Improve your body language
Sometimes we define ourselves as introverts or extroverts people; extroverts are the ones who can speak to anyone in any moment, introverts are those who, on the other hand, find it harder to start a conversation… and introverts say “they’re not good at talking” but, I swear that if you put someone with the same interests in front of this person, things change and suddenly they just have a lot of things to say. So probably its not that you’re introvert, but maybe you haven’t found the way to feel comfortable in different situations… and some good news is that communication is a skill, and it can be trained!
So here some exercises you can start doing to improve those skills
Exercise 1: Practice active listening
Good communication is not always about knowing what to say, it’s about knowing how to listen. It’s sound incredibly obvious, but you might get surprised by how often we’re actually preparing our next answer instead of actually just listening, so then when you’re having a conversation with someone, just listen, pay attention to their words, their tone and to what they’re actually telling you.
Exercise 2: Tell a Story in One Minute
Here we dive more into actual exercises you can do by yourself. So, you’re gonna choose something that happened to you recently and give yourself exactly one minute to tell the story… so, what’s the challenge here? It has to have a beginning, a middle and an end.
This exercise makes you decide what information is actually important instead of just adding a ton of unnecessary details. So set a timer, tell the story, and at the end, ask yourself if your story was clear enough.
Exercise 3: Explain Something in a Simple Way
In this one, you’ll choose something that you know really well, any theme you want to later on, explain it to someone that doesn’t know absolutely nothing about it. Don’t use very complicated words or assume the other person already understands what you mean.
Exercise 4: Speak Without Preparing
This one is interesting!! So, you are going to choose a random topic and talk about it for one minute but without preparing anything, just start talking.
This exercise helps you to feel more comfortable organizing your thoughts in the moment instead of needing to prepare every single word before speaking. You might get stuck. You might repeat yourself. You might have absolutely no idea where your sentence is going, but that’s part of the exercise! Just keep going
Exercise 5: Pay Attention to Your Body
Stand in front of a mirror or record yourself speaking for one minute, but this time, don’t focus only on what you’re saying instead, look at how you’re saying it: are you making eye contact? Are your arms crossed? Are you moving your hands naturally? Are you speaking loudly enough?
Your body is communicating even when you’re not saying anything, the goal isn’t to control every movement you make, it’s just to become aware of what your body is communicating along with your words.
Honestly, communication is a skill, not a personality thing. It’s all about how you listen, how you communicate your ideas and how comfortable you feel using your own ideas.
