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Interpersonal Skills
Making Small Talk and Moving Beyond
Small talk is the “ice-breaking” part of a conversation; it is the way strangers can ease into comfortable rapport with one another. Mastering the art of small talk —- and how to build from this stage— can open many personal and professional doors. In this chapter, we will discuss how to start a conversation, as well as how to skillfully ease our conversation starters into deeper levels of talk.
Many people are interested in initiating friendships and productive business networks, but they don’t know how to start. Indeed, going up to a stranger and making an introduction can be incredibly anxiety-provoking for some people. The same goes with finding something to talk about with someone you already know, but are not familiar with.
The following are some tips in starting a conversation:
- Understand what holds you back. The first step in developing conversation skills is to understand what factors — attitudes, feelings, and assumptions — interfere in your ability to skillfully handle a conversation. Is it shyness? Fear of rejection? Difficulty in dealing with people in authority? Awareness of what holds you back can help you manage your anxieties better, and give you more control over how you handle yourself during social situations.
- Know what you have to offer. In the same way that you have to make an inventory of your weaknesses during social situations, you also have to take stock of your strengths. Confidence in initiating conversations does not begin with knowing what tried-and-tested lines are out there. It starts with a sincere belief that you have something to contribute to a discussion, and that people would find it a pleasant experience to get to know you. If you have this self-assurance, you can be more at ease and more natural around other people.
- Be interested about people. Genuine curiosity and openness makes starting a conversation less threatening; it grants incentive to approach people.
Cultivate the attitude that meeting people is an enriching experience. It shouldn’t be that hard; this mantra goes beyond self-talk. Many find that you can actually learn a lot about yourself, about life and about various subject matters, just by simply engaging in constant conversation. And remember: being interested in a people doesn’t end after you’ve spent time with them. Even those you’ve spent years with can still tell you something you don’t know!
- Create an arsenal of conversation starters. For people not used to skillfully handling conversations, the first few tries can feel awkward. While you’re still finding your footing, you can rely on some recommended conversation starters. Among them are:
- Introduce yourself. The most straightforward way to start a conversation is to offer your name and your hand. By making the first move in breaking silence, you’re sending the other person an invitation into conversation. If you can make the introduction with a smile, better.
- Comment on something in your immediate surroundings, maybe the location, or the event you both are attending. Things that you both can relate with are good conversation starters, as it does not alienate anyone. Example: “It’s really crowded tonight, isn’t it?”
- Comment on something the other person or people would find interesting. For example, if you’re talking with someone known for his or her art collection, you may call attention to an art piece within your vicinity, or inform him about an exhibit you heard about. Example: “Hey Bob, I just heard that the National Museum is hosting a Renaissance week.”
And if you have no prior knowledge about the person you want to strike a conversation with, you can take a guess at their interests by subtly checking what they are looking at, or studying their appearance. Example: “That’s a lovely brooch. It looks like an antique.”
Relax. “Be yourself” is generally good advice for handling social situations. Conversations are more comfortable and engaging if you simply relax, and let your personality do the talking. Don’t pressure yourself coming up with something funny, clever, or new. Scripts are okay while you’re still developing your social skills, but make sure you also give conversations your personal touch!
For more on Interpersonal Skills, please visit: https://corporatetrainingmaterials.com/course/Interpersonal_Skills
Interpersonal Skills
Making Small Talk and Moving Beyond
Small talk is the “ice-breaking” part of a conversation; it is the way strangers can ease into comfortable rapport with one another. Mastering the art of small talk —- and how to build from this stage— can open many personal and professional doors. In this chapter, we will discuss how to start a conversation, as well as how to skillfully ease our conversation starters into deeper levels of talk.
Many people are interested in initiating friendships and productive business networks, but they don’t know how to start. Indeed, going up to a stranger and making an introduction can be incredibly anxiety-provoking for some people. The same goes with finding something to talk about with someone you already know, but are not familiar with.
The following are some tips in starting a conversation:
- Understand what holds you back. The first step in developing conversation skills is to understand what factors — attitudes, feelings, and assumptions — interfere in your ability to skillfully handle a conversation. Is it shyness? Fear of rejection? Difficulty in dealing with people in authority? Awareness of what holds you back can help you manage your anxieties better, and give you more control over how you handle yourself during social situations.
- Know what you have to offer. In the same way that you have to make an inventory of your weaknesses during social situations, you also have to take stock of your strengths. Confidence in initiating conversations does not begin with knowing what tried-and-tested lines are out there. It starts with a sincere belief that you have something to contribute to a discussion, and that people would find it a pleasant experience to get to know you. If you have this self-assurance, you can be more at ease and more natural around other people.
- Be interested about people. Genuine curiosity and openness makes starting a conversation less threatening; it grants incentive to approach people.
Cultivate the attitude that meeting people is an enriching experience. It shouldn’t be that hard; this mantra goes beyond self-talk. Many find that you can actually learn a lot about yourself, about life and about various subject matters, just by simply engaging in constant conversation. And remember: being interested in a people doesn’t end after you’ve spent time with them. Even those you’ve spent years with can still tell you something you don’t know!
- Create an arsenal of conversation starters. For people not used to skillfully handling conversations, the first few tries can feel awkward. While you’re still finding your footing, you can rely on some recommended conversation starters. Among them are:
- Introduce yourself. The most straightforward way to start a conversation is to offer your name and your hand. By making the first move in breaking silence, you’re sending the other person an invitation into conversation. If you can make the introduction with a smile, better.
- Comment on something in your immediate surroundings, maybe the location, or the event you both are attending. Things that you both can relate with are good conversation starters, as it does not alienate anyone. Example: “It’s really crowded tonight, isn’t it?”
- Comment on something the other person or people would find interesting. For example, if you’re talking with someone known for his or her art collection, you may call attention to an art piece within your vicinity, or inform him about an exhibit you heard about. Example: “Hey Bob, I just heard that the National Museum is hosting a Renaissance week.”
And if you have no prior knowledge about the person you want to strike a conversation with, you can take a guess at their interests by subtly checking what they are looking at, or studying their appearance. Example: “That’s a lovely brooch. It looks like an antique.”
- “Be yourself” is generally good advice for handling social situations. Conversations are more comfortable and engaging if you simply relax, and let your personality do the talking. Don’t pressure yourself coming up with something funny, clever, or new. Scripts are okay while you’re still developing your social skills, but make sure you also give conversations your personal touch!
The Four Levels of Conversation
The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place, but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at tempting moment. It requires sensitivity to the stage of a relationship, the context of the conversation and the comfort level of the person you are talking to.
There are 4 levels of conversation based on the degree and amount of personal disclosure. They are:
- Small Talk: This is commonly referred to as the ‘exchange of pleasantries’ stage. In this level, you talk only about generic topics, subjects that almost everyone is comfortable discussing. These subjects include the weather, the location you’re both in and current events.
The small talk stage establishes rapport; it makes a person feel at ease with you. It’s also a safe and neutral avenue for people to subtly ‘size up’ one another, and explore if it’s a conversation or relationship that they’d want to invest in.
If the small talk goes well, you can proceed into the next level: fact disclosure.
- Fact Disclosure: In this stage, you tell the other person some facts about you such as your job, your area of residence, and your interests. This is a ‘getting-to-know’ stage, and it aims to see if you have something in common with the other person. It’s also a signal that you are opening up a little bit to the other person while still staying on neutral topics. If the fact disclosure stage goes well, you can proceed to sharing viewpoints and opinions.
- Viewpoints and Opinions: In this stage of the conversation, you can offer what you think about various topics like politics, the new business model —or even the latest blockbuster. It helps then to read and be curious about many things, from politics to entertainment to current events.
Sharing viewpoints and opinions require the ‘buffering effect’ of the first two stages for two reasons:
- First, a person needs rapport with another before they can discuss potentially contentious statements, even if they’re having a healthy debate.
- Second, sharing viewpoints and opinions opens a person to the scrutiny of another, and this requires that there is some level of safety and trust in a relationship.
The controversial, and therefore potentially offensive, nature of an opinion exists in a range; make sure that you remain within the ‘safe’ zone in the early stages of your relationship.
- Personal Feelings: The fourth stage is disclosure and acknowledgment of personal feelings. For instance you can share about your excitement for the new project, or your worry about your son’s upcoming piano recital. Depending on the context and the level of the friendship, you can disclose more personal subjects. This stage requires trust, rapport, and even a genuine friendship, because of the intimate nature of the subject.
Different people have different comfort levels when it comes to disclosing feelings, and there are cases when you’d need several conversations before they would trust enough to open themselves. In some cases, you never get to this stage. Just make sure to be sensitive and test the other person’s readiness before opening an intimate topic.
Listening is vital in all stages of the conversation but especially so in this fourth stage. Listen with empathy and understanding to acknowledge that you heard the feeling that they have shared.
https://corporatetrainingmaterials.com/course/Interpersonal_Skills
10 Soft Skills You Need
What are soft skills, anyway? Simply put, soft skills are the personal attributes that allows us to effectively relate to others. These skills enhance our personal interactions and lead to greater job performance and satisfaction. Unlike hard skills, which are the technical and knowledge skill set we bring to our work, soft skills are interpersonal and can be applied in a broad array of situations. Soft skills encompass both personality traits, such as optimism, and abilities which can be practiced, such as empathy. Like all skills, soft skills can be learned.
Definition of Soft Skills
Soft skills are personal attributes that allow us to effectively relate to others. Applying these skills helps us build stronger work relationships, work more productively, and maximize our career prospects. Often we place the focus of our career development efforts on hard skills – technology skills, knowledge, and other skills that specifically relate to our ability to get work-related tasks done. This means we neglect to develop our soft skills. However, soft skills are directly transferrable to any job, organization, or industry. As a result, they are an investment worth making.
Soft skills include:
- Communication
- Listening
- Showing Empathy
- Networking
- Self-confidence
- Giving and receiving feedback
Empathy and the Emotional Intelligence Quotient
Empathy is perhaps the most important soft skill we can develop for better interpersonal interactions. Empathy is the ability to identify with another person’s experience. While we often think of empathy in terms only of identifying with someone’s pain or negative experience, we can apply empathy in a variety of situations. Developing empathy allows us to imagine ourselves in another person’s shoes, to respond to others, and even to vicariously experience others’ feelings of emotions. When we demonstrate empathy, we create connections with others, which can help to build teamwork or otherwise create shared goals. Empathy also helps to forge stronger interpersonal connections between team members and colleagues, which is as important as shared goals or complementary skills when it comes to accomplishing work.
Empathy is one component of what is known as Emotional Intelligence, or EI. Emotional Intelligence is the ability to recognize and manage our feelings so that they are expressed appropriately. Exercising emotional intelligence helps to create harmonious, productive relationships.
There are four key components to Emotional Intelligence:
- Self-awareness: The ability to recognize our own feelings and motivations
- Self-management: The ability to appropriate express (or not express) feelings
- Social awareness: Our ability to recognize the feelings and needs of others, and the norms of a given situation
- Relationship management: Our ability to relate effectively to others
Taken together, these skills make up our Emotional Intelligence Quotient (EQI). The EQI is a measure of your ability to exercise soft skills such as empathy.
Professionalism
The word “professionalism” often conjures up images of a cold, distant, brusque person in a nondescript navy blue suit. In fact, many people have the sense that to be “professional” is exactly the opposite of demonstrating empathy and emotional intelligence! However, professionalism is a key soft skill, and it doesn’t require you to be inauthentic, distant, or detached. Professionalism is simply the ability to conduct yourself with responsibility, integrity, accountability, and excellence. Acting with professionalism also means seeking to communicate effectively with others and finding a way to be productive.
Professionalism involves what may seem to be small acts, such:
- Always reporting to work on time and returning promptly from breaks
- Dressing appropriately
- Being clean and neat
- Speaking clearly and politely to colleagues, customers, and clients
- Striving to meet high standards for one’s own work
Learned vs. Inborn Traits
Because soft skills are talked about as traits of a person’s personality, it may seem as though you have to born with them. While some soft skills come more easily to one person than they might to another, soft skills are not inborn. Like all skills, they can be learned. Because we all have our own preferences and ways of moving through the world, some soft skills may be more difficult to learn than others. But if we think back, there are also aspects of our hard skill set that were difficult at first, though they now seem to come quite naturally to us. We develop soft skills in the same way we develop hard skills – we practice! Spending time with people who seem to be able to effortlessly demonstrate a soft skill that you find challenging is one way to build your soft skill set. Another way is to seek opportunities to practice in which the risk of failure is low, until you feel confident in your ability. You don’t have to be born a networker or an empathetic person – you can learn and build these skills throughout your career.
For more in our course “10 Soft Skills You Need”, please visit:
https://corporatetrainingmaterials.com/course/10_Soft_Skills_You_Need
Developing Creativity
Divergent Thinking
Divergent thinking moves away from the traditional, convergent thinking, which is linear and analytical. It is looking for the right answer. Divergent thinking, on the other hand, is nonlinear and spontaneous. Rather than finding a single correct answer, the divergent thinker discovers multiple options for addressing problems. Brainstorming, predicting, and imagination activities are all examples of divergent thinking. It is possible to increase divergent thinking by implementing open-ended questions when addressing problems rather than closed questions. We will discuss open-ended questions in a later module. Moving toward divergent thinking may not be comfortable for analytical thinkers, but practice will soon help creativity develop.
Developing Creativity Courseware
Children have an innate creative ability when they are born, but for some reason adults can lose it along the way. Your participants will move out of the mundane, be more curious, engage, and explore new ideas. Recognize creativity and be ready when it happens.
With our Developing Creativity course your participants will learn how to remove barriers that block or limit their creativity. They will improve their imagination, divergent thinking, and mental flexibility. Participants will learn mind mapping, individual brainstorming, and when to recognize and look for what inspires them to be more creative.
For more on the Developing Creativity training course, please visit:
https://corporatetrainingmaterials.com/course/Developing_Creativity
Personal Branding
Defining Yourself
You are in control of your personal brand if you choose to be. When establishing your brand, it is essential that you define yourself. Remember that perception is reality, so it is essential that you carefully cultivate your image. When you take the time to define yourself and present this definition to the public, your will reap the benefits that come with taking control of your personal branding.
It is easy to underestimate the importance of personal branding and avoid actively participating in your brand. The truth, however, is that branding occurs whether you participate in it or not. If you do not take the time to brand yourself, the market will brand you, and it may not do it favorably. Customers can bring negative attention to a company or individual, and attention can easily escalate to the court of public opinion. For example, the video “United Breaks Guitars” brought negative attention to the United Airlines brand. Without personal branding and active intervention, the damage to the brand name could have been beyond repair. Taking control of personal branding is necessary to manage your public reputation.
Brand Mantra
Brand mantras are short, but they are powerful. This short phrase or statement may only be three to five words, but these words define your brand. A mantra must explore the brand’s points of difference or how the brand is unique along with what the company represents. For example take a look at, Nike’s “Authentic Athletic Performance.” In order to create a brand mantra, you must first identify what sets your brand apart and list your points of difference.
Once the points of difference are identified, you must create a mantra that is simple, communicates, and inspires.
- Simple: The mantra should be short and to the point.
- Communicate: The mantra should define the purpose of the brand and what is unique about it.
- Inspire: The mantra should be significant.
When creating a mantra, you should begin with a word bank of points of difference and your purpose and mission.
Be Real
People are attracted to genuine people. The key to personal branding is to make it personal. Communicating dry facts will not impress most people. Your brand must have personality. Develop a persona that attracts people. Share ideas, implement humor, and make connections with people. Having an online presence makes sharing your persona much easier.
When you are developing your persona, remember to be real. You are under no obligation to share personal details about yourself, but everything that you do share must be genuine. Never make up facts, statistics, or tell lies. Fact checking has become easier than ever, and lies will do nothing to improve your brand’s reputation.
For more on our Personal Branding course, please visit:
https://corporatetrainingmaterials.com/course/Personal_Branding
Assertiveness & Self Confidence: Dealing with Difficult Situations
Dealing with Difficult Situations
A difficult person can be your boss, your co-worker, or anyone else. He or she behaves in a way that is disruptive to business or life outside of work. In a work setting, often the functioning of a team is disturbed leading to a disruption of the work flow, flared tempers, and gossip. The bottom line is that work suffers and difficult situations cost organizations money.
To deal with difficult people, we innately try to apply coping filters, such as:
- Removing virtually all positive attributes about the person. (“He was my worst hiring mistake…”)
- Defaming him or her (We build consensus with others against the person
- Explaining the person in negative terms.
Anger also plays a big part; feeling angry, we instinctively use anger to try to manage the situation.
To break the cycle of negativity, take time to answer the following questions:
- What observable behaviors or statements did the person perform or say?
- What is the most positive interpretation an outside witness would make? The most negative?
- What will you gain by interpreting the difficult person’s actions or words in as positive a light as possible?
- What would you do or say when you respond to the difficult person if you viewed his or her actions in a positive light? What is stopping you from responding this way?
For more on our Assertiveness & Self Confidence training course, please visit:
https://corporatetrainingmaterials.com/course/Assertiveness_And_Self-Confidence
Communication Strategies: Seven Ways to Listen Better Today
Hearing is easy! For most of us, our body does the work by interpreting the sounds that we hear into words. Listening, however, is far more difficult. Listening is the process of looking at the words and the other factors around the words (such as our non-verbal communication), and then interpreting the entire message.
Here are seven things that you can do to start becoming a better listener right now.
- When you’re listening, listen. Don’t talk on the phone, text message, clean off your desk, or do anything else.
- Avoid interruptions. If you think of something that needs to be done, make a mental or written note of it and forget about it until the conversation is over.
- Aim to spend at least 90% of your time listening and less than 10% of your time talking.
- When you do talk, make sure it’s related to what the other person is saying. Questions to clarify expand, and probe for more information will be key tools.
- Do not offer advice unless the other person asks you for it. If you are not sure what they want, ask!
- Make sure the physical environment is conducive to listening. Try to reduce noise and distractions. (“Would you mind stepping into my office where I can hear you better?” is a great line to use.) If possible, be seated comfortably. Be close enough to the person so that you can hear them, but not too close to make them uncomfortable.
- If it is a conversation where you are required to take notes, try not to let the note-taking disturb the flow of the conversation. If you need a moment to catch up, choose an appropriate moment to ask for a break.
https://corporatetrainingmaterials.com/course/Communication_Strategies
D5 Creation