25 Quick Tips to improve your interpersonal skills
Interpersonal skills are skills used by a person to interact with other people, both individually and in groups. It is a key life skill which we use everyday in both our professional and personal lives. It is our interpersonal skills at work when we try to use our emotions, intelligence, relations and our personality /attitude together in our interactions in order to do get results that we desire.
From a professional perspective as financial advisors, we can list some key skills under the umbrella of interpersonal skills....
|
|
Why focus on it?
Firstly, good interpersonal skills is not only critical for many roles in employment, business or profession but is also essential at a personal level. For a financial advisor, its' importance can never be overestimated given that relationships are at the heart of our profession. Advisors with who have worked on developing strong interpersonal skills are usually more successful in both their professional and personal lives.
Secondly, interpersonal skills, though it may sound as a character trait or part of personality of an individual, it is something than can be learnt and improved easily. Frankly, its' a misnomer that it cannot be taught to someone. Just improving on interpersonal skills can meaningfully change perceptions about you as your ability to project yourself as a solution provider with positive attitude will improve.
Benefits of good interpersonal skills...
By now you must already be convinced that interpersonal skills are important for financial advisors. But how? Lets' just jot down a list leaving the rest to your imagination...
-
Relationships
-
Work Environment
-
Productivity
-
Goodwill
-
Success
25 Quick Tips to improve your interpersonal skills
There are many ways and means of how we can improve our interpersonal skills. We can get into each part /area of the skill and then talk upon it. Instead, we are just listing 25 tips that we came across. We believe that our readers will be smart enough to understand what we mean with these points...
-
Work on your attitude
-
Be a good listener
-
Give respect, appreciate others
-
Watch your body language, be positive
-
Choose to be assertive, not aggressive
-
Stay focused and always be alert
-
Always reflect /assess later on your interactions
-
Be open to change and accept you need to improve
-
Be genuine, don't dramatise
-
Be clear and honest
-
Avoid negativity (words, arguments and ideas) and use humour
-
Have reasonable expectations
-
Work on expressing yourself better
-
Understand your clients /people with whom you interact
-
Work on developing empathy
-
Set goals for interactions & relationships
-
Don't presume or assume things not clear
-
Don't force a conversation
-
Find common ground and then use it
-
Avoid complaining, be accountable
-
Smile and be appreciative
-
Use surprise / delight as a secret weapon
-
Resolve problems
-
Manage self better
-
Think from the other side
In brief:
Good interpersonal skills are important for financial advisors. Even though we may think ourselves to be good at it, there is always some scope for improvement. And the good news is that there are many things we can learn and develop which we may have never observed or thought of before. Improving interpersonal skills is an ongoing journey that may begin from the list of quick tips above but which probably will and should never end. One thing that we can promise is that those who run on this journey will be miles ahead in success from those who just walk. So all the best and let the journey begin!
