If you want to be seen as powerful, respected, and confident, your words have to match your ambition. I've spent years working under executives, becoming one myself, and learning from the most respected people in the room. These are the five communication skills that separate those who get listened to from those who get overlooked.
Skill one is a hard one. You have to stop speaking to be liked and instead speak to lead. In our company today, we have over 250 team members.
And so I get to see day in and day out people who exude confidence and act like leaders versus people who accidentally erode their own credibility. And they do this in the simplest of ways. The mindset shift that the people who are successful have is I am a leader even if they aren't yet.
The mindset that people have versus the mindset of I am in somebody else's environment and therefore I have to be less than or smaller or less certain. When you are less certain in your communication, it shows. So, in order to be more certain, you can do a handful of things to switch up the way that you speak.
One of the most important things that you can do is actually mean what you say and only say things that you are certain of. CEOs, leaders, top executives, they have a point of view. They see themselves, they see their life experiences, and they use where they're at in order to frame what their point of view truly is.
And they're confident in that frame. If you want to be able to be more certain in your communication, remember that your point of view is important and you are there for a reason. Now, the simple language tweaks on this are as follows.
Qualifying your statements by saying I think or I feel reduces your credibility. Just say what you think or say how you feel. It's obvious through the communication that you are thinking or you are feeling something.
But those qualifiers make it seem like you are uncertain. So, consciously practice making these language swaps. So instead of saying I think we should try this instead say the best path forward is another example instead of saying I feel like this might work say here's the strategy that will get us this result.
It is this simple switch but removing you from the conversation and just stating what you see how you see it instantly increases your credibility. Next is number two which is that your emotions are making you sound reactive and unsure. We have a saying around here, high emotion, low intelligence.
Have you ever noticed that people who are wildly emotional, always talking about what's wrong and being outrageously creative in their storytelling, very rarely have a lot of success around them. They don't have people who are winning around them. They don't have successful business relationships.
They don't have successful businesses because the more you use emotion, the less you're using logic. Emotion just clouds your decision-m ability. And effective leaders are spectacular.
They are gangsters at being able to take a situation, remove emotion, and be able to logically make decisions very quickly. And they trust their decision-making process. The only way you know you can trust your decision-making process is if you have your own internal confidence that you're not being swayed by something based off of the emotion that you have.
You're actually being swayed based off of logic, based off of data. Just this week, I had somebody pop off on me and had this whole emotional outburst. It was embarrassing and it instantly reduced my confidence in this person.
Their inability to feel something, to experience something, to have there be a form of rejection in front of them and be able to handle that with grace, understanding, questions allowed me to see this person through a very new lens. And that new lens is they make decisions based off of their emotion. And as I looked a little bit further into this, I actually started to see how there was a lack of success in a variety of different areas, which is a key indicator that emotion is used in all sorts of conversations.
And instead of creating confidence, it actually erodess people's confidence, which means you cannot be successful because without other people as a leader, you're not successful. You actually cannot by definition be a leader if other people don't trust and actually follow you. So never let your emotions override your message.
One of the visuals I use to help me during emotional situations is I imagine myself being a blade of grass. Follow me on this one. If you have a blade of grass that is horizontal and there is a rock that falls through the blade of grass, the blade of grass isn't going to stay hardened.
It's actually going to move with the pressure. It's going to move with the rock and then is going to bounce back up to its original shape versus if you had a toothpick there. A toothpick when a rock goes right through it is going to rake.
It's very rigid. It's hard and it's frail. So in situations instead of thinking of yourself as somebody who's going to make their point and who's going to prove somebody wrong and get hardened like a toothpick, imagine that you are a blade of grass and that situation is just going to fall through you.
Not because you don't care, but because you're not going to get emotionally involved. You're going to let the data that they're giving you go through you. You're going to let the emotion that they're giving you pass by and then you're going to respond in the way that you should respond without the tense rigidity of the toothpicks in your life.
Next is number three and focuses on authority. This is the secret to getting people to stop interrupting you and start actually listening. Great leaders don't speak more, they speak with weight.
What about what you're saying actually matters. When you think of every conversation you're in as an opportunity for you to make an impact, you will show up to those conversations differently. Any meeting that you're attending, any conversation you're a part of, it has to matter because as a leader, you have a million things pulling at your attention, there are no shortage of things on your to-do list, emails that you could be answering, presentations that you could be making, but instead you're in that room for a reason.
If you recognize that you have nothing to say and there's no reason for you to be there, leave that conversation. A leader knows where their time is best spent and they prioritize accordingly. So whenever I walk into a room, I know the reason I am going into that room.
I ask myself, what is my target? When I know I have a target, I have authority going into the room because I'm clear on why I'm there. Most people just go through the motions.
They show up. They're not even sure why they're there. They just listen, think about other things, maybe distract themselves, answer emails.
That is not what great leaders do. Great leaders know that there are a plethora of problems for them to solve and their time is going to be spent solving the most important problem. Therefore, their attention and their communication where they are truly does matter.
So, if you're struggling with authority, re-evaluate where you're spending your time. Go into the meetings where you do choose to participate and actually participate. Have a point of view.
Use your authority because you've thought through the situation and you know that there's a problem and there's something that you can help with or you need to better understand as a way for you to build up your own authority in your mind. Leaders matter. They drive initiatives forward.
So never enter a room where you don't know why you're there and you will all of a sudden have more authority in your communication simply because you took a handful of minutes in order to really understand why your time was best spent there when participating. and leading meetings, you steer the conversation with clear, confident delivery. Next up is number four, which is to become a question master.
You do not need all the answers to lead. You just need to know how to ask the right questions. The best leaders put themselves in a position to solve the most complicated problems in a business.
And in order to solve a complicated problem, there has to be some sort of constraint, some level of confusion, and no clear path forward. So if you are an effective communicator, you are able to address and properly identify what questions you need to ask, what information is missing to be able to make the best decision to move that problem forward. I like to think about this as untangling a necklace.
When you're looking at untangling a necklace, it's taking one piece after another after another to really start to understand strategically what is the core knot inside this tangled necklace. Your job as a leader is to unnot many necklaces. The best leaders think of themselves as professional problem solvers.
But the reason they're able to solve these problems better than more junior people is simply because they ask more questions. It is not the expectation that you know everything and you're coming at it from this high vantage point to be able to tell everybody what to do. Often times you don't know what to do when you're entering that meeting or that problem.
It's a new problem. You see, great leaders guide conversations by asking powerful and strategic questions. So challenge yourself to ask these questions.
Instead of what do you think, ask what data supports this decision? And instead of how's it going, ask what's the biggest challenge you're facing right now. Instead of can we fix this, ask what would it take to ensure this never happens again.
The quality of your questions determine the quality of your results. Here's a little trick that my parents taught me in order to become better at asking great questions. When I was growing up, we would play the question game at any sort of social function.
The question game meant that little Natalie was supposed to walk up to an adult and ask them three questions. So my mom at a social gathering would say, "Go talk to Mr Bob. " So I would walk over to Mr Bob and my target was to ask Mr Bob three questions.
Well, it's terrifying talking to adults when you're young, and sometimes it's still terrifying to talk to adults. So I had to overcome that fear. But then I also had to ask three questions that kept the conversation engaging.
Well, as a very young kid, I wasn't able to ask super engaging questions. The questions might sound like, "Mr Bob, I realize that Bobby, your son, is going to baseball practice these days. Does he love baseball?
" And then Mr Bob's going to answer back. And then by the answer, I'm going to hopefully be able to ask a second question. Well, often times I couldn't actually make it to question three because I would run out of things to ask questions on.
So, I'd go back to my mom. My mom would say, "Here are a few other question choices that you could ask Mr Bob. " and she'd make me go walk back to Mr Bob and ask him the final questions.
This practice of getting good at asking questions, keeping the conversation going, understanding what really matters is priceless and an invaluable trait if you really want to communicate like an expert. That brings us to number five, which is what most people do wrong. You have to stop oversharing.
I will never forget the first time I had to fire somebody. I was 23 years old and I was coached ahead of time to say a very specific statement that led me to a very specific conclusion to not get into some large debate as to whether or not we were going to fire this team member. And instead of saying what I needed to say, I started overexplaining.
I started telling them how wonderful they are and how much I liked them and how much of a pleasure it had been to work with them. And as I talked more like that, I became more and more tense and more and more uncomfortable. So I kept saying things like that.
And instead of successfully firing the person, we just effectively had a nice little touch point in the middle of the day. And I had to take another swing at it the next week. It was awkward.
It was embarrassing. And it was the exact opposite of what somebody who has confidence and presence would do. When you know what you're going to say, say it.
You say it with grace. You say it with directness and you are firm. It's not because you don't like people.
You don't deliver communication. Overexplaining is an indicator that you are not confident. When you do speak with confident people, they say things with effect.
They have a message. They clearly articulate that message and they don't continue to communicate. I like to think of this like an airplane.
I'm sure you've had an experience where somebody talks and they continue to talk and they continue to talk and the plane is about to land, but instead of actually landing, nope, we're going back through it again and you already know that they said that, but they're about to land it and nope, there's another new angle to just restate what they already stated. It's uncomfortable as a listener. It's difficult to communicate with somebody like this and it clearly shows that the person isn't confident and is uncomfortable.
So instead of overexplaining or softening your feedback, be direct. More than that, seeking validation can instantly erode your authority. And highle CEOs actually get authority because they are direct and they are deliberate.
So be like a confident CEO. They don't need validation and neither do you. And another hack on this is watch really successful people communicate.
I didn't say listen to how they communicate. I said, "Watch how they communicate. " You'll notice that they don't talk like this.
This is not the way that somebody who is successful communicates. They sit up straight. Their shoulders are back.
They have confidence through their body language. They move their hands through this certain little section of their bodies right here. They don't sit there and fidget playing with their fingers, playing with their rings, moving their feet around.
They're able to sit there comfortably, have a direct conversation, eye to eye with another human being. So, it is very simple to just throw your shoulders back, sit up a little taller, and look like you are more confident before you actually become more confident. One of the things that I had to work on for a while, the way you project your voice also matters.
And this was actually something I had to work on for quite some time. I tended to whisper for a very clear reason. I used to get quieter when I would voice my opinion.
And that reason is pretty obvious. I wasn't certain of my opinion. I didn't feel like I could present my idea and be passionate and be excited because I was actually uncertain and you could tell not just by the words I was saying but by the volume that I was using to portray my ideas.
So I had to actively work on not talking like this and trying to quiet myself but by being louder and being more communicative through my body language but also through the volume which I was speaking. I had to work on this for many months and it was not a short process. Every single time I would start whispering, I'd have my core team of people tell me, "Hey, Natalie, you're whispering again.
" And I'd be like, "Okay, good to know. I'm going to project. I'm going to get clear on what I'm saying.
" Because clarity matters in communication. So, when you find you're doing some weird things, putting your shoulders in, starting to whisper, fidgeting, just remember, future you doesn't communicate like that. So, fix it in the moment and deliver the effective communication.
If you master these five skills, I guarantee that you will be able to communicate better than 99% of people. And if you are still feeling stuck, check out my next video that will help you unlock success.
