Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts with the label communication

How to answer "So, What do you do?" without being awkward!

  Person : So what do you do? You : I am an engineer. Person : …. Oh, that’s great. You : thanks. Person : ….. You : So what do you do? Person : Ohh, I am a Doctor You : Doctor is great!! Person : ….   Does this conversation sound familiar? Do you also run into a dead-end when the question “So what do you do?” comes up?   This will be a short blog where I will give you a template that you can follow while answering this question in a non-generic way so that the answer to the question about your occupation leads to a better conversation. To answer this question, you must divide your answer into three parts as follows: 1.     Who do you it for? 2.     What do your clients/customers want or need? 3.     How does it change/transform their lives?   There you have it, the template. You do not need to answer these questions in any specific order just to try to answer as many of these three. Now, let us elaborate on each question a little.   Who do you do

Flaws of Subconscious Mind

There have often been points in our life where we stopped ourselves from doing something or did something that we were not going to do because we had a gut feeling to do so. These gut feelings/instincts are not something that we explicitly think about, they just subconsciously come to us. The reflexes are also a sort of instinct. These gut feelings/instincts/ subconscious actions have served us quite well and they continue to be a very important aspect for our survival as a species. For example, how we immediately pull our hand when we touch a hot surface without even thinking about it for a second, and our inclination towards running away from immediate/unexpected loud noises (horns) have saved us quite a few times. But, since we do not think about these subconscious actions, it could be easy for someone who has a basic knowledge of working of these instincts to exploit us. For example, crows treat all the eggs in their nest as their own, cuckoos exploit these parental instincts o

Communication Skills (Part II - Speaking)

  We talked about listening as one of the fundamentals of communication in my previous blog , today we will talk about speaking. Let us first talk about the fundamental purpose of “Speaking”. When we are talking, we are sharing some experience that we have been through and we are trying to recreate the same experience in the mind of others by telling them about it. So, it is important to understand that during the conversation, it is not about us but, it is about the person that we are speaking to. Without wasting any more time, let us get right into it. So here are the fundamentals that every person should follow to be a good speaker.   Speak slowly:   I can not emphasize the importance of speaking slowly. A lot of people have the habit of just running through the words. The problem with this is that most of the time when we are speaking fast, we skip through half of the words. This makes your statement ambiguous or hard to understand. If you often experience people asking y