life. We are not ‘taught’ it as a skill, we simply watch and hear how it’s done and copy it. OK, we will be corrected when we pronounce badly, or use a wrong word, but very few of us get to study conversation in depth.
So, here’s the point. Many of us accept conversation simply as we absorbed it in those early years, a background routine set of actions and reactions. Something we ‘just do’!
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If that sounds a bit far-fetched, think for a minute just how many costly mistakes we regularly make:
How often do we:
- Argue with our life partners?
- Fight with our kids?
- Find it difficult to speak out?
- Have our ideas ignored or shouted down?
- Feel uncomfortable in gatherings?
- Feel inadequate and challenged?
- Fail to act on ideas or give up on new projects?
- Win an argument, only to lose the war?
All symptoms of poor, basic conversation skills, symptoms we would prefer to avoid, but simply don’t have the knowledge to do so!
So, can you think of a part of your life that doesn’t include conversations, difficult isn’t it?
I mean, even asleep, we are having conversations with ourselves!
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So what’s the answer?
Of course, there’s no quick and easy answer. Such a powerful set of skills needs a concerted effort and a plan of improvement, We need to embark on a journey of discovery and a quantifiable program.
The good news? There’s a simple start point.
Make a determined effort to expand your awareness of the true powers of conversation. To move beyond basic, ordinary levels and reach out for highly effective conversations! Then make a plan to learn and improve your skills. Notice the detail of every conversation you have and the outcomes. Quantify your results and your progress and take action to find remedies for mistakes and build on your success.
Everyone can improve their conversational skills. It just takes the will to do so and a path of learning, and the benefits will be life changing!
“ I know you think you understand what you thought I said but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant”― Alan Greenspan
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