As I am an introvert, my strength in communication is listening to others first before speaking. Therefore, I am usually the last few to speak in a group discussion. I will usually analyse the entire situation before speaking. However, this can be a drawback as other people's opinion will influence my thought. Not only that, I tend to think about how people view the situation and this caused me to forget what I wanted to say.
To me, listening and observing people is a way for me to learn what are the do's and don'ts in communication. I will be able to know whether that person is able to handle criticism, or whether I must rephrase my words such that no one gets hurt.
One of the major challenges I faced while communicating is not being able to get my point across. Sometimes, I have a tendency to be excited/nervous while I am speaking to people. I can feel my heartbeat beating faster the moment I get excited or nervous, and my mind will look like a mesh of tangled wires. This leads to a loss of words or not speaking clearly. Thus, the other party has to ask to repeat what I am saying a few times which always made me think whether I am speaking proper English or I am speaking too softly/fast.
Till date, I cannot find a solution to that challenge as a conversation between people occurs simultaneously. I don't have the luxury of time to rehearse what I want to say in my mind before speaking. Thus, I speak in point forms and try to connect them together which creates an incomprehensible sentences. Only those who knows be better are able to get the gist of what I am talking about.
I feel that having your strength will allow you as a person to be able to see things in a clear format that others might not be able to however it gets redundant from the fact that you are easily influence as mentioned that all the information that you gathered would be discarded for the opinion you heard.
ReplyDeleteIt would be good for you if you are to calm down, breath in and think of a proper sentence before saying it out to the person you want him to listen and breath out the sentence in your head. It is okay to speak slowly as long as your sentence get processed properly out from your mind to your mouth. Sure it might seem like it is going to take a very long time, but with enough practice you can get faster and faster speaking in proper phrases and even sentences as time go by. You just need to have the patience.
We've worked multiple times together in the past year and from what I've learned from observing the way you behave, I think it's quite obvious that you spend so much time thinking that it is totally expected for you to sit in a group discussion without having even said a single constructive comment. The comments that you do happen to make end up being irrelevant to a certain extent.
ReplyDeleteI feel that one of the ways you can improve in communicating is to not wait for the opinions in your head to mutate into something else. The moment you feel like you have something worth contributing to the discussion, you should share it as soon as you are able to. The longer you hold on to it the larger the risk of forgetting what it is that you wanted to share (like how Elyas would always say he had something good to say but he'd already forgotten what it was).
Yu Shan is totally spot on about you needing to have some patience. I think you're quite fortunate to have friends in this school who are patient with you but the professional world is no where near as kind. Before we graduate let's both work on our communication skills together!
Regards,
Tirmidzi Zulkifli
mzulkiflicom150blog.wordpress.com
I have read the following blogs:
ReplyDeleteNg Yu Shan
https://com150ngyushan.wordpress.com/
Khaliq
https://com150khaliq.wordpress.com/
Cheers,
Germaine