How to Improve Communication Skills: 14 Best Worksheets

In his acclaimed book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie (2019, p. 32) hints at a key strategy involved in effective communication that involves focusing on others and their motivations:

“Instead of condemning people, let’s try to understand them. Let’s try to figure out why they do what they do. That’s a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness.”

But how do we put this strategy into action?

In this post, we’ll give you the tools to be a strategic and effective communicator, no matter your context, by walking you through a range of worksheets, digital activities, and resources to discover better communication.

Before you continue, we thought you might like to download our five positive psychology tools for free. These science-based tools will help you and those you work with build better social skills and better connect with others.

How to Improve Communication Skills

Whether you’re delivering a presentation to a room full of conference attendees or hashing out a disagreement with your partner, many of the skills you need to achieve your goals in these different scenarios will be the same.

To improve your communication techniques, scholars recommend training in the following skills.

Perspective taking

Defined as a cognitive attempt to consider another’s viewpoint (Longmire & Harrison, 2018), perspective taking enables us to communicate in a way that is likely to resonate with others in the way we intended.

Perspective taking is often referred to as putting yourself in another’s shoes.

For instance, when preparing a presentation, we can take the perspective of our audience by considering their background knowledge on the subject of our talk. By doing so, we can communicate in a way that will match the listeners’ level of background knowledge, rather than leaving them in the dust.

Likewise, we can be intentional about trying to take our partner’s perspective during a disagreement by imagining how our actions might make them feel or by imagining how we would feel if the roles in the conflict were reversed.

Usually, this involves showing empathy to the person you are speaking to and creating space for their emotions.

Self-awareness

Self-awareness involves being able to see yourself clearly and objectively through reflection and introspection. It requires you to separate your sense of identity from your thoughts and emotions.

But why is this important?

According to organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich (Workforce.com, 2020), we can only be as good at influence or collaboration (and a range of other skills) as we are at self-awareness. That is to say, if we work to develop our self-awareness, it can have a ripple effect on our ability to communicate, engage, and empathize with others.

In the example of delivering a conference presentation, self-awareness may help us recognize that we appear withdrawn when speaking to a crowd. This awareness then enables us to amend our behavior and style of communication.

Likewise, in the example of the disagreement with a partner, self-awareness might help us recognize our tendency to grow defensive to perceived criticism in a particular area. Self-awareness can counter this, allowing us to remain open minded and curious in such discussions.

In sum, good communication involves balancing our own perspective with that of others to convey a message successfully and accept feedback.

3 Examples of Good Communication Skills

As noted, a key component of both perspective taking and self-awareness is empathy.

To empathize is to

“respond to another’s perceived emotional state by experiencing feelings of a similar sort.”

Chismar, 1988, p. 257

Showing empathy is another way to take the perspective of a conversation partner by acknowledging and validating their emotions in a situation.

No matter the situation, there’s usually a place for empathic communication. Let’s look at three scenarios. For each, see if you can identify the more empathic response out of the two response options.

A nasty bruise

• Scenario: You are having coffee with your sibling, and they hold out their arm to reveal a dark welt on their arm. “Check out this bruise from my fall down the stairs!” they say.

Which of the following is the more empathic response?

• Response A: You squint at the bruise. “That’s tiny,” you say. “Look at what I got when I was hit by a bike!”
• Response B: You wince. “Ouch! I can imagine that must have really hurt.”

Problems with Mom

• Scenario: You’re walking down the street in conversation with a friend. He’s been describing a recent conversation with his mother, in which he grew very frustrated. “When she shows up at my house without calling first, it’s stressful for me, but I can’t get her to listen to my point of view.”

Which of the following is the more empathic response?

• Response A: “I’m sure it’s just because she really wants to see you.”
• Response B: “I can imagine that must be really frustrating if you never know when she’s going to stop by.”

Missing money

• Scenario: You and your friend are at the counter at a coffee shop. As your friend goes to pay, her card gets declined. “I can’t understand where all my money goes after I get paid,” she laments.

Which of the following is the more empathic response?

• Response A: “I reckon you should make a budget.”
• Response B: “Yeah, it’s annoying when money disappears like that.”

In each of the above scenarios, Response B is the more empathic option. In these responses, the speaker validates the other person’s emotions and reflects them back to the other person.

Response A reflects different forms of communication in each scenario: one-upping, explaining, and advising, respectively. These are just a few different styles of response that you can learn more about in our free Empathy Bingo worksheet.

3 Most Effective Worksheets and Tools

Let’s now look at three free worksheets and tools you can use to help develop your clients’ perspective taking, self-awareness, and empathy when communicating.

• Active Listening Reflection Worksheet
  This worksheet provides a useful summary of the techniques involved in active listening. Once the techniques have been reviewed, clients can practice them in pairs or groups or reflect on a recent conversation with someone in their life to apply their learning.
• Trading Places Worksheet
  The Trading Places worksheet takes your client through 10 steps to help them imagine a situation from another’s perspective. These steps can be especially useful when a client is struggling to move forward following a disagreement with someone in their life.
• How to Improve Communication in Relationships: 7 Essential Skills
  This simple leaflet details seven approaches and frameworks to better understand how we communicate and develop our skills in relating to others.

3 Games for Developing Communication Skills

Improving your communication skills need not be tedious for you and your clients.

Check out these three games for both children and adults, designed to make strengthening communication with others fun:

• 500 Years Ago
  In this free worksheet, players attempt to describe modern-day phenomena to their partner, who pretends they have no knowledge of the modern world because they are from long in the past. In each round, the speaker must practice empathic communication and perspective taking by tailoring their language to their old-timey listener.
• Shuffle
  In this game, five children race to occupy four positions at the corners of a square marked on the floor. As kids play rounds of rock–paper–scissors to resolve disputes, the game will introduce them to the basic principles of conflict and negotiation.
• Where Should We Begin? A Game of Stories
  In this card game by leading psychotherapist Esther Perel, players take turns drawing cards to tell stories about themselves, their hopes, and their dreams. In doing so, participants can grow closer and share greater intimacy through the power of storytelling.

Assessing Your Client’s Skills: 3 Questionnaires & Scales

Want to assess your client’s communication skills? Look at these three useful questionnaires and scales:

• Effective Communication Styles Inventory
  This test uses 15 forced-choice items to help individuals determine their preferred communication styles, including thinking, doing, collaborating, and creating.
• The Revised Self-Monitoring Scale
  This scale by Lennox and Wolfe (1984) is a 13-item adaptation of Snyder’s (1974) 25-item Self-Monitoring Scale. This reconfigured scale is a useful way to help clients assess two facets of their communication: their ability to modify their self-presentation and their sensitivity to the expressions of others.
• The Communication Effectiveness Profile
  This 84-item inventory provides a comprehensive assessment of seven factors contributing to good or bad communication, including empathizing and the ability to read nonverbal cues.

Using Digital Tools to Improve Communication

Many of the social skills that contribute to effective communication in face-to-face situations are equally important when communicating virtually.

Thankfully, many new tools, games, and approaches are emerging to help facilitate communication training and skill development through virtual channels.

3 Games for your videoconferencing sessions

If you’re looking to improve communication with a small group or work team, here are some fun games and digital interventions you can use to have fun, break the ice, and encourage open communication via video conferencing.

• Synonym challenge
  Get everyone engaged, expand your vocabulary, and warm up your call participants with the synonym challenge.

Time: About one minute per round
How to play: Determine a turn order for each participant in the call. Begin by having the first player say a word. Participants must then proceed in sequence, saying synonyms for that original word without repeating a word already said. The first player to take longer than five seconds to say a word is eliminated from the next round.

• Virtual escape rooms
  Emerging research has pointed to escape rooms as possible avenues for developing team capabilities and creative problem solving (Adams, Burger, Crawford, & Setter, 2018; Cohen et al., 2020). Why not try one out with your team?

Time: About one hour
How to play: With virtual escape rooms, players must work in teams to watch videos, track clues, and cooperate, all to escape a virtual environment or race another team to complete a series of puzzles.

See The Escape Game for a popular virtual escape room provider and more information.

• Virtual murder mystery
  Break the ice and have fun with role-play at your next video call get-together by solving a quirky murder mystery.

Time: Typically one to two hours
How to play: Each participant in a call is assigned a character or role with background information about their motivations and why they might be a suspect in a central murder mystery. Participants must then chat with one another in character to deduce information about the possible murderer (or point the finger at someone else if they are the murderer).

Check out the whodunnit app for a popular virtual murder mystery provider.

Communication Resources From PositivePsychology.com

Looking for more resources to teach communication skills? Here are some free materials you can use when conducting therapy, coaching, or counseling with groups:

• Listening Accurately Worksheet
  This handout presents five simple steps to facilitate accurate listening and can help establish some basics for training in effective communication.
• Communicating an Idea Effectively
  This handout lists three key features of a well-explained idea and strategies for building these into one’s communication.
• Making Eye Contact Exercise
  This exercise is a fun way to kick off a group training day by warming up people’s non-verbal communication skills.
• Effective Communication in Therapy & Counseling: 17 Techniques
  This article about communication in therapy is a helpful guide for therapists as it provides a number of techniques that can be used to improve the therapeutic relationship.

For even more tools, check out our dedicated article with more than 30 communication games and activities you can try with your clients.

A Take-Home Message

Whether you’re the quietest person at a table or a smooth-talking socialite, the ability to put yourself in the shoes of those with whom you speak is key to effective communication.

Likewise, understanding yourself in terms of your strengths and potential biases when communicating can only serve you as you connect with others. Be sure to check out the resources throughout this post to help you or your clients develop these skills today for better relationships tomorrow.

We hope you’ve found this post and the listed resources useful. Let us know in the comments: What’s one technique or skill you’ve used to improve your communication?

We’d love to hear from you!

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