I want to tell you a story.

In addition to being a college professor, I'm a consultant. The most common kind of training I do, as a consultant, is communication skills training.

I specialize in training health professionals how to talk to patients and families who have been harmed by healthcare.

These are very difficult conversations. We focus a lot on empathic communication skills, which is a topic I've taught a lot about.

I'm going to teach you the single most important step you can take to begin to improve your communication skill.

One Key Method to Improve Your Communication Skills

Often in my training, I introduce a bunch of empathic and reflective communication skills. But one of the most fundamental skills is simply labeling people's feelings. If you want people to know that you're paying attention to their feelings and you're being empathic, one thing you could do is simply name their feelings.

If they seem angry, you can say, "You seem angry." If they seem scared, you say, "You sound frightened." If they've seemed anxious, say, "I can tell you look anxious." It's just naming and labeling their feelings as a way of demonstrating you're connected and you understand what people are saying. It's a great skill.

We have actors who play patients and families, and we asked for volunteers from the audience to do role-plays. One of the most common things that happens when we do the role-plays, especially the first couple of role-plays, I'll stand up there lecturing and say, "Name their feelings, name their feelings, label their feelings." The first couple of people will come up to volunteer, and the actor will be very sad or very angry. They'll be emoting like crazy, and the volunteer won't label any of their feelings. This has happened so many times that it's a very distinctive pattern in human behavior.

Now I've become convinced that it's just hard to get out of our comfort zone and do things differently. Especially if we're fully grown adult and we've been communicating in a certain way for a long time, it's hard to do things differently. So, the single most effective thing that you can do to improve your own communication skills is to take action. You have to actually implement some of these new skills in your own repertoire of behaviors.

You have to start behaving differently. It's the hardest thing about our behavior change. If you go on any kind of training on YouTube, especially, you'll see people urging you to take action, because it's just so easy to sit there and watch a video and say, "That's a great idea. I'm going to do that." But it's much harder to actually take action. But I know if you're watching a video like this, you're motivated to improve your communication skills.

Summary

So, do this one thing: Next time you're in an interaction with a friend or a family member or a coworker, whoever it is, name their feeling. They'll be feeling something. Maybe they're tired, maybe they're sad. Who knows? But people are constantly feeling some emotion, and they're often talking about how they're feeling. It's one of the most common topics of conversation.

So next time it happens, practice naming their emotion. Just say, "Oh, you seem really happy today. You seem frustrated about that." Whatever it is. You might think it sounds like a gimmick, but I've told you over and over again. If you do it earnestly, and with real sincere intention to be connected to your friend or your co-worker, they will not hear it as a gimmick. They'll just keep talking or they'll say, "Oh no, I'm not exactly frustrated. I'm just tired." Whatever it is. Try this one thing: Take action by labeling people's emotions. Let me know how it works.

Sign up for our email list and we'll send you a free e-book about empathy. You can also read all the other blog entries we've written about communication skills and politeness and difficult conversations, and all sorts of other topics around communication skill which I think you'll enjoy.