Improve Your Work Communication Skills

It is normal to experience difficulty in our communication once in a while. But if you experience friction and frustration in expressing yourself frequently (or even daily), you might consider improving your interpersonal and work communication skills with a communication coach. The stakes may be high, because it affects your career progression, relationships and your confidence.

Symptoms of issues in your interpersonal & work communication

1. You have ideas or thoughts you’d like to share, but you keep quiet instead of speaking up.

2. You need to repeat yourself a few times before your listener understands you.

3. You overthink, or people-please.
    
4. You struggle with your words and sentences, even though you have no speech impediments.

5. Your mind goes blank when you try to speak.

6. Your emotions (e.g. anxiety, fear, frustration) get in the way.

7. You come across as too pushy, blunt or intimidating.
   

Impact of poor interpersonal communication skills at your workplace

Displaying poor interpersonal communication skills at your workplace can result in anything from dissatisfaction to emotional distress (high anxiety), or a drop in confidence. It could stem from your character, or from specific changes, environments or people in your life. Regardless of the cause, this can impact the quality of your workplace relationships. Your professional image might suffer, as how you communicate affects peoples’ perception of your reliability and effectiveness.

Emotional mastery is also a key factor in how you’re able to express and assert yourself. In order words, your emotional mastery can affect your clarity in communication, both in your own thoughts, and how you express yourself out loud. Being out of touch with your emotions might cause you to:

• suffer a lack of clarity in your thoughts
• not be as persuasive as you’d like to be
• feel overwhelmed, or hesitate to speak

Signs you might need to improve your workplace communication skills

Your ability to communicate affects how people experience you at the interpersonal level. To a huge degree, it doesn’t matter how clear you think you are; what’s most important is what the other party received. You can pay attention to feedback from those around you, for a better idea of how effective your communication skills really are.

This is even more relevant when you consider that your performance is (like it or not) partly assessed based on your relationships, and the quality of your communication with the various stakeholders in your work.

I’ve helped clients from various levels of organizational hierachy, and I get to hear, first-hand, what motivated them to learn how to communicate effectively at the workplace. The most common pain points I hear are:

① “People tell me they don’t understand what I’m trying to say.”

② “People say I’m beating around the bush, and asks me to ‘get to the point’.”

③ “People comment I’m too quiet, and tells me to speak up more.”

④ “People don’t acknowledge, or ignore my verbal contributions.”

⑤ “People say I’m too emotional, too harsh or too blunt.”

How coaching helps with effective communication & higher confidence at your workplace

Through personal coaching, you can improve your communication and reclaim your confidence at work. This is familiar territory I’ve visited with clients on over the years, as a full-time life coach, specializing in communication and confidence.

Every coaching engagement is unique, because each client has different needs, weaknesses and strengths. However, there are processes that unfold every single time:

• Through open exploration and in-depth reflection, we will uncover your blindspots.
• Once you can see the cause or nature of your issue, you might also be able to see how you can do things differently so you get different result.
• I can also guide you to try new ways of saying or doing things, that are effective and feel authentic for you.
• Together, we will co-create practices that you can adopt, to assimilate what you learn into your regular way of being.
• I will provide you with honest feedback which you can use to calibrate and fine-tune your new skills.

What coaching is

Coaching is a form of super-customised learning, focused solely on your needs. It is one of the most dignified forms of professional help, because you choose the topic, direction and depth of what you wish to work on.

In fact, my clients are NOT ‘broken’ in any way. They are capable, creative and self-initiated individuals who want to live out their full potential. Many of them are high-performers at their workplace.

They just want support to help them hit their objectives more quickly and with less pain.

If taking ownership of your growth appeals to you, coaching is might be suitable for you.

WhatsApp me now, to find out how you and I can work together on your communication and confidence.

Or, if you know what you want, and would like to move things along more quickly, you can pre-book a ‘chemistry’ coaching session with me → here. I will respond to you to confirm the session.