Develop Effective People Skills For Yourself and Your Team

For some, relating and cooperating with others comes naturally, even easily. To these folks who struggle to relate to others, developing the right skills is difficult, sometimes it even feels impossible.

Realizing Your Goal To Improve Your People Skills is the First Step

Maybe you've come to a point in your life that your career is stuck. Maybe you lack the communication skills to get ahead in your current position. Perhaps the mere thought of presenting in front of an audience makes your stomach churn.

Maybe you lack social skill because you struggle with low self-esteem? Whatever the root of your struggles is, be confident you can work through and overcome them.

The Capacity For Discipline and Dedication

It takes dedication to overcome these deeply-rooted not-so-great aspects of ourselves. The rewards are worth the momentary discomfort compared to the everyday feeling of being unable to break through these barriers to your success.

By clearly looking at our behaviors we can see where your effective people skills are lacking.

Communication Lies In the Heart

Whether you care to admit it or not, your level of people skills are about how you communicate with others. This can be:

• verbal
• body language
• written communication
• procrastination
• Lack of Creative Problem Solving
• aggressiveness
• passivity

Working through these roadblocks you can revolutionize your team and organization.

Empathy Translates Into People Skills

This means being empathetic (perceiving your team members as living, breathing, sentient beings) and being inclusive rather than exclusive between leadership and "the team." All of these people skills help create a nurturing and safe environment on your team.

So how do you set up a blueprint to develop your effective communication skills?

• Target areas or experiences in your life (personal and professional) where your communication skills let you down.
• Examine your motives (fear, mistrust, anger, pride) for communicating the way you did.
• Lay out a framework with details targeting why you want to improve your communication skills.
• Set milestones with dates to test your improvement
• Write detailed notes (with dates) marking your successes and setbacks.

Most people resist the idea of writing anything down. At first it seems like a burden. You'll say things like: "I don't have time." or "I don't want to carry a notepad around with me." Any type of excuse is purely resistance to improvement on your part.

Setting Goals to Fight Deeply Rooted Resistance

If you can't commit to writing down your intention to improve, how do you expect to establish the dedication and discipline it will take to reach your goal?

Writing down your intention is like planting the seeds in your mind. The framework you set, and the continued journaling is the water that allows them to grow.

As a leader you're obviously invested in building a great team. Developing effective people skills is the most important things you can do to build a well-rounded and successful life.

Here's why: Your team emulates your actions. How you communicate directly determines how your team communicates. Developing effective communication skills is the biggest investment into the betterment of your business.

The power of effective people skills lies in its ability to positively influence the trajectory of your team, and your business.