It’s my profound hope that as you built your business and personal goals in 2018, you included becoming a great communicator! Of course you did – because you know that nothing will serve you and your vision better than developing exceptional communication skills.
So what’s on the menu first?
Your most powerful results may come from communicating with your team. Great leaders spend a lot of energy on internal communication – to inform and motivate teams as well as to create and reinforce company culture.
You may want to become a great media spokesperson – which is a lot harder than it looks! An immersive media training sets a good baseline. But building the new neural pathways to become an effective spokesperson takes practice and time.
Perhaps you’ll focus on becoming a compelling speaker. TED Curator Chris Anderson wants us all to become literate, successful presenters. Here’s my favorite line from Chapter One of his exceptional book, TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking, “Presentation literacy isn’t an optional extra for the few. It’s a core skill for the twenty-first century.”
Don’t try to master all of these skills at once. Pick one skill to focus on first, based on business requirements. Whether you start with internal communications, media or speaking, you start with doing some foundational work – building your personal platform and messages. You’ll use that same basic platform for everything you do.
Where you start doesn’t really matter. What does matter is that you set out on the path and keep going.
Your business must scale, and you must scale with it. You need to hire a great team, forge strong customer relationships and lead your market with a powerful point of view. You can do none of these things without exceptional communication skills. Click here to receive pragmatic communications advice in your inbox every month.
