Knowing how to improve verbal communication is tricky. We all communicate verbally. But some of us do it with more effectiveness than others. Having good verbal communication skills is essential for success, both on a personal level and for your organisation.

It’s important to understand that learning how to improve verbal communication is about more than just learning to speak well. Speaking must go hand in hand with listening and crucially understanding the needs and wants of your audience. Your audience might be just one person that you know really well, or a room full that you’ve never set eyes on before and may never do so again. In both cases, your goal must be to get you and your message remembered. Hopefully for the right reasons.

Listening & Speaking

We all believe that we are listening to people. But are we? Or are we just hearing (often what we want to hear) and then moving on. It’s only a while later (when something hasn’t gone to plan) that perhaps we wonder if we were really listening to what we heard. Learning to listen is key if you want to develop verbal communication skills. There’s plenty of advice about how to physically speak well. Speak clearly and slowly, make eye contact, be informed. That’s easy to say, but it’s not always so easy to do. How often do you hear people bemoaning how they hate public speaking? Yet this is totally fixable – it’s all about technique. All it takes is time, effort and a real desire to improve your verbal communication skills.

How to improve verbal communication in the workplace

If you needed to improve your knowledge of Excel to be able to do your job well, you’d take a course. Everybody would see that as a valid business reason for expenditure. So why not apply that reasoning to your verbal communication needs? How you speak and react in a sales meeting is just as important as the data you present. Let’s say you frequently deal with areas of conflict or in high stress situations where the first impression to make is the one that stick (new business sales springs to mind). How you speak and listen to your audience is key to the outcome. In that situation, would you go in with a confusing spreadsheet to sell your product? Of course not. You’d make sure that you knew exactly how to lay out your data to maximum effect. So why would you go into the same meeting only to confuse your potential client with what you say and how you say it? Your ability to speak with clarity, brevity and impact could be the best sales tool in your personal skill set. Invest in your verbal communication. For instance, just one day spent developing your presentation skills with The Polished Presenter could be the most significant investment you ever make in your personal development. The ability to speak well and with relevance is a skill that you will use every day. Follow this up with Dynamic Speaking®. Once you know how to identify what makes you great, you can could approach any speaking engagement with greater confidence. This works whether you speak to a hall of people, or the MD in the corridor, knowing that you can give it your all. ]]>