Can we learn to be better communicators?

Or are we stuck with the communication skill level and competence that we were born with?

I'm going to define what I mean by the statement that communication is a skill that can be learned.

Some people believe that communication skill is like height or eye color, that it is an inborn trait, and that there's nothing we can do about it. We were either born lucky with a lot of communication skill, or we were born unlucky with a lower level of communication skill. There is a sense in which that is correct. Genetically, we are endowed with certain innate capabilities which might make us better or worse communicators. So we have a sort of baseline level of communication skill, the same way we might have a baseline level of athletic ability or musical ability or scientific ability or something like that.

But there's an important sense in which that belief is wrong. Communication is a skill, meaning it's a goal-directed activity that you can learn to be better at with practice. So even though we might be born with a certain innate disposition to be good or bad at communication, we can improve from that point. Now some people might be born with a greater innate disposition and they have an easier time. They have to practice less because they're intrinsically more skilled. But communication is a skill, it can be learned.

Communication is a Learnable Skill

If you've come to a website called How Communication Works, I'm going to assume you're interested in improving your communication skills, but you might also be discouraged or you might believe, "Well, I just am the way I am and I can't get any better. I've tried, but it's been frustrating and I haven't gotten any better."

I get it. It's hard to improve at any skill, but I want to make a few points about how communication is a skill like any other motor skill or any other cognitive skill, meaning there's a genetic component which might determine our eventual maximum capacity and it sort of determines our starting point. But it's a skill, meaning there's a huge range of possible levels of performance that we might attain depending on how much we practice and how hard we try to learn more and get better.

I want to talk about the very idea that communication is a skill. I take this from The Handbook of Communication Skills, which is a sort of textbook about the various communication skills. The first chapter of that book defines communication as a skill. One of the first things it says is that a skill is a goal-directed intentional activity that can be learned and improved by practice.

So that's what I mean when I say communication is a skill, it's a goal-directed intentional activity that can be improved with practice. Another important point about communication being a skill is that it's learned. It doesn't mean that there isn't an innate genetic basis for these skills. Obviously, I have to have the musculature. I have to have a fully functioning neurological system and sensory system in order to be able to produce speech and understand speech and derive correct inferences from communication. So we're assuming sort of a healthy body, which is our genetic endowment.

Communication Fluency & Goal-Setting

We say that we've really acquired the skill or can engage in skillful performance when we can produce a fluent and effective performance. Fluent means smooth without a lot of stops and starts and errors. Effective means that whatever the skillful performance is, it achieves its goals. So a skillful performance is one that is fluent and effective at achieving its goals. All of us can communicate at some level or other, but we only say someone is a skillful communicator if they can do so fluently and effectively.

Once the skill is acquired, it can be done with very little effort. It's when I'm just first learning to play guitar or play tennis or drive a car or cook or anything like that, I make a lot of mistakes, right? So in the beginning is where acquiring a skill, is an effortful performance, but we say a behavior is skillful and someone has achieved the high level of skill when they can perform effectively and fluently seemingly effortlessly. That's another characteristic of a skill and it involves internal processes of analysis and setting goals and executing plans and so on.

Social or communication skills in particular involve both speaking and listening, that is producing utterances and comprehending utterances. It also involves engaging in an interaction in such a way that we fulfill our own goals and needs while at the same time respecting and helping to fulfill the goals and needs and rights of the people that we're interacting with. That's what makes social interaction difficult, the need to simultaneously meet our needs and the needs and goals of the people that we're interacting with. People who can do both of those things successfully we call skillful at communication.

I think goals are an under-emphasized aspect of communication skill. Often when I coach people about communication skill, I'm not really coaching them necessarily about exactly what to say, but sometimes we talk about that. But often, the difference between less skillful and more skillful communicators is in the goals that they identify. Less skillful communicators might not have any clear goal in mind besides, "Just tell people how I feel."

More skillful communicators have a clear goal in mind, and it's often a different goal than less skillful communicators have. The goal for a very skillful communicator might be something like achieve consensus on a plan, or maintain a relationship over time, or respect the needs of all the parties involved, or focus on the future. These are the kinds of goals that skillful communicators have, and they may differ from those that less skillful communicators would adapt. Whereas less skillful communicators might not have a clear goal at all. It's useful to think about skills developing through four stages.

Stage 1: Unconscious incompetence: That is, "I don't even know I'm not any good at communication." We meet people like this, and they think they're good communicators, but everybody who knows them thinks that they're bad communicators. This is a level of unconscious incompetence. You don't even know you're bad.

Stage 2: Conscious Incompetence: The second level is when you learn, "Oh, I'm no good at communication," or tennis or cooking or driving or whatever the woodworking or piano playing or whatever the skill is. This is the level of conscious incompetence. "I now know that I'm not any good at this skill." That's an important advance from the first level, which is unconscious competence because when you're unconsciously incompetent, you're not even trying to get any better because you don't realize how bad you are. The second level, conscious incompetence, is, "Oh, I'm not very good at this skill. I need to practice and learn to get better."

Stage 3: Conscious Competence: This is, "I now know that I'm pretty good at this, but I still have to concentrate and be consciously aware of my goals and of my efforts at being good. So I know that I can be good at this, at piano playing or driving or golfing or communicating if I concentrate and I'm present and I'm focused on my goals and I'm trying hard. If I'm distracted or not at my best, I might not be any good." This is a level of conscious competence. "I'm good. And I know that I'm good, but it requires conscious effort to be good."

Stage 4: Unconscious Competence: The fourth level, the highest level of the most skillful performers in any domain, is what we call unconscious competence. That is, you're extremely good and it seems like you're exerting no effort. You don't even need to concentrate that hard or seemingly to exert much conscious control over your performance. When we see, for example, an extremely talented virtuoso musician, they appear to play effortlessly, even though a lifetime of practice and diligent effort has gone into the appearance of playing effortlessly. But once they get to this level of unconscious competence, there's so much muscle memory and so much that has become automatic about the skill that they no longer have to exert conscious control. They can concentrate only on the aesthetic quality of their performance. This is the highest level that we can aspire to in acquiring any skill, the level of unconscious competence.

Often in communication skills training that I've conducted, our goal is just to take people from unconscious incompetence to conscious incompetence. Because sometimes people come into especially difficult communication situations thinking they're good at them, and we have to show them, "Oh no, you're not that good at this yet. This is a hard skill." We show them that by putting them in role-plays with actors and letting them try to practice the skills in front of an audience, and then they realize, "Ah, I'm not so good." When they realize they're not so good, they've gotten to the level of conscious incompetence. This is a real achievement in terms of education, because now they can focus on exerting explicit effort to get better, and hopefully, then get to the level of conscious competence and eventually unconscious competence.

Summary – Practice Makes Perfect!

Finally, perhaps the most obvious point, but in some ways, maybe a discouraging or frustrating one, learning a skill requires practice. There's the famous 10,000 hours rule that Anders Ericsson came up with in talking about the acquisition of expertise like chess. It's not clear that we all need 10,000 hours. There may be some shortcuts, but the essence of the point is true, that to acquire a high level of skill, to attain this level of unconscious competence at any complex skill, requires many hours of deliberate practice. So the good news is, communication is a skill. It's a learnable goal-directed activity that gets better with practice.

The bad news is, if you're looking for a shortcut, there's not an obvious shortcut. You have to put in many, many hours of practice with feedback, with coaching and so on to move through these levels of skill. But you're on your way. You've come to this channel, so I'm assuming you're at the level, at least, of conscious incompetence, knowing that you need help to get better. Maybe you're already at the level of conscious competence or unconscious competence and you're just trying to see what I have to say about this topic.