Five traits a good communicator should have

Reading time: 2 minutes

A good communicator should have many talents, different skills and, hopefully, a deepened knowledge of what he is going to tell. There are five particular traits up which every other element hold.

These are the features:

1. He should be coherent in his way of speaking and he should align verbal, para-verbal and nonverbal languages together. Internal contradictions, like in the case a person says something he knows it’s a lie, lead the brain to notice a distortion and to show consequently an incongruity between verbal and nonverbal communications. As a result the person tells the buyer the product he is selling is the best in the world while his head is moving from left to right as a denial.
2. He should pay attention outside himself in order to catch every feedback. A good communicator is first of all a good observer, he should use most of his focus on the audience standing in front of him instead of on himself to feel well. By doing so he can notice the audience’s reactions and adapts his language and his para-verbal communication to the context as best as he can.
3. He should listen to his interlocutor and to himself with his closest attention. During a face to face communication, it is important to know the person standing in front of you and to mimic his behavior in order to be on the same wavelength with him.
4. He should take on responsibilities for his own communication. This is one of the easiest trait to understand but the most difficult to put into practice as well. Shortly, the communicator should know that any kind of incomprehension or misunderstanding about the service he is offering is due to himself only and he should consequently find another way to gain the audience’s attention and trust and to prove the rationality of the subject he is talking about.
5. He should change his communication in the case the audience’s feedback is not in line with his intentions. Even if the communicator is confident about his skills he should be ready to accept being wrong and to call himself into question. He could end up turning his previous speech upside down but he should not consider it as a minus, indeed. As in the true proverb: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”. If you are not willing to change your mind, you will get negative feedbacks.

I can assure you that you will improve your communication skills very much if you exercise on these traits: you will feel satisfied and great opportunities for success will come out of this.

P.s. Please feel free to write worthy supplements to these features in the comments below.

Luca Brambilla