The Best 3 Communication Tips on How to Be Thoughtful
Without saying a word. The best 3 communication tips, and I share them on my YouTube channel. Video below.
Communication skills are life skills. They can help change your life at work and at home, and, in the most extreme situations, save lives.
Before I write about the tips in the video, let me share how this week’s experience went with my public and crazy journey of creating a YouTube channel in my own name. It takes every ounce of personal courage and imagination to do this, ignoring any doubters and naysayers.
” I trained 4 years to run 9 seconds. And people give up when they don’t see results in two months.”
Usain Bolt, Olympic gold medallist 8 times. Bolt is the only sprinter to win Olympic 100 m and 200 m titles at three consecutive Olympics (2008, 2012, and 2016).
The fact is that you have to step outside of your comfort zone and be comfortable with being uncomfortable if you want to achieve things you’ve never done before. I’d rather give it a go and commit to it completely as a creator, come what may, regardless of the outcome.
The other motivation is that my YouTube content creation is helping me to build a video archive of my work and so forth. It will become an archive for my children and grandchildren to watch as well.
These are the best 3 communication tips for people wanting to know how to improve their communication skills beyond public speaking. A great foundation to start with.
So here I am.
I told myself that I would only do minimal edits of my videos. That way, I don’t waste time with elusive perfection and instead get the videos done and online by Saturday, no excuses.
This week’s YouTube video journey
It took all of Saturday to think about how to start the video. I started to wonder how on earth I was going to talk about my tips on video for longer than a few seconds. I started to carve out the outline and main ideas with more details. Surely I need a teleprompter?
Why? Because the best 3 communication tips I shared are actually huge things to share. But the challenge is that people on YouTube are not necessarily looking for these tips in big numbers. People tend to associate good communication with being a good talker or speaker. But that’s only part of the equation. These tips I share are very underestimated and, as the research shows, woefully underused in the workplace.
I started to record in the afternoon what I thought I could do in one sitting. No more than 5 minutes, I told myself. Don’t stop the phone camera and don’t worry about editing. More than 28 minutes of recording later, stitched together by multiple clips on a tiny app, the road of a million takes in the evening light finally came to an end. It was nearly midnight when I finished.
Lack of natural light affects the lighting in the video, well in my video it does. So it looks grainy. But because I recently changed my eye prescription, I didn’t fully see just how grainy…until I saw it on YouTube today on a bigger screen. I had been editing and compiling the video on my phone app. Now on Youtube, everything looked bigger and grainier.
I can’t wait for my new prescription glasses to be ready.
Losing my mind and my video
To go back to my weekend journey, my video issues didn’t end there. When I tried to upload the video, my app tells me that there is no room on my phone to store this video. So, in a moment of quiet madness, I started to clean out my phone. Out went unused apps, out when duplicate photos and videos. But I got carried away and cleverly deleted the whole video folder. Deleting the videos was so easy to do, I was so proud of myself.
I thought that because I had all my videos and photos saved online automatically when I take videos on my phone, this wouldn’t impact the video for YouTube.
Not true. In my genie-like madness, I had wiped out all the clips for the video in the app. So it was empty. I stayed cool and calm. How could I have wasted a whole day of filming in a single act of random video deleting? Who does that? Me, it turns out.
I knew that starting a YouTube channel would not be easy. But I didn’t realise I would sabotage my own video on improving your communication skills. I’m very good under pressure and in great crisis. I stay calm. After all, I’ve just shared the best 3 communication tips for people beginning this journey to improve.
Revealing none of my video woes to any other souls, I went to church on Sunday, knowing it would all work out. This was a conversation just between me and God at home, before I went to church.
How did I solve this? On my YouTube channel banner, I changed my banner to say “Monday” instead of “Saturday” for my weekly video. Since I’m a tiny channel with a grand total of 9 subscribers (please don’t let me lose any of them), this is a great time for me to make my rookie mistakes. They may have even forgotten they subscribed to my channel.
So I went onto my backup online storage and retrieved the original video clips. Spent hours editing them together again, imperfectly of course. And finally posted late Monday morning which happens to be a public holiday here in the Northern Territory, phew.
So there you have a typical day in the life of a newbie YouTube creator.
The best 3 communication tips
I share three tips in my first proper YouTube video . These are tips that thoughtful communicators and experienced people-centered leaders know. And yes, it’s true. These tips do not involve saying a word or talking to people, or public speaking. Yet, they are powerful tools. As you practice what I share in this video, it can help you to improve your communication skills and your relationships. They can bring peace to your mind and heart.
Why did I focus on these tips?
They are foundational skills, traits, and practices. When practiced, they can help people accelerate learning and personal growth. It doesn’t mean you will be spared from communication issues and misunderstandings. Real life with imperfect human beings doesn’t work like that.
Part of the human experience is that we learn and grow from our experiences on Planet Earth. Focus on the things you and I can control, like how we view a situation and how we react to it.
These tips will help you figure things out. Note: I call them Practice Tips to emphasise that these tips require practice if they are going to be of any use.
“what strikes me most about their stories of missed opportunities and derailed careers is this: The source of their anxiety and frustration is rarely a shortfall in technical or professional expertise. Instead, it invariably stems from a shortcoming in their soft skills repertoire—the nontechnical traits and behaviors needed for successful career navigation.”
Peggy Klaus, The Hard Truth About Soft Skills: Workplace Lessons Smart People Wish They’d Learned Sooner
Communication skills require lifelong learning and improvement
For anyone who thinks that they already know a lot about communication and don’t need to apply these tips, let me say this. Think again.
Communication skills, no matter how old or young we are or how professional we are, require continuous learning and improvement. We often encounter new experiences new situations and new people in new settings. Often, a person’s environment and the state of relationships, whether at home or at work, can reveal communication issues and challenges to address. That’s part of the human experience.
Few people, if any, are exempt from that reality at one point or another. That’s how we learn and grow. It allows us to improve and change to be better versions of ourselves, in whatever way that looks like.
For example, in professional and community workplace settings such as medicine and health, continuous learning and improvement programs and practices are critical to improving patient communication, care, and safety. The research backs that up.
Patients and families value doctors and nurses who can communicate clearly and take the time to explain personal health information and diagnoses. Yet research shows many doctors and nurses tend to overestimate how they communicate with patients and underestimate patient dissatisfaction with clinical communication.
If you want proof, check this out. A 2015 USA study of the medical profession found that poor communication between doctors and patients was one of the attributing factors to an increase in lawsuits against doctors (Ranjan P, Kumari A, Chakrawarty A. How can Doctors Improve their Communication Skills? J Clin Diagn Res. 2015 Mar;9(3):JE01-4. doi: 10.7860/JCDR/2015/12072.5712. Epub 2015 Mar 1. PMID: 25954636; PMCID: PMC4413084.) .
The study found that good communication practices like detailed explanations by clinicians “with enduring listening to the patients or their families have been found to decrease such incidences.” (2015, Ranjan P, Kumari A, Chakrawarty A.)
It’s other professions too
Before you assume this is the only profession with the need for the best 3 communication tips and how to improve, pause that thought.
Research also shows a concerning lack of essential communication skills in a number of other professions including accounting graduates and hospitality and management, to name a few. The reality is these are worldwide gaps for many professions.
In my video, I also share historical research on employer and business industry concerns dating back to the 1940s to the 1980s.
Outside of professional and workplace settings, the reality is that as human beings, we often need reminders and learning from our mistakes to encourage us to communicate better. The same applies to families and individuals.
The difference with these best 3 communication tips is that practicing them doesn’t require you to talk to others to make improvements. And despite that, they can change your life and your world when done consistently and sincerely.
“When you receive criticism from well-meaning people, it pays to ask, ‘Are they right?’ And if they are, you need to adapt what they’re doing. If they’re not right, if you really have conviction that they’re not right, you need to have that long-term willingness to be misunderstood. It’s a key part of invention.”
Jess Bezos
Following my YouTube journey
If you’ve read my previous posts, you’ll know that I’m documenting on YouTube creator journey. I hope these are helpful if you are interested in setting up a YouTube channel.
The video for this post is the most unguarded I have ever been in a public video. When I speak in public in-person settings and closed webinar sessions, if it’s appropriate and relevant, I share personal anecdotes and personal experiences to help explain a principle, for example. I consider myself a lifelong learner and I find that teaching people what I learn helps me as well. It reinforces learning.
So, in the end, I decided to not edit out the personal experience in the video. Why? Because it has relevance to the last tip and what I fundamentally know to be true about it.
Plus, it’s clear to me now that posting these videos helps to create an archive library of content on YouTube. This means it will exist long after I am gone (in the far distant future, I hope). And when that day comes, my children and grandchildren will be thankful for them. So that’s a big plus about doing these videos.
Are YouTube videos something you want to do?
If you’d like to keep learning how to improve your communication skills, I’ll keep creating content. Finally, if you’d like to subscribe to my new channel and follow my YouTube journey, that would be wonderful. I’m excited to say that I now have 9 subscribers :-). Thank you.
” I trained 4 years to run 9 seconds. And people give up when they don’t see results in two months.”
Usain Bolt, Olympic gold medallist 8 times. Bolt is the only sprinter to win Olympic 100 m and 200 m titles at three consecutive Olympics (2008, 2012, and 2016).
If you’d like to learn how to set up your own YouTube channel, I personally recommend these guys in the business. They are experienced YouTube creators and they have taught me a tonne of stuff in such a short time (less than 2 weeks). Being one of their students gave me the courage to make and post YouTube videos, even though I have less than 10 subscribers. Who cares about the numbers? It’s turning out to be a great creative outlet and I don’t focus on the numbers. I am focused on creating and learning.
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