Successful communication strategies or characteristics

I have a friend who is an independent contracted trainer who travels worldwide facilitating professional development classes and engages in reflective practice with her clients. She has lived in a variety of cultural areas of the world. I believe her multi-faceted life has given her many high level communication skills.

I admire her skill in reading her audience; she can tailor her presentations to the specific needs of her audience.  This is a skill that I am still developing.  I have started going to trainings not just with the intention of gaining content but also to see how different presenters, facilitators, or instructors manage their audience, either keeping or losing their participants’ active engagement.  My friend has a way of posing a provocation at just the right time to regain their engagement.  Part of the skill building here is to also know your content extremely well so you can help other make sense of it all.

I also admire her ability to listen completely to a participant’s observation, but steer them in a more accurate direction without making them feel defensive.  She acknowledges their effort in participating but keeps them focused on accurate pertinent information.  She looks for parts of the observation that are accurate to find a common ground of agreement, but builds on it in such a way that the participants still are open to learning new information.

My friend has many communication strategies in her repertoire, I think the key is to always be learning about people in general and the ways they communicate, this allows us to become more proficient communicators in a variety of settings.  “The competent communication model not only includes feedback, but it also shows communication as an ongoing, transactional process; the individuals (or group or organizations) are interdependent—their actions affect one another—and they exchange irreversible messages. (O’Hair, et.al, 2015, p. 21)”  Many times it seems like people forget that children are our communication partners as well and they are learning from everything we do or say, we impact who they will become by our way of respectfully communicating with them in a transactional process.