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 [Music] I'm Bruce Lambert from how communication works comm 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 want to 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 want to 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 want to 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 a 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 scientists for the past 50 or 60 years have developed accurate measures of communication skill and I want to 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 can do so by strengthening strengthening these foundations and that's what I'm going to 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 communications say situations or tasks are equally difficult and I'll link in the description below to a blog I wrote about what situations are hard and 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 ask people to describe their houses or their apartments this is a great example of an easy communication situation almost no one's struggled with this situation and not only that but

people produced almost identical messages they produce 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 describe their apartments and almost no one struggled with it so with easy situations you get little effort and tremendous no variability tremendous amounts 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 medical care and this is a really really hard situation and when you give a hundred 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 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 only one goal sort of describe it accurately in the disclosure situation where 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 that simultaneously achieves all these goals is really difficult

hard situations normally have a high level of emotional arousal we're anxious were afraid we are frustrated we are nervous whatever it might be we have high level our emotions are cranked up and that makes 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 hardest normally are very highly consequential so that the medical error disclosure disclosure situation is highly

consequential it's a 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'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 communicator so I want to talk to you about how we do that it 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 that I have to give you a quick course in communication theory so the theory that underlies this measure of communication skills called constructivism and it was developed by in in the 1970s and 1980s by

scientists at the 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 through adolescence to adulthood children are impolite they're not tactful they don't know how to say things they don't know what to say right very young children don't even have language than 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 underlied these the development of social skill in general so constructivism says we represent the social world in terms of constructs constructs are two-sided or say bipolar dimensions for representing the social world some examples are given here kind cruel fair unfair considerate inconsiderate genuine fake these are that 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've 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 are connected that they are and we can measure these things I want to 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 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 our phones they would market cameras to us based on how many megapixels the camera had even now they still talk about how many megapixels are in the cameras and 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 you know in the middle you get like a five by five or twenty five pixel image you still can't tell what it is by the time you get by 10 pixels of resolution you cordon see the letter R there but by the time you get a hundred by hundred or ten thousand 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 to 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 order 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 in an image so in the upper left of this image you see one bit you know zero or one black or white there's only two colors represented in this image but don't know lower right you have 16 bits

or two to the 16th power bits of the color being possible colors being represented that's more than 16 million different colors can be represented in this image and obviously the 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 in our head having a lot of constructs in our head and especially abstract and integrated constructs it's 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 and and an abstract us of these dimensions for representing their 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 and depth and subtlety and nuance and like I said before it's like from seeing the world in low definition black and white to seeing it in high-resolution color the

basic idea yeah I said a lot of stuff that's kind of abstract but the basic idea is more constructs more dimensions means a higher level of social skill so obviously we want to strive to increase the number of constructs we use in representing other people in social situations how do we measure it it's actually very simple to measure I'll link below to a place 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 light person and the number of descriptions use for the dislike person is your cognitive complexity the number of

constructs we call construct differentiation you can measure the abstract necessities 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 want to 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 them the benefit of the doubt until they prove otherwise strong work ethic and team oriented that's six dimensions for 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 some of them just didn't really do their best and so they produce some very short impression sometimes so when you measure your own cognitive complexity you got to do your best and don't be distracted narcissistic this is

two dimensions actually narcissistic and so here's a high complexity impression look at all these constructs intelligence intellectual relaxed down-to-earth approachable genuine humble caring kind thoughtful loving etc talented infectious trustworthy bohemian pondering discerning not only are there a lot of constructs in this impression but they're really abstract so imagine the social world that this person inhabits compared to the social worsen the social imagine the social world that this person inhabits compared to the social world than these people inhabit this person here sort of has a tremendous amount of rich detail when they walk into any social

social situation whoever they meet they have a service incredibly detailed readout 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 grey 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 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 that representing this liked and disliked the 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 at 80 90 more than a hundred some people are really really extremely above-average in these skills you wouldn't be surprised to learn that the person had more than a hundred constructs was an extremely sophisticated and skillful communicator so why is cognitive complexity good it allows us to have more organized and integrated impressions of other people to have greater ability to recognize other people's feelings and their dispositions to integrate inconsistent information about other people this is you know not just seeing black and white passing shades of grey and realizing people

can have multiple capabilities both good and bad understanding other people's thoughts and motivations their plans goals intentions and desires this allows us to adapt to them when we're communicating most importantly people with higher cognitive complexity produced more effective messages and 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 it's 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 the 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 nonverbal 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 think about what other 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 a link to lists 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 the meant like I had to look up bohemian you know be bohemian I thought meant hippie the dictionary said it meant nonconformist so learn these adjectives for describing other people and then begin to apply them so think about bohemian so now you know bohemian means nonconformist 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 for 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 Janos is a famous novelist whose

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 will increase the sophistication of your understanding of other people's inner mental lives so read some Jane Austen novels in addition to the other tips so this is a summary people differ their inability to perceive social situations and produce effective

messages these differences are most apparent in difficult situations and we want to be good at difficult situations this is when the stakes are highest when it makes the biggest difference for our lives you can measure these differences reliably and I told you about how to measure cognitive complexity and linked in the description for how to go to a survey and measure it in yourself for friends and family the underlying foundational capability is called cognitive complexity and it 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 and I gave you several tips for how to do that really appreciate the time you take to listen to us if this is the first time you've come to this channel I'd be grateful if you'd consider subscribing to our Channel if so you can do that down below click on the subscribe button and then clip click on that Bell notification icon so YouTube will let you know next time we post a video come on over to how communication works com sign up for our mailing list

it will let you know every time we post a video and/or we post a new article to the blog you'll get a free copy of our ebook about empathic communication and read about all the other topics and community in communication skill that we've talked about on the blog I have a question for you 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 think

you were revealing very much they just had such sophisticated communication skills that they could and such refined social perception that 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 come join our community in the comments I'd like to get to know you thanks so much for spending a little time with us I really appreciate the time you spend I know you're busy we'll see you next time