There is no doubt that interpersonal skills are the backbone for achieving success in your personal relationship and work experience. If you are serious about this and want to know ‘How to improve interpersonal skills’ then this article will provide you a step by step strategy to follow in order to be strong in interpersonal skills.
Improving your interpersonal skills will always open a door of better opportunity for getting a quality job, achieving success and promotion in the workplace.
You can improve interpersonal skills by accumulating feedbacks from others those are closer to you, accepting criticism as the way to improvement, Learning from the people who possess excellent communication or interpersonal skill, Finding out your weaknesses in interpersonal skills and working upon them to develop, Always carry positive attitude in spite of any circumstances, accept problem or challenges as an opportunity to display interpersonal skills, always be willing to learn from others who are better than you in interpersonal skills, to take responsibilities rather than blaming on others, measure your performance to understand where you need to grow, display your cheerful and happy face to others while you are communicating, listen actively when people are speaking, do not speak with Hurry rather think before you speak, plan and prepare before you communicate with others, always appreciate others who deserve it, add humor in your communication, be a supportive or empathetic person to others.
20+ Best ways to improve strong interpersonal skill
TABLE OF CONTENT
20+ Best ways to have strong interpersonal skill are :
- Accumulate genuine feedback
- Embrace criticism
- Learn from others strong in interpersonal skills
- Detect your weaknesses
- Be willing to rectify
- Be positive in every situation
- Look at the problem or challenges as opportunity
- Develop your learning spirit
- Do not blame others
- Be responsible
- Measure yourself
- Display cheerful face
- Be an active listener
- Avoid interrupting others
- Think before you talk
- Plan and prepare for communication
- Find the way to appreciate others
- Add humor while you communicate
- Be supportive and empathetic to others
- Be an assertive person
- Do not be controlled by emotion
- Respect and show real interest to others
1. Accumulate genuine feedback
Do not measure your level of interpersonal skills by yourself, because most of the time, we are incapable of detecting our real weaknesses.
So, the solution is, take help from your family members, friends or close colleagues, who will provide you with genuine feedback about your performance in interpersonal behavior, and request them to be honest in their feedback.
As you accumulate the feedback, now is the time to analyze them and find the insights of your weaknesses and develop the necessary interpersonal skills that you lack.
2. Embrace criticism
How do you feel when someone criticizes you, most probably offensive, right? But do you know this criticism can be a powerful tool for improving your interpersonal skills.
If you instead of hating criticism, start embracing it positively for developing your criticism then soon you will find that criticism is not a barrier rather a stepping stone for your improvement of interpersonal skills and as a result establishing better relationships with your friends, family and colleagues for quality personal and professional life.
3. Learn from others, who are strong in interpersonal skills
Learning from others by keenly observing them and imparting every good and necessary skill in our lives is another great way to strengthen our interpersonal skills.
There are many ways you can do this, you can observe the leaders in your work area and learn from them, watching the videos of top leaders in YouTube, reading the blogs of top leaders etc, all these can help you to learn from the people possessing strong interpersonal skills and becoming a better person in interpersonal skills.
4. Detect your weaknesses
A sick person will be treated in the right manner only if the cause of the sickness is detected, this is the reason patients go through many tests for detection of the actual cause of disease.
In the same way, if you want to improve your interpersonal skills and to enhance your professional capability, then the first thing that you need to do is to detect your weaknesses. Once you understand your weaknesses, it becomes much easier to work on them and develop.
But detection of your weakness in interpersonal skills is not too easy, for this you need to analyze the criticism of the people towards your interpersonal behavior and also find out the insights from the feedback that you gathered from your friends and family.
5. Be willing to rectify
Once you recognise your weaknesses, now is the time to rectify them, but the question is, are you ready to rectify them, the rectification of your weaknesses or wrong behaviours will not happen just like that, rather you need to work upon them, give your effort and apply strong determination.
Most people have a habit of finding excuses to cover up their weaknesses, if you are finding some excuses to justify your weaknesses in interpersonal skills, then it is pretty impossible to rectify them.
So the solution is, do not search for excuses rather be honest with yourself and have a willing heart to rectify your wrongs, and gradually you will be moving towards better interpersonal behavior.
6. Be positive in every situation
You can either be a positive minded or negative minded person. Did you see the people with negative charge, this kind of people always thinks about what can not be done rather than what can be done.
People with a positive charge will always think positively in every situation. In order to excel in interpersonal skills, you need to be a positively charged person, always think about what can be done and seek for the possibilities.
7. Look at the problem or challenges as opportunity
Problem is a common issue faced by every person and workplace. Do you know that there can be hidden opportunities behind most problems? Let us understand this with an example.
Think about how Facebook came into existence, the founder Mark Zuckerberg, realised a common problem people face in order to be connected with each other.
He recognized that people want to communicate with each other and share their thoughts and ideas but there was no proper means to make it happen.
It was a problem that people faced to communicate with each other, So he programmed Facebook, which became very popular because of it’s great feature to communicate with friends and family. And by providing ad services and other monetizing processes, he made it a huge profitable business.
so we see that there is a problem with communicating but behind this problem there was an opportunity to establish a big business.
When you see a problem, think about the hidden opportunities behind it. You need to take the problem positively to find the opportunities.
Taking challenges as an opportunity, will help you to become a better person in interpersonal skills.
8. Develop your learning spirit
You can only learn and develop a skill if you have the spirit of learning. If you are really serious about improving interpersonal skills then you must learn to develop your learning spirit.
Have an attitude of learning from different resources such as YouTube, blogs, personally from people etc, even When you watch movies, you can learn a lot of good things for your career and personality growth.
9. Do not blame others
It is very easy to blame others and get rid of the problem by throwing it up on somebody else, but this attitude makes us unproductive and becomes a barrier for our personal and professional relationship.
Blaming others in order to justify our mistakes or weaknesses will never help us to improve our interpersonal skills, rather being honest and acknowledging the mistakes and weaknesses will.
10. Be responsible
Who likes an irresponsible person, most power in none. In the same way, when we become responsible and take our works seriously we become lovable and likeable to others.
Completing the work with responsibility and being responsible for the quality and the productivity of the task are the powerful interpersonal skills we can possess.
We can learn to become responsible even from our home, by completing our works honestly and responsibly. When we continue to be responsible towards our duty, it becomes a habit in our life, as a result it becomes a part of interpersonal skill which enhances our career growth and makes us a better professional person.
11. Measure yourself
you can be sure of the improvement in interpersonal skills, only by measuring it.But how do you measure it, you can measure the growth or development of it, by taking a repeated feedback with a gap of a certain time span from your friends, family and colleagues.
Evaluate your last feedback by comparing with the previous one, and try to find out your progress. If you find progress in a certain interpersonal skill then mark it and when you reach your goal, move to the next one.
12. Display cheerful face
It is said that our face is the mirror of our mind. A cheerful face displays a healthy mind, moreover a cheerful face is liked by everyone.
A cheerful and happy face emits positive energy, which is also capable of positively energizing others.
It also makes you an attractive person, whom people like to get closer to and create a better work environment. This is the reason it is considered one of the essential interpersonal skills.
13. Be an active listener
Most people love to talk and are reluctant to listen, but in order to be an excellent communicator with strong interpersonal skill, you must be an active listener.
To become an active listener:
- You should not interrupt when another person is speaking.
- Establish regular eye contact with the speaker.
- Show your interest by some action like nodding head or giving some response.
- Display your active listening through action like with appropriate facial expression and body language.
14. Avoid interrupting others
You might have not considered the effects of interruption but there are several negative effects produced by interrupting others while they are speaking.
Some results that interruption can create are:
- Interruption shows your lack of interest towards the word of the speaker.
- It causes insults towards the speaker.
- Your pride or bossy manner is displayed.
- Establishes poor communication.
15. Think before you talk
A word that goes out of mouth can never be taken back, it is just like a bullet that goes out of a gun. Speaking without thinking can not only show your poor communication skill but also it has tremendous power to create misunderstanding, confusion, hamper in business and broken relationships.
So, it is always a wise decision to think and plan before you speak, as well preparation helps you to deliver the words effectively which causes a successful communication.
16. Plan and prepare for communication
Communication is not all about speaking a bunch of persuasive words in clever manner, rather a productive communication consists of many other factors like maintaining your body language, eye contact, presenting the information in an engaging and attractive manner, delivering the information flawlessly and without error etc.
In order to follow all these standards of better communication, you may need to go through a proper planning and well preparation.
17. Find the way to appreciate others
You can either be an appreciator or a person who always finds some way to criticise others. Remember, always criticising others takes you away from others by creating an unseen barrier between you and others.
Whereas, appreciation works exactly the opposite way, it makes others feel important and create a positive energy in them.
As a result others get closer to you and an unseen trust and liking is created between you and others.
18. Add humor while you communicate
There is time to be serious and time to be humorous. Adding humour to your communication is like adding spice to the curry, humour creates relaxation in the mind of the listener and they become more attentive and attracted towards your words.
Try to find some creative way to create some kind of humour while you are communicating with others, but make sure your humour doesn’t offend another’s sentiment or humiliate others.
Let your humor create a genuine positive charge to your listener.
19. Be supportive and empathetic to others
It is said that if you want to go short distance go alone but if you want to go far distance go together. In order to achieve the greater goal, we may need to work as a team and a team can never work successfully without supporting each other and being empathetic toward another.
Having a team spirit with a supporting and empathetic attitude is an essential interpersonal skill that every individual must possess to be a part of a successful team.
20. Be an assertive person
Assertive attitude is all about being patient, calm and positive while speaking or standing for your right or other person’s right without becoming aggressive and attacking and hurting others.
An assertive person can establish a problem solving communication and help the business to enhance by displaying a great positive manner.
21. Do not be controlled by emotion
Emotion is good till you control it, but if emotion starts controlling you then soon you will face severe tragedy. As an example, if your anger controls you during a controversial communication, you may end up with a bitter relationship and cause severe harm to a business.
Emotion is like a gas cylinder, which is good if you control it and use it wisely with a regulator, but if you fail to control it and all the gas release without regulation then it has tremendous power to burn your whole house and even take life.
So, learn to wisely control your emotions like happiness, anger, frustration etc.
22. Respect and show real interest to others
If you respect others and show genuine interest to others, it is normal that you will be respected and shown interest by others.
Most of the time, people are very selfish, they want to hurt others, offend severely but expect respect from them. It does not work, if you expect respect and care from others then you must take the first step of respecting and caring for others.
Let me know your suggestion in the comment section below for adding more life to this article and helping others to grow.
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