Martin Metzmacher

Communication skills are important so that people can effectively express what they feel, interrelate with other people, share thoughts, and learn. Ultimately, the goal of communication is for people to understand each other.

Nowadays, communication via electronic gadgets and through monitor screens is extremely common place. Oral communication through mobile device or telephone calls is also common. We use these relatively new technologies to add to more obvious forms of personal interaction communication to improve our skills to efficiently tell people what we want, need and wish.

Tips to Improve your Communication Skills

1. Listen to the details of what the other person has to say. Maintain eye contact and an open position, and try to understand right away what the implications are and what the person is really trying to say. After he or she is done talking, you can then ask questions for clarification and you can also repeat some parts of the talk to emphasize your query.

2. When you talk, specify important data, completely answering questions like how, what and when. Your thoughts should be well explained in this manner.

3. Delivering your message correctly by combining the right words with the right voice tone, body language, gestures and even with the clothes you wear. This keeps conflict from growing and keeps the conversation running smoothly.

4. Use different words for different people. That usually involves knowing the values of a person, and understanding that different persons mean different things when they talk to you. When communicating, ideas should be exchanged; one must be supple and mutual. Equally as important as being an active talker is being an active listener.

5. Sometimes, you need to pass judgment on what someone has said, but do this with a neutral voice tone, showing gentleness. Don’t mock or bully that person, and honest comments should only be given when essential. Don’t add sarcasm, don’t nag, and don’t voice out your opinion or advice when no one asked you to.

If you must criticize, make it gentle by using a neutral tone of voice. Avoid threatening or mocking the other person. Do not be rude. Give honest feedback only when necessary. If you want to give comments, do so without being sarcastic, preachy or moralizing. Don’t give advice or opinion when not asked.

Communication’s Role in Organization

In any organization, communication between departments is unavoidable because of the need to interconnect day-to-day activities to effectively connect with the outside world. It’s done through various means: whether written or verbal, planned or unplanned, top to bottom or bottom to top, etc.

Communication is crucial in the coordination of all management roles and functions, and in the achievement of each section’s goals, including organizing, planning, coordinating, monitoring, budgeting, controlling, staffing, marketing, delegation, financing, production, research and development, purchasing, selling, etc.

Communication is vital for all sorts of meetings, whether annual, urgent, or typical meetings. Successful meetings determine an organization’s effectiveness, since it is in these meetings where goals and targets are going to be performed, improved and talked about. Good communication in these meetings ensures that ideas are properly understood, and members of the organization won’t fail. The importance of the meeting chairman, as a communication expert, cannot be overemphasized.

All members of an organization, the bosses and the sub-ordinates, need good communication skills.

Today anyone can be an expert. In order for you to become an authority figure in that realm instantly, pick a niche that is small enough but one that has enough traffic in order to sell some products to people.

When in doubt always go for the smaller niche. An expert right now is not someone that is ultimately very knowledgeable on a specific topic, but being an expert has more to do with communication and social structure.

The Quizmaster Effect

You cannot call yourself an expert for the status. You always need approval of other people, and this is why its very important that you pick a very specific niche. In order to do this, you will use two psychological processes: one is the halo effect, and the other is called the Quiz master effect.

The quizmaster effect basically says that people think that the quizmaster is always a very brainy person; it doesn’t make sense to ask those questions if you don’t know the answer to them. This effect still holds for people who become aware of it.

This means that in order to be perceived as an expert, you don’t necessarily have to give the good answers. You have to ask the right questions.

Interview Experts to be an Expert

The easiest way to become an overnight authority figure is to interview people who are very knowledgeable in the niche and are very well known. In that interview, try to challenge them in a friendly way. Find out if you can dig so deep in the topic that you can ask some difficult questions that makes sense that they don’t really know what to answer, and what they might do is acknowledge the fact that your question is interesting and that they will have to do a bit more research to answer that question.

You then publish those interviews and that gives you two things: one, the quizmaster effect, and two, it may also gives you TV time with one of the very well-known experts in that niche. That is important because that will mean that you will be associated with those people.

Forming Social Structures

Being perceived as an expert today, is less about the actual knowledge, but more about the ability of that person to form specific social structures. Those social structures could well be represented in a digital way, for example, through social networking sites.

One of the easiest social networks we have available from a technical point of view is the blog. There’s a specific hierarchy to the blog because one person is writing an article and the other people are commenting.

However, very often, it is the commenting that is actually more interesting than the article itself, especially if the community of readers step up and share their objective or subjective views that lead to a very informative debate. Of course, some readers opt to troll, spam or vandalize the comments section, but the really good ones provide you with a lot of SEO bonus because your readers will put comments that are related to the keywords of your topic.

A habit is a very small part of behavior. Before talking about habits, we should first discuss two kinds of behavior: conscious and unconscious behavior.

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Dear Apple,
I run an Video-Interview-Blog at http://netrepreneurs.de/

As psychologist I am interested in what makes people successful. Therefore I have developed a format, in which entrepreneurs talk about their personal development and how that has contributed to making them successful in a business context. I believe that true success always starts from within – and that is why I have dedicated quite some time to making these interviews and releasing them for free.

Why I think Apple will be a great sponsor

In this short video Leedo Daniel (CEO of Sugar Habits) explains how to sell your product, before you have even started to create it – and how you can be sure that it will be a successful sale. Take this idea and use it together with an automated slaes-funnel. Gotcha!

Nowadays, one of the more popular e-book readers is Kindle, by Amazon. People who love to read different kinds of publications find it compact, light, and easy to use. Writers, on the other hand, have much to gain as well: they can self-publish their books on Kindle. These e-books can then be promoted and sold through Amazon, and the writer can expect to earn and be paid twice every month, depending on the sales profits.

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Without a doubt, e-books are fast becoming a trend among readers around the world.  If you happen to be a writer, you can venture into the e-book publishing industry through Apple’s iPad.  This gadget, which is used by many to read e-books, is directly linked to Apple’s iBookStore, where readers can purchase and download from a wide selection of electronic books.

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In this video coaching call (the almost final session):

• What to track
• Why I might be looking at the wrong metrics
• Motivational waves and how to match your activity
• Selling vs. creating

In this call we talk about refining the goal and the team. I have prepared some numbers about my financial goal and about the current situation. We also talk about people around me that are going to help me build the system I want. Very eye-opening discussion with the CEO of Sugar Habits.

In Coaching Call #1 Leedo told me that it would make sense to refine my goal. I sat down and looked at my Monthly spending, both personal and business-wise. Oups. That’s about 2x of what I was guessing I’ll need. Good I checked. My jaw kinda dropped, when I looked at the figures of my Passive Income in June 2012. Argh.

But let’s focus on the task at hand:
Setting a SMART Goal