Improve Your Communication Skills: Simple Tips, Killer Results

- In this video I'm gonna talk to you about the basic fundamental foundations of communication skill and how you can strengthen those foundations to improve your communication skills across all situations. (groovy music) I'm Bruce Lambert from howcommunicationworks. com.

This is a channel where I teach you about communication skills so you can improve your relationships, succeed at work, and be more confident. If you're watching a channel like this, you probably wanna improve your communication skills. It seems like the key to success at work and happiness in our relationships and just overall joy and meaning and living if we could just be better communicators.

What I wanna talk about in this video is the foundations, the very basic foundations for almost all of our communication skills. In other videos I've talked about specific communication skills like comforting or persuasion or what have you. In this video I wanna talk about what underlies the development of all of those skills and how can we strengthen those foundations so that across all skills and tasks we'll be better communicators.

One thing is obvious to all of us, I think, and that is that we're not all created equal when it comes to communication skill. People vary tremendously in their communication skill just as we vary in our height or weight or intelligence or athletic ability, we vary in our communication skills. We're not all created equal.

But the question is what underlies that variation, what separates the best communicators from the worst communicators in terms of fundamental skills. Well, it turns out we can measure people's communication skills fairly accurately. The communication scientist for the past 50 or 60 years have developed accurate measures of communication skill.

Now, I wanna tell you about those and what they reveal about what the foundations of our skill are and how we develop those skills further. So you can improve your communication skills. You could do so by strengthening these foundations and that's what I'm gonna talk about in this video.

So this slide just represents the idea that I'm talking about, that with any skill like communication skill there will be a normal distribution, a bell curve. And most of us will, by definition, be average. So the question is how can we get ourselves from average to above average in this overall distribution of communication skills.

Well, it turns out that these skill differences are most visible in hard situations. Not all communication situations or tasks are equally difficult, and I'll link in the description below to a blog I wrote about what situations are hard, what situations are difficult, and what makes hard situations hard. But I'll just give you a couple of examples here.

A famous communication study asked people to describe their houses or their apartments. This is a great example of an easy communication situation. Almost no one struggled with this situation and not only that but people produced almost identical messages.

They produced sort of verbal tours of their apartments or houses. So they said oh, you go in the front door, and to the left is the living room, and to the right is the dining room, and straight ahead is the office, and to the right is the stairs, and that's how people described their apartments. And almost no one struggled with it.

So with easy situations you get little effort and tremendous, no variability, tremendous amount of kind of uniformity in people's messages. Hard situations on the other hand produced tremendous variability and some people really struggle and can't produce effective messages at all. One example of this that I've studied a lot is asking people to disclose a medical error to a grieving patient and family.

So because I'm a health communications skills trainer I talk to a lot of doctors and nurses about how to talk with patients and families after they've been harmed by a medical care. And this is a really, really hard situation. And when you give a 100 or so people this task, they'll produce dramatically different messages.

Some people will produce really ineffective messages and some people will produce beautiful subtle compassionate messages. And this is an example of how hard situations draw out these differences in communication skill. Well, what makes these tasks hard?

Multiple conflicting goals. In this describe your apartment situation there's really one goal sort of describe it accurately. In the disclosure situation when you have to talk to a patient's family, there are many goals: like tell the truth, protect your reputation, protect the hospital's reputation, don't get sued, comfort the family.

There's all these goals and trying to produce a single message but simultaneously achieves all these goals is really difficult. Hard situations normally have a high level of emotional arousal. We're anxious, we're afraid.

We are frustrated. We are nervous. Whatever it might be we have high level, or our emotions are cranked up and that's make it hard for us to perform well.

There's normally also a high level of ego involvement. What that means is that our identity is at stake, our ego is really involved in the outcome of the situation and this clouds our judgment often. And the situations that are part of this normally are very highly consequential.

So the medical area of disclosure situation is highly consequential. It's literally about life and death, people's professions, their careers, their medical licenses, their nursing licenses, millions of dollars can be at stake, and people's reputations. So all these things combine to make some situations hard.

It's actually possible to measure people's communication skill. Some of us think that communication serves such a soft skill, there's no way of measuring it. It's not like we can measure people's height or weight or their speed at running the 50-yard dash.

How can we measure people's communication skill? Well, communication scientists have been working on this problem for 50 or 60 years at least and there are reliable and valid ways for assessing people's communication skills. When I and my colleague go into healthcare organizations and help them learn how to talk to patients and families after patients have been harmed by medical care, we offer to measure the communication skills of the whole group so that we can identify the best communicators.

And I wanna talk to you about how we do that that leads directly to our understanding of what these foundational abilities are that underlie all of our communication skills. So these assessments are just, provide a preliminary assessment of people's communication skill, they don't tell the whole story. So if you take this assessment and you score average or below average, it's not a measure of your worth as a human being or anything, it's just a preliminary assessment of your skill.

These measures have a very long history. They go back at least to the 1950s. But to understand though I have to give you a quick course in communication theory.

So the theory that underlies this measure of communication skill's called constructivism. And it was developed by, in the 1970s, the 1980s by a scientist at University of Illinois and elsewhere who were trying to understand the development of communication skill from childhood to adolescence to adulthood. If you've had children or if you've been a child, you know that communication skill develops pretty constantly from childhood thorugh adolescence to adulthood.

The children are impolite, they're not tactful, they don't know how to say things, they don't know what to say. Very young children don't even have language. Then we acquire language and we increasingly acquire social and communication skill, but it wasn't clear how they did that, like, what was going on cognitively and developmentally that allowed them to get better at communication?

So the idea is that it was our social perception, that development of our social perception underlie the development of social skill in general. So constructivism says we represent the social world in terms of constructs. Constructs are two-sided or I say bipolar dimensions for representing the social world.

Some examples are given here: kind, cruel, fair, unfair, considerate, inconsiderate, genuine, fake. These are the sort of two-sided dimensions that we have in our head for representing other people in social situations. Cognitive complexity is the underlying ability that we're trying to measure when we give people these measurement tasks and it is the foundational skill that I have been talking about that underlies all of our other communication skills.

Cognitive complexity refers to how many of these dimensions we have, how abstract they are, and how integrated or connected that they are. And we can measure these things. I wanna give you a couple of analogies for thinking about cognitive complexity.

The first one is image resolution. So image resolution, this comes from the Wikipedia page on image resolution. And on the left you have a a one-pixel image.

Well, first let me say something about image resolution. In the old days when we used to buy cameras, when we didn't all just have cameras inside out phones, they would market cameras to us based on how many megapixels that camera had. Even now they still talk about how many megapixels are in the cameras in our phones.

And most of us honestly didn't know what megapixels were, but we knew one thing: we wanted as many megapixels as we could afford. So we knew higher resolution was better. And that's what this image resolution slide shows you.

On the left is a one-pixel resolution image. You can't tell what's in the image at all. It just looks like a green blob.

In the middle you get like a five-by-five or 25-pixel image, you still can't tell what it is. By the time you get ten-by-ten pixels of resolution, you're going to see the letter R there, but by the time you get a hundred-by-hundred or 10,000 pixels of resolution, you can really see in perfect clarity the letter R. So that's image resolution.

So the idea is that the more pixels or resolution we have, the clearer the image. So the analogy for us is the more constructs you have, the higher the resolution in which we see the social world in which our impressions of other people are created. Here's another analogy: color depth.

Color depth refers to how many bits of color we can represent an image. So in the upper left of this image you see one bit, 0 or one, black or white. There's only two colors represented in this image.

But on the lower right you have 16 bits or two to the 16th power bits of the color being or possible colors being represented. That's more than 16 million different colors can be represented in this image. And obviously that image on the lower right is much clearer than the image on the upper left.

So again the analogy is to the number of constructs we have on our head. Having a lot of constructs in our head and especially abstract and integrated constructs is like seeing the world in high definition, technicolor rather than seeing it in low definition black and white. So this underlying foundational capability social scientists call cognitive complexity and it refers to the number and abstractness of these dimensions for representing the social world.

We know from lots of research that the quality of our social perception increases as cognitive complexity increases. As we get more dimensions, more abstract dimensions and more integrated dimensions, we see the world more clearly. Our representations of the social world improve in their complexity and depth and subtlety and nuance.

And like I said before it's like from seeing the world in low definition black and white and seeing it in a high resolution color. So the basic idea, I said a lot of stuff of this kind of abstract but the basic idea is more constructs, more dimensions means a higher level of social skills. So obviously we want to strive to increase the number of constructs we use in representing other people in social situations.

So how do we measure it? It's actually very simple to measure. I'll link below to a place where you can go and take this survey yourself and measure your own cognitive complexity.

But we basically ask people to think of a person you know well and like and then think of another person you know well and dislike. Take five minutes for each of them, only five minutes, time yourself and describe each person in as much detail as you can. Not their physical description but their habits, their mannerisms and so on and so forth, their character, their demeanor.

And then you just, in the end, count the number of unique descriptors that you used and tally that up. And that total sum of the number of descriptions used for the liked person and the number of descriptions used for the disliked person is your cognitive complexity. The number of constructs we call construct differentiation, you can measure the abstractness of these dimensions too but normally we just count them up and we call that your cognitive complexity score.

And it turns out in many, many different studies, your cognitive complexity is associated with your development from childhood to adolescence to adulthood, and it's also among adults associated with success at relationships, success at work and success in a variety of other socials and communication situations. I wanna give you some examples of low and high complexity impressions. So here are some low complexity impressions: genuine and sincere, taking people at face value, and giving the benefit of the doubt until they prove otherwise, strong work ethic, and team-oriented.

That's six dimensions of representing that person. Accepts blame, acknowledges other's achievements, level-headed, trustworthy, that's four dimensions. Good listener, that's only one dimension.

We used to send these surveys out online to people via email, busy people, and we think just some of them didn't really do their best and, say, produce some short impressions sometimes. So when you measure your own cognitive complexity, you gotta do your best and don't be distracted. Narcissistic moron, this is two dimensions actually: narcissistic and moron.

So here's a high complexity impression. Look at all these constructs. Intelligent, intellectual, relaxed, down-to-earth, approachable, genuine, humble, caring, kind, thoughtful, loving, et cetera.

Talented, infectious, trustworthy, bohemian, pondering, discerning. Not only are there a lot of constructs to this impression but they're really abstract. So imagine the social world that this person inhabits compared to the social, the social.

Imagine the social world that this person inhabits compared to the social world that these people inhabit. This person here sort of has a tremendous amount of rich detail when they walk into any social situation. Whoever they meet they have sort of this incredibly detailed read-out of what that person is like and what they're thinking and what they're feeling, whereas people with these impressions they seem to inhabit a much more black and white social world.

And we often say about people, well, that person is black and white or they see no shades of gray. What we're implying there is our own intuitive sense that they have low cognitive complexity, that they have undifferentiated simple representations of other people and of social situations whereas a person like this has this incredibly rich abstract picture of other people and of the situations that they find themselves in. Here's a graph of the measured cognitive complexity of about 450 people that we've met on our various consulting projects.

These are all health professionals that we've trained. And the average is about 20. So if you measure yourself and you have about 20 different dimensions for representing this liked and disliked person, you're about average.

I measured myself I had about 55, so I'm above average. I've studied communication all my life, I hope I'm a little bit above average in this measure. But look at some of these people had 80, 90, more than 100.

Some people are really, really extremely above average in these fields. And you wouldn't be surprised to learn that the person who had more than 100 constructs wasn't extremely sophisticated and skillful communicator. So why is cognitive complexity good?

It allows us to have more organized and integrated impressions of other people, so you have greater ability to recognize other people's feelings and their dispositions to integrate inconsistent information about other people. This is not just seeing black and white but seeing shades of gray and realizing people are gonna have multiple capabilities, both good and bad. Understanding other people's thoughts and motivations that are plans, goals, intentions, and desires, this allows us to adapt to them when we're communicating.

Most importantly, people with higher cognitive complexity produce more effective messages and could more accurately interpret other people's messages. So this is the direct evidence that increased cognitive complexity is associated with improved communication skill. So how do you actually improve your communication skill?

The direct implication of this work on cognitive complexity is that you should strive to improve your own map of the social world. And I have a few suggestions for how you can do that. First of all is very simple, for every person you meet, ask yourself what are they feeling in the moment that you meet them.

Just try to label one feeling so you'll have to develop your vocabulary of feeling words. I'll put a link in description to some lists of feeling words. You'll have to develop that vocabulary and learn to apply it.

So you have to look at their posture, their gesture, their facial expression, their non-verbal behavior, what they're saying, and use that to draw conclusions about what they might be feeling and then put a label on that feeling, that will increase the number of emotion words you can use for people. Another is to try and take their perspective. What are they thinking?

What are their plans? What are their goals? What are their intentions especially those three things to think about: what are their plans, what are their goals, and what are their intentions.

This will improve your perspective taking ability if you practice this. And then also learn some of these adjectives for describing other people. In the description below I'll link a list of adjectives for describing other people.

There are some very, very long lists that writers use sometimes, but I'll link you to some of them. Learn them. You may have to pick up a dictionary and figure out what some of them meant.

Like I had to look up bohemian. Bohemian I thought meant hippie. The dictionary said it meant non-conformist.

So learn these adjectives for describing other people and then begin to apply them. So think about bohemian. So now you know bohemian means non-conformist.

So you might have a dimension in your head which is now bohemian and conformist or non-conformist and conformist. So every person you meet you have to try to learn to apply these new dimensions. So if you meet a new person you think are they a conformist or a non-conformist.

Are they pondering or not pondering? Are they discerning or non-discerning? Are they considerate or inconsiderate?

And progressively add to the number of descriptions you can use for represent other people in your mind. This will directly increase your cognitive complexity. Oh, there's one other suggestion: read Jane Austen novels.

I've heard many people say that Jane Austen is a famous novelist who is most famous not just for writing great novels but for being one of the first novelists ever to explore the interior mental and emotional lives of her characters. So she writes very deep and subtle descriptions of the thoughts and feelings of her characters. And the argument is if you read these novels by Jane Austen you yourself will increase the sophistication of your understanding of other people's intermental lives.

So read some Jane Austen novels in addition to the other tips. So this is a summary. People differ in ability to perceive social situations and produce effective messages.

These differences are most apparent in difficult situations and we wanna be good at difficult situations. This is when the stakes are highest when it makes the biggest differences for our lives. You can measure these differences reliably and I told you about how to measure cognitive complexity.

I linked in the description for how to go to a survey and measure it in yourself or friends and family. The underlying foundational capability is called cognitive complexity and refers to the number of dimensions we have for representing other people in social situations. To get better you have to improve your own map of the social world I gave you several tips for how to do that.

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Question of the day: tell me about a time when someone saw right through you, someone had so much cognitive complexity that they were able to see right through you into your own beliefs, desires, feelings, plans, goals, and intentions even though you didn't think you were revealing very much. They just had such sophisticated communication skills and such refined social perception and they could see right through you. Go down in the comments and tell me about that or tell me about anything else that came to mind as you watch this video.

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