Poor communication is often stated as a major problem in business and prevents progress. This applies to both the organisation’s internal and external communication.
In ‘Brenda Eckstein International’s’ training programmes, we help individuals to enhance their competence in this field. By improving their personal effectiveness, productivity increases. The ripple effect can be enormous.
I usually consolidate participants’ input after each session and reflect on what I can learn from it. That way I can ‘continuously improve’ on my own performance as a trainer and also explore ways to ‘self-generate’.
Recently after one of our most popular EYES (Enhance Your Executive Skills) Communication Skills Workshops in which we cover ‘effective delegation’, ‘giving instructions’ and ‘how to be more assertive’ I was updating the input from ‘Lessons from the Tree’. In this exercise, participants observe and then instruct their partners to draw a specific tree. There are many lessons to be learnt from this simple exercise. And the CEO’s in the group learn as much as those in less senior positions! Improving their communication skills through these concepts enable them to generate more time to spend on strategic issues.
What fascinated me after this particular workshop was that I copied-and-pasted the participants’ combined input into a ‘Word Cloud’. Have a look at the picture! It came out looking like a tree. What a co-incidence!
Yes, creativity adds energy and can help to broaden our perspectives. We constantly need to find new ways of ‘getting our message across’. Different people vary in the way they of absorb information. So, use a range of ways of providing information and you have more chance of closing the gap between your intention in sending your message and the recipient’s perception of your message.
Most of our training is ‘in house’ and specially tailored for companies. However we do run occasional ‘public’ workshops on this topic. The next will be held in KwaZulu-Natal in May 2012 - Pietermaritzburg on Thursday, May 10 2012 and Mooi River on Thursday, May 17 2012.
For more information on our training sessions on this topic please contact me – Phone: +27 33 3425432, Mobile: + 27 82 4993311, brenda@146.66.90.172