Hello everybody in my last post I talked about how to exceed expectations in a work environment and one of the key elements that I talked about was the soft skills, especially the assertive communication.

How to exceed expectations in your first job ? 👨‍💻👩‍💻🥇

sabrinasuarezarrieta ・ Nov 26 '20

#beginners #career

But someone in my office said: "Ok, I know that my communication skills are not the strongest but, how can I improve?" So for you friends that are in that same situation I wanted to give you these 5 activities that you could try to improve.

1. Create presentations

This is going to sound like a total nerd thing to do, but I encourage you to make presentations, where your audience will be people in which you trust and you want to hear their criticism, in my case, were my parents and sibling, don't have to be presentations about software, I actually presented subjects like sustainability, personal finance, and so on, but the important thing is that you see if your audience is understanding the subject that you are presenting (that defines how good you are to communicate).

2. Teach something to a group

I have been involved in an NGO for 7 years, in this NGO we work with teenagers and I had the pleasure to teach my own dance workshop, and yes the first few lessons were a little uncomfortable for everyone but 6 lessons later I sounded like a totally different person, I was able to give instructions with clarity, never use buzzwords and the most important I was standing with confidence when I was talking, the best is that you could do the same thing in wherever place that you are, your school, NGO, church, neighbourhood, does not matter, somewhere someone will be happy to learn something that you can teach, and you will be exercising constantly your speak in public abilities.

3. Create your blog

Part of the communication is writing and there's no more reliable way to get better than practising, platforms like this allow you to share and connect with people and all through your writing. But I understand that not everybody feels comfortable exposing their ideas so if you are a little shy you could write and not publish, just share it with 2 or 3 friends of confidence that could give you their feedback (part of growing is hear and acknowledge constructive criticism).

4. Learn a lot

Even if you are going to ask about something you have a different attitude when you have been reading about that subject, you feel more comfortable talking about it and can give different and interesting points of view from the subject when you know it.

5. Make the hard question

This is for the risky ones, you need to ask as many people you feel comfortable "In my normal life, how you perceive my communications skills?" the responses could be hard to hear but if the people are honest this is going to be game-changer for you. You could be the smartest and give the best facts but if you do not know how to make people want to listen to you, that knowledge is going to waste, if you hear things like "aggressiveness" or "lack of empathy" or even "when you talk I feel a little bored" people are giving you points in which you could do better so feel grateful and motivated because now you know and you can improve.

Last I want to say thank you very much for reading and I wish you all a happy day!!