How to Make the Most of Communication

Wherever we go, we are inundated with communication. By the spoken word, we communicate with the people we meet, the people we speak with on the phone and even the people on the radio, the television and the movies. But that is just a very small part of the communication we are faced with on a daily basis. We are also constantly communicating with people in the written medium. Whatever we read—in books, newspapers, magazines and even on the labels of the products that we buy—is communication. And, don’t even get us started with the humongous amount of communication possibilities that exist on the Internet!

 

However, studies reveal that not all people respond to communication in the same manner. There are people who are more responsive to communication, and these people are those that eventually become better-informed and even more successful, while there are people who ignore most of the communication that comes their way. These are the people who miss out on a great and free way of personal development.

 

If you are planning to make the most of it, the one thing you have to bear in mind is to be receptive. Whatever form anyone is trying to communicate with you in, you have to be able to receive that input. If someone is speaking with you, open your ears wide to listen. If you are reading something, open your eyes wide. Most importantly, keep your brain open at all times. Receive all the information that you get and try to store as much of it as you can.

 

You can do this effectively by enhancing your input channels and downplaying the output ones. In spoken conversations, the simplest way to do this is to listen more and speak less. When you listen more, you are inputting information into your brain, and you are not spending more energy by talking, which is a form of output of information. When you are reading, however, the bulk of your communication is input. That is the reason why reading is such an important part of a child’s education—it is an almost 100% form of knowledge and information input, quite unlike other forms of communication that prevail.

 

This is one of the most essential things that you have to bear in mind if you are trying to make the most of communication. Communication is a two-sided affair, but there are ways in which you can make it work better to your advantage. 

 

Say What You Mean and Mean What You Say

Good communication stems from this adage—Say what you mean and mean what you say. If you take care of it in your conversation, you will find that you become a better speaker and eventually people start viewing you as a better person.

 

There are two aspects of this adage. Maybe you don’t quite understand how this line is relevant on the whole, but when you break it down into its two distinct parts, then you are better able to understand the message that it is trying to convey.

 

Saying What You Mean

 

For a person aspiring to be a good conversationalist, this is of utmost importance. You have to always say things that you truly mean. Using words just for the sake of them is something you should never indulge in. It is quite all right to be a person of a few words, but you have to make sure that you mean these words well. By extrapolation, you have to make sure that you don’t say anything that you don’t mean. Don’t say anything that you will regret later. Remember that most of the hurt in the world has come from ill-used words; wrong words that were used in the wrong place at the wrong time.

 

Before saying something important, it is quite all right to take a little breather and think over what you want to say. Don’t blurt things out. It is always wise to do a little thinking first. If you have time, you could think how to properly word a particular thing so that it has a better effect. This is an art, and our English language is so vast that there is a word for almost everything that doesn’t sound impolite or rude.

 

Keep in mind that you will always be held accountable for what you say. So that you don’t have to eat humble pie later, it is better to say only things that you truly mean, things that you will stand testimony for at any point in future.

 

Meaning What You Say

 

This is the more difficult part of the conversation. This is the part where you are supposed to take action. When you have said something, you need to stand by it. You have to put it into action if you have said it. That’s what this part refers to.

 

A person’s real worth is seen in how they are able to stand for their words. Indeed, spoken words hold no real value unless and until they are implemented. And that is the reason why people want you to mean what you say. You are not allowed to just say things without being aware of the repercussions. On the other hand, if you say something and then are able to stand by it, you gain everyone’s respect. 

 

What to Remember When in Conversation

When we are deep in conversation with someone, it is so easy to forget how to behave! True, when we are totally engrossed in something, we don’t realize that there are a few things that need to be kept in mind. Conversation etiquette is a very important aspect of personality development. Perhaps the person speaking with you—the other end of the conversation—may not realize your demeanor, but if there is someone else listening in on the conversation, they are likely to make a judgment.

 

So, what is conversation etiquette? What are the things that you need to keep in mind, though it is very difficult to do that during a conversation? Here they are…

 

Listen More Than You Talk

 

One of the chief aspects of conversation etiquette is that you have to listen more than you talk. Give the other person a chance to say what they want to say. Hear it out completely. Don’t interrupt in between unless you need some elaboration on something.

 

Don’t Shoot Off Your Own Trajectory

 

A very irritating habit during conversation is when people start telling their own tales right in the middle of something someone else is telling them. You say something to your friend, and then your friend starts giving an example from their own life! You should make a definite effort not to do this. Your own life is colorful to you, but at the moment someone else is sharing something with you. Hear them out completely and give them valuable inputs where needed. Your own story can wait.

 

Remember Details

 

It is very important to be attentive when talking with someone. You cannot afford to miss out on the details. When they are saying something, it is very impolite to ask them what they are talking about! Though human memory is what it is, you cannot cite your poor memory as a reason all the time.

 

React According to Situation

 

Be ready with the right reactions… surprise, disgust, happiness, anger, etc. Every story that someone tells you needs a reaction. Don’t be too reticent about expressing your emotions. People want reassurance in the form of your emotions. 

 

Don’t Start Patronizing or Advising

 

Unless called upon to do so, you should never dole out advice during a conversation. When someone tells you something, most times they just want a pair of ears. That gives them enough liberation. But if you start dishing out advice, it might be taken in the wrong way. Give advice only when someone asks you for it.

 

These are the basic rules you have to remember when you are in conversation with someone. Basically, be a decent, attentive person who shows their expressions when someone is talking with them. That’s what’s expected of a listener anyway. 

 

About Improving Yourself for Your Teenage Children’s Development

Among the different aspects of improving children, a very profound way is to try and improve oneself. Many experts have spoken about how it is important that parents first try and remove the negative traits from themselves if they want their children to improve. And this is all the more important when the child is at an impressible age such as the teenage. 

 

A teenager is easily influenced by what their parents do. If the father smokes or comes home drunk, the teenager might feel that this is all acceptable behavior. The teenager will certainly begin to emulate that. Things may not happen when the child is still living with parents but in later life, when he becomes a father himself, he might think it is all right to come home drenched in booze.

 

Whatever you do today is going to affect your children’s future lives. That includes all your positive and negative behavior. Even a seemingly minor thing like arguing with your spouse over who brings in the newspaper each morning can leave its indelible impression on a teenager’s life. For, the teenager will grow up thinking that such arguments are commonplace, they can happen and will happen, and that could lead to discord in their future life.

 

This will sound very difficult, but if you want to improve your teenager’s present and future life, you have to give them a totally positive environment at home. You have to teach them the values you want them to grow up with, and you have to ensure that you abide by those values yourself. You cannot expect to just be a preacher. You have to practice what you preach.

 

Positive values such as hard-work and integrity are also passed on from parents to children most emphatically during their teenage years. If a son sees his father slogging at work, he will respect people’s dedication to work. If a daughter sees her mother doing everything she can to run her house, she is going to have those values in her later years as well.

 

This is how you can teach your children the most valuable lessons in life when they are teenagers… by living them yourself. There is no other way to go about it. If you don’t abide by what you want to teach your children, then they aren’t going to adopt it into their lives, come what may. 

 

Learning from Your Children—A Quintessential Form of Self-Improvement

There are a lot of ways in which you can develop yourself. People who are on a constant quest of self-improvement always keep looking at avenues that they can use to enhance themselves. They look at the people around them and learn. And a very important resource here is one’s own children. There are people who look forward to learning from their children, and improve themselves in the process.

 

For a very significant portion of your life, you are teaching your children various aspects of existence. You educate them, your train them in the basic skills, you enable them to become good fits for the society they are living in and so on. But then, there comes a time when your children start growing beyond you. They are more abreast with the rapidly changing technology; and that is one reason for that. There is also the fact that children are younger than their parents, and their younger minds are more receptive to knowledge and information. It is not at all surprising when we see a father-son team and find out that the son is the better-informed of the two.

 

Parents who look forward to learning from their children start quite early, right from the schooling days of the children. Now, there might be many things you learned and forgot, many things you just didn’t learn because they weren’t invented back them. Learning along with your child is like going back to school, but a school that has revamped itself according to the contemporary times.

 

Every step of the way, your trysts with your children could be a learning process. Even when you are just trying to handle your kid, you are learning new aspects of qualities such as patience, compassion and understanding. You are developing in the process. When you are teaching your child to become responsible, you are becoming more responsible yourself.

 

Learning from your children isn’t all about seeking the new knowledge and information that they have amassed because of the big advantage that they are living in present times; it is also that you are learning how to develop your personality. A lot of people become more confident when they move with their children. They feel pride in their children’s achievements and it improves their demeanor as well. These are all different aspects of self-improvement that can happen in being spending time with your children. 

 

Which Parental Approach Is the Best?

For first time parents, it becomes very difficult to choose among the various approaches at parenting that they hear. Some parents are quite strict with their children while others are more laidback. There are all kinds of parents, and to confuse matters more, there is no uniformity in the way their children grow up to be. Why, even within the same house, siblings can turn out to be radically different from each other! So, what form of parenting should you choose?

 

If you decide to be a very strict parent who puts a lot of restrictions on their children, the whole thing may backfire. Such forms of parenting worked in the medieval periods, when children didn’t know better. They weren’t exposed to anything apart from what went on in their own family and, of course, there was a much-stinted view of family values that let such behavior be accepted. Today’s children are better aware of what goes on around them. If parents are too restrictive, they may possibly rebel.

 

At the same time, it doesn’t work being a very laidback parent either. Children are going to pick up the wrong habits along the way and it becomes important to you to correct them. You may even have to admonish them at times. Fail at that, and the children may grow up to be wrong and then they may blame you for not showing them the right path.

 

Though there is nothing like a foolproof method of parenting, it is important to avoid the extremes. Don’t be too strict and don’t be too lenient either. You have to walk on the middle path. You have to show your children what’s wrong when they err and you have to reward them when they do something commendable. This is the form of parenting that you have to emulate. This is the most practical approach, the situation-based approach. You don’t decide in advance how you are going to react. You take things at a time and then you behave as per the situation. 

 

How to Develop Yourself as a Parent

You may be expecting too much from your children, want your children to do things in a particular way, but in that you may have lost sight of the most important fact. And that is, there might be shortcomings within you that are keeping you away from becoming a good parent. Are there any such pitfalls? You have to realize them when there is still time and improve upon them. This is what can keep you developing as a better parent.

 

Your children will try to emulate you, consciously and subconsciously. Many of their developmental aspects are going to depend on your personality. For example, if you behave in society in a particular way, your children are very likely to behave in the same manner as well. This is because of exposure. Children become like what they are exposed to because they don’t know of any other way. When they learn the options they have in later life, it is too late for them to change themselves. That is the reason why people from a family tend to behave in a similar manner.

 

There are many such traits that children directly or indirectly pick up from their parents. Some of these include honesty, diligence to work, way of interacting with people, money-mindedness, love and affection, behavior with friends, etc. Every minute of your life you are training your children on these aspects, and most times you don’t even realize you are.

 

For instance, if a storekeeper gives you some money by mistake and you return it, children learn the value of honesty. They understand that they should not keep what is not theirs. When they see you working hard, they realize that hard work is important. When they see you helping your friends, they realize friends are important. These are lessons you are giving out to your children at all times.

 

Hence, if you want your children to be better individuals, maybe you need to improve yourself first. When you work in these positive values within yourself, your children are going to see the results of those values, see that they are good, and then try to incorporate those values in their own lives. They are going to become better individuals just because their parents were better people. So, you know now where the real training for your child begins—within yourself as their parent. 

 

5 Parental Self-Improvement Tips

In your quest to become a better parent, you often tend to ignore the fact that it is self-improvement that is the priority. Improving your children comes next. Most people try to change their children, while what would probably be better in the long run is to improve their own personality.

 

If you are looking at being a better parent yourself, then these are five important things that you should not ignore at all.

 

Learning from Mistakes

 

Parents must have the elegance to learn from their mistakes. When you are with your children, you are going to have several situations when things don’t work your way. At such times, your children are looking at you, learning from you. They are seeing how you handle the situation. Do you learn anything from it and put in a better effort? If you do, if you learn from your failings, then your children are subconsciously going to pick the habit as well.

 

A Thirst for Knowledge

 

Most parents want their children to be the most knowledgeable people on earth, but what do they do to gain knowledge themselves? You have to keep learning. Whenever something new happens, make an effort to know about it. Emphasize on the importance of knowing all you can. This is what sets your children going. They also get this insatiable craving for knowledge and that stays with them for life.

 

Being Social and Sociable

 

Children learn from their parents by observing them. How are you socially? Are you concerned about the people around you? Do you behave well in public? When you do that, your children are sure to follow in your footsteps. But if you are gregarious, a nuisance to others, thinking too much about yourself, then your children are going to think this is acceptable behavior.

 

Not Expecting Too Much

 

To avoid hurt, parents must refrain from building too many expectations from their kids. Children are going to be what they want to be; they will be individuals in their own right. Parents can only lead them to a distance; they cannot go all the way with them. And the root cause of parental hurt is over-expectation. Don’t expect your children to live in a particular way and you will be happier.

 

Relationship with Your Partner

 

The most important thing is that you have to be loving and caring towards your partner. This has a very deep influence on your child’s life. If you are affectionate to your partner, your child will learn what love is. Try building on this relationship at all times. It is probably the most important education you are giving your child.

 

Parenting—What to Expect from Your Children

A large share of all parental torment stems from belied expectations. Parents tend to expect a lot from their children as they are growing up. They want their children to be at the head of the class, win awards in sports, excel at their college studies, bag the best job possible, get a life partner that they approve of, have exactly the right number of children according to their ideas and so on. At every step of the way, parents hold expectations from their children. And when these expectations are belied—which is bound to happen if there are so many of them—the parental hurt begins.

 

When a person holds a child—their own child—for the first time, the feeling that generally crosses their mind is that they want to turn these children into spitting images of themselves. Most times, they want to transform these children into what they couldn’t become in life. Within those brief minutes of their first encounter with their children, most parents map out an entire lifetime for them… right from the way they will give the children their first room in the house to the time they will build their own household in their later life.

 

But this is where parents sow the seeds of troubles in their later life. If you expect too much from your children, you are simply bracing yourself to face the hurt later on. And it is not fair on your children as well.

 

The one thing—and the most important thing—that you have to keep in mind is that your children are not extensions of yourself. They are independent people. They have their own personalities. They have their own likes and dislikes. They have an opinion about everything. And all of these things may be different from what you have.

 

You give an education to your child. You give them the things they want to survive in life. You find out what talents they have and then give them the avenues to explore them more. You give them financial security in their lives. You monitor them so that they don’t fall into bad habits and ruin their lives. You teach them values. You show them what’s right and what’s wrong. You teach them to be independent.

 

But, it would be very wrong if you let them depend on you for their entire lives. Once you have handheld them through their younger days, there comes a time when you should let them go ahead in the world. Let them stumble and get up themselves if they have to. Let them find out things, the way you did.

 

The key is to not expect more from your children. They are individuals too, and as their life with catch up with them, they will have similar limitations and constraints as you have today. Despite meaning well, they may not be able to demonstrate their love and affection for you.

 

But let this not hamper your parental love for them. This is the way it should be, the way nature has ordained it to be.