How to improve Communication Skills

When improving communication skills goes wrong

Speaking about the traditional communication skills that most of us already know about would be a big waste of time - the internet is full of thousands of web sites that tell you how to be a good listener, how to use eye contact and how to be polite in a job interview. Many books and websites get communication skills wrong by thinking that they are superficial in such a way that they can be improved in minutes by such inferior advice.
While being a good listener will certainly help still you need much more complex techniques to understand and properly communicate with a human being.
We all know that a single human being can be too complex to understand, now what happens when two complex beings try to communicate? Will a superficial advice such as be a good listener improve the communication skills? Of course not.

How to communicate with people better

In order to improve your communication skills you need a deep understanding of yourself and of the people around you.

Lets suppose that someone has a low self esteem and doesn't like to talk much. Now what will happen if you decided to be a good listener? both of you will remain silent and you will get bored of each other.
The key to have superb communication skills is to be able to look for signals that people send about their personalities before they even open their mouth. I am not referring to body language alone but i am referring to a combined set of methods that can help you get a better understanding of the person you are dealing with and so communicate with him better.

In communication skills no one size fits all

One of the most common mistakes people do when trying to improve their communication skills is believing that the same advice that worked with someone will work with everyone else while that's completely wrong.
People are different and that's why you might need to change your strategies whenever you approach a different person.
For example some people criticize others all the time because they have a negative outlook about life while others criticize others because they feel jealous. Even though both people did the same action which is criticizing you still you can never respond to them the same way because that will never work.

Improving your communication skills by learning non conventional ones

Some examples of non-conventional communication skills are body language (not just eye contact and body posture), and personology or face reading. The former can be used to determine the emotional state of the person standing in front of you like fear, shame, guilt, confidence....etc while the latter can let you find out more than ten personality traits of a person you just met just by noticing his facial features.The below links will help you know about both these non traditional communication skills and much more.