Effective communication is fundamental to achieve success in many areas of your life, from your professional career to your social life and your interpersonal relationships.
Great conversations not only enable the exchange of thoughts and ideas, but they also promote the development of deeper social connections.
But what makes a great conversation?
How can you avoid small and shallow talk and start having deep discussions?
Let’s discover it together.
The 6 elements of communication competence
If you want to improve the quality of your conversations, you have to master your commuication skills.
In other words, you must learn how to best utilize symbols – sounds, movement, and images – to represent ideas so that meanings can be shared.
According to Spitzberg & Cupach (2002), one’s communication competence can be assessed based on 6 factors:
- Fidelity
- Appropriateness
- Satisfaction
- Effectiveness
- Efficiency
- Ethics
Let’s have a closer look to the meaning of these elements.
Fidelity
“Fidelity refers to the clarity of a message – the extent to which meanings can be correctly inferred from the symbols” (Spitzberg & Cupach, 2002, p. 16).
Fidelity levels decrease when there is noise pollution, as well as when communicators utilize different types of symbols due to differnet cultural/educational experiences, as well as age.
One such example is the use of acronyms and abbreviations.
Appropriateness
Communication is appropriate when messages that individuals generate suit the requirements of a situation.
The suitability of messages to certain circumstances are influenced by social rules, namely guidelines that indicate actions that are “expected, preferred, and off-limits in a given situation” (Spitzberg & Cupach, 2002, p. 17).
Satisfaction
Satisfaction refers to the enjoyability of communication. This can be assessed by the feelings arising in a person after a conversation, such as happiness, a sense of connection, or even a boost in energy.
Effectiveness
Effectiveness refers to the degree to which a comunication helps you achieve your goals.
To learn more about the types of objectives you can achieve thorugh communication, check out my previous post.
Efficiency
Efficiency refers to communication that allows you to generate the outcomes you desire without investing “more than a reasonable amount of effort” (Spitzberg & Cupach, 2002, p. 18).
Ethics
Finally, ethical communication takes into account what is right versus wrong or good versus evil and it is driven by values that act as a moral guide during interpersonal interaction.
Individuals who engage in ethical communication clarify their values and assumptions and show respect towards those of other people.
9 Ways to have great conversations
Now that you learned the 6 elements that you need to implement to master your commuication skills, it is time to apply them.
Here are 9 concrete ways you can promote fidelity, appropriateness, satisfaction, effectiveness, efficiency, and ethics when you speak to have awesome conversations.
Make them feel important
The first way you can improve your conversations is to make others feel important.
This is a extremely effective method because it helps fulfilling the fundamental human emotional need of validation – the “desire to have someone else’s approval or agreement with what you say, believe, or do” (Slijepcevic) – and it therefore promotes the generation of positive emotions, making the conversation more enjoyable and satisfactory.
Here are ways you can make others feel important:
- Acknowledge their emotions, thoughts, experiences, values, and beliefs
- Be curious about them and ask questions
- Ask for their opinion on something (use open-ended questions)
- Show your admiration
- Notice things
- See their potential
- Use their name often
- Ask them to teach you things
- Value their time
- Clarify what you think you heard
- Show appreciation
- Honor confidentiality
- Show them respect
- Listen to them
Speak clearly
Another way you can improve your conversations is to speak clearly.
This is important because it helps ensuring that whoever you’re talking to correctly understands what you’re saying, therefore fostering a high level of fidelity in your discussion.
Here are a few ways to speak more clearly:
- Talk slowly
- Avoid using acronyms, slang/complex words, or if you do, first introduce them or make sure they know their meaning
- Don’t assume they know what you’re talking about
- Avoid pause fillers/ (e.g., umm, errr, aaa)
Expect a minimally positive outcome
An inconventional tip to make your conversations more enjoyable is to expect a minimally positive outcome from them.
This technique works because the level of satisfaction you get from a discussion is greatly influenced by your level of expectation from it.
If you expect a conversation to be extremely engaging, content-rich, and funny, and you end up having a conversation that “only” teaches you a lot but does not make you laugh so much, you will not be satisfied with it.
Since people usually assess the greatness of a conversation by comparing its outcomes to those obtained from the most frequent and noteworthy conversations they have, they often struggle achieving a high level of satisfaction from a discussion.
To avoid this and increase the level of satisfaction you gain from your conversations, try lowering your expectations by expecting a minimally positive outcome from all the discussions you have.
Hecht (1978) well describes the strong link between expectations and satisfaction by stating that “satisfaction is the reaction to encountering the world one has been conditioned to “expect”” (p. 59).
Avoid distractions
It goes without saying that any type of distraction decreases the fidelity – and therefore the quality – of a conversation.
When you want to have a great discussion, it is essential to minimize anything that could interefere with your conversation, from visual to noise pollution.
Here are a few ways you can minimize distractions:
- Turn off/put away electronic devices (e.g., mobile phone, TV, PC, etc.)
- Sit in a quiet space
- Get comfortable
- Keep strong eye contact
- Don’t multitask
Stick to your values and morals
Communicating by never compromising your morals and ethics is another way you can improve your communication skills and better your conversations with others.
When you converse based on your own values, you show itegrity and you therefore promote a sense of trust among others.
This fosters the generation of positive emotions within them, fosering satisfaction.
Here are a few ways you can speak morally & ethically:
- Respect them
- Be honest
- Speak up for your morals and values
- Disagree respectfully
- If you don’t know, say you don’t know
- Use manners
Get to the point
If you’re under time pressure, being coincise and cutting out the unimportant is essential to conduct efficient communication.
This way not only you save your time and effort, but those of other people too.
Here are a few ways to be more coincise:
- Be clear with yourself about the goal of the discussion and what exact message you want to communciate
- Avoid over-explaining
- Share your objective and convey the central idea first
- Speak in chunks of important information
- Avoid pause fillers and useless sentences (e.g., as I previously mentioned, I just wanted to say, etc.)
- Don’t get distracted by other ideas
- Think before you speak
Express empathy
Showing empathy is another important way you can improve your conversations.
This is because empathy promotes a feeling of acceptance – an important human emotional need – therefore generating a positive feeling within other people and making the conversation overall more satisfactory.
Here are a few ways you can talk with empathy:
- Listen actively
- Consider both points of view
- Search for commonalities
- Recognize others’ emotions
- Accept others’ interpretations
- Withhold judgement
- Appreciate and acknowledge all the different ways they express themselves
- Observe others’ nonverbal signals to capture how they’re feeling
Communicate with your body
Using body language (e.g., gestures, posture, etc.) to emphasize what you’re communicating is another powerful way to ameliorate your conversations.
This is because body language helps others to better understand and decode what you’re saying, increasing the fidelity of the disucssion you’re having.
In addition, body language also helps the listener to interpret your emotions and moods, therefore facilitating empathy.
Use humour
Humour is not only useful to entertain and amuse others, but it also helps to release tension, improve other people’s mood, and make a discussion overall more memorable.
Laughter triggers an endorphin release, and it therefore promotes social bonding and the generation of positive emotions wihtin others, making the discussion more enjoyable and satisfactory.
I hope that you found this blog post valuable and that it will help you to have good conversations with other people ✨
I wish you a wonderful day and remember, you are, have always been and will always be, enough.
Love Saori